Hip Aesthetics

 

     During the twentieth century, several forms of ironic reception of art gained widespread popularity.  Though far from novel, they benefited from the erosion of generally accepted standards of beauty and the exile of many artworks to subcultures or elite audiences.  “Kitsch”  and “camp” have been widely studied [1], while another approach, of arguably equal importance – the hip – has been neglected.  Each involved adopting, temporarily at least, often as much for the fun of it as to reveal unsuspected value, a taste either not one’s own or, at any rate, comically exaggerated.  For kitsch is fundamentally the appreciation of the extremely vulgar products of mass culture, while for camp it is a caricature of a flamboyant gay style.  The hip celebrates a spirited counter-cultural reaction, often the contrary of social norms. 

     The category is used both for artworks and for lived experience bordering on art.  For instance Blake was hip to find Satan the hero of Paradise Lost as was Abbie Hoffman in honoring George Metesky, the “mad bomber.”  Each reaction is an ironic reversal of what might be expected.  People ordinarily seek fame; it was hip of Ted Joans to avoid it.  People seek affluence; to live self-sufficiently was a hip choice by Scott Nearing.  Critics think highly of literary craftsmanship, so Kerouac liked to give the impression that he wrote with a wholly “spontaneous bop prosody.”   

     The spirit of hip is counter-cultural, but the adversarial aspect of the concept is relatively recent.  The  deepest roots are in the notion that poets bring news from a divine realm, either the gods or an extraordinary imagination.  This concept is ancient [2], but in earlier eras the artist had been largely normative rather than challenging social norms.  With the Romantic movement of the end of the eighteenth century, however, and the celebration of the individual genius some in the arts assumed a more contrary posture.  The old patrons – the nobility and the church – lost importance, displaced by middle class consumers as the economic base of much aesthetic production.  With these changes came the avant-garde and contempt for the philistine: “il faut épater le bourgeois” [3].  Some artists since have particularly aimed at provocation, particularly in movements like Dada, Surrealism, and Situationism. 

     The etymology of the term hip is a vexed question.  Over fifty years ago David Dalby suggested that it was derived from the Wolof hipi (or xipi) meaning “with open eyes” [4].  Numerous other alternatives have been suggested including earlier slang derived from hypochondriac, people with the surname Hepp, the wearing of hipboots, associations with hip-flask or with the posture of opium smoking, but a definitive answer remains elusive.  Dalby’s idea has at least the virtue of reinforcing the primary semantic import of the term.

     Whatever the ultimate origin of the word, the current usage has always suggested superior knowledge.  That is the meaning in the word’s first written appearance as slang, a definition in the “Modern Slang Glossary” published in the Cincinnati Enquirer [5] in which “hept” is defined as “to get wise or next.”  The following year Tad Dorgan used the word for several names in a cartoon and it appeared as well in George V. Hobart’s 1904 novel Jim Hickey: A Story of One-Night Stands in which an African American character says, “Say Danny, at this rate it’ll take about 629 shows to get us to Jersey City, are you hip?”  By the ‘thirties, the term was widely used among Blacks, particularly among musicians, and appeared in Cab Calloway’s Hepster’s Dictionary with the definition “a guy who knows all the answers, understands jive.”  The expression was adopted as well as among white people who valued Black culture.  In his Autobiography Malcolm X describes the importance of jive talk in establishing hip credentials in Harlem as well as the appearance of whites who affected it in seeking to be more “Negro than the Negroes” [6]

     Among these white hipsters were musicians and drug-takers, some of whom, like Mezz Mezzrow, had lifelong contact with African-American culture.  Others were further toward the fringes, fans of jazz or marijuana, including artists and intellectuals, some of whom, like Kenneth Rexroth and Norman Mailer, contributed to a theory of hipness during the ‘fifties.

     Kenneth Rexroth, the poet, critic, and translator whose character is described in Dharma Bums as the “father of the Frisco poetry scene,” the organizer the historic Six Gallery reading, cites Lipton and emphasizes even in the title of his essay “Disengagement: the Art of the Beat Generation” [7] the “disaffiliation, alienation, and rejection of the young.”  The movement is thus for him less a protest than a simple opting out.  While condemning “the utter nihilism of the emptied-out hipster,” he asserts that “It is impossible for an artist to remain true to himself as a man, let alone an artist, and work within the context of this society.”  Neither Howl nor On the Road had yet been published; Rexroth’s examples of hip artists are Charlie Parker and Dylan Thomas. 

     Norman Mailer’s essay “The White Negro” [8] proved even more influential.  He, too, stresses the hip person’s disaffection: “one is a rebel or one conforms,” “one is Hip or one is Square,” but he is more willing than the scholarly Rexroth to admit the petty criminal or addict under the title of “the American existentialist, the hipster,” a spiritual adventurer who explores “uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self.”  Though the more edgy, even sinister, aspects of hip culture faded, late 1950s pop culture figures like Del Close’s Geets Romo (on How to Speak Hip) and Jules Feiffer’s Huey, foil for the nebbishy Bernard in The Explainers (1960), remind us to what an extent the inarticulate, perhaps dangerous, youth played in the hip identity during the 1950s.  The same decade that saw the popularization of the Beats was fascinated as well by juvenile delinquency. 

     Some critics in the literary world offered as skewed a view as comedy albums and comic strips.  Norman Podhoretz wrote one of the fiercest denunciations of the Beat writers [9], associating them with youth crime (“young savages in leather jackets”).  Their work “can easily spill over into brutality” since for them ”kicking someone in the teeth or sticking a knife between his ribs are deeds to be admired.”  For him they are “hostile to civilization” and indeed “against intelligence itself.”  Suffering from “a pathetic poverty of feeling” the hip writers are “the spiritually underprivileged and the crippled of soul – young men who can’t think straight and thus hate everyone who can.”  Though Podhoretz’ is one of the most extreme attacks, it is typical of the reception of the Beats among a good many critics and doubtless characterizes their image in the public as a whole.  

     Familiarity with hip artists became all but unavoidable for as the principal American periodicals Time and Life featured that curiosity, the beatnik (a derisive term first seen in print in Herb Caen’s newspaper column [10]).  In September of 1959 Life magazine printed a photo essay comparing the lifestyle of West Coast artists with that of small-town Kansas residents, giving every American a glimpse of an alternative.  Yet, apart from the misrepresentations of popular culture [11] the question of hip identity, was far from settled among the artists, most of whom were not critics, let alone theoreticians.

     The idea of disaffection, of “dropping out,” is widely shared, but the disaffection of the hip is neither random nor utterly nihilistic.  The positive values of the hip aesthetic are nearly all descended from those of the Romantics.  The most convenient demonstration of this lineage is perhaps Norman Mailer’s list of things which are hip and contrasting things which are square which he calls “a primitive foray into the more formal aspects of Hip” before noting “to my knowledge, no one yet has attempted this terrain.” [12].  In the simplest terms he labels spontaneous as hip, while orderly is square; wild is hip and practical square; instinct is hip and logic square; midnight hip, noon square (des Esseintes would have agreed).  In a social context Negro is hip, white is square; crooks are hip, while cops, naturally, are square.  Catholic is hip, presumably because of the ritual and magic, while Protestantism  is square (though perhaps Mailer would have made an exception for Black Pentecostals).  All this would have made a good deal of sense to Lord Byron.

     Some of Mailer’s opposed pairs are more imaginative, and take the reader a moment to understand.  Schrödinger’s model of the atom is hip, and Bohr’s is square, because the former takes quantum uncertainty into account.  Perverse is hip, pious square.  Some might remain somewhat obscure: physiology is hip and anatomy square (because it does not analyze process?)  the T-formation is hip, the single wing square.  He finds Nixon hip compared to John Foster Dulles, presumably because Nixon was such a fabulating hustler.  Apart from  Mailer’s turns of wit, the general pattern is clear.  Mailer privileges the intuitive, the physical, the irrational.

     Several significant elements of the hip semantic field must be added.  Among the probably erroneous etymologies for hip is one that offers an explanation for the word in the posture of users in  opium dens, reclining on one hip, while a competing explanation would have it suggest the hip flask in which one might carry liquor.  While neither seems likely as a source for the word, both assume an association between hip and mind-altering substances.  The connection, not necessarily essential, arises from three circumstances: the advocacy of pleasure-seeking implied by hip values, the ostracism from  the broader society and inclusion in a subculture that accompanies the use of illegal drugs, and the potential some such substances hold for mystical insight.  Thus Howl speaks of “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,” Kerouac begins a letter ““Dig this, PEOTL EATERS OF THE HIP GENERATION,” [13] and Tower of Power’s 1973 song “What is hip?” answers “smokin’ only the best weed.”  The historical partiality of white Bohemians as well as African-Americans in  general and musicians in  particular to the use of illegal drugs strengthens the association.

     Advocates of psychedelics will prefer to call such substances entheogenic (meaning “becoming god-filled”) and point to the world-wide use of psychoactive drugs in spiritual practice from the ancient Hindu soma to the contemporary vogue for ayahuasca [14].  This element in  the meaning of hip returns to the first: to be in the know, in this case enlightened.  This grand ambition is evident in Kerouac’s description of On the Road as “an imaginative survey of a new American generation known as the ‘Hip’ (The Knowing) . . .  This new generation has a conviction that it alone has known everything or been ‘hip’ in the history of the world” [15].  Mailer had sought his “ancient heavenly connection” in existentialism, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Snyder, and Whalen in Buddhism, Richard Alpert and the Beatles in varieties of Hinduism, William Everson and Dorothy Day in a radical Christianity, but all pursued paths to spiritual liberation.

     Ironically the idea of hip may diverge from kitsch and camp in that, for all its associations with being au courant with the latest trends, hip is in substantial ways profoundly traditional.  For the sake of divertissement both kitsch and camp defend the ugly and the overdone; whereas hip aims directly at the truth, psychological, social, and cosmic, just as art has always done.  At the same time, hip values the experiential: pleasure and the aesthetic, the irrational and the mysterious, the ambivalent and the self-contradictory, and in all these ways it is deeply human.  For the hip art is play as is all experience, though the drama takes place amid “the iron gates of life.”  For the hip there is always a certain élan, a delight in the game, a winking confidence in the face of mortality, a sense that we may still laugh even if the joke is on us.

 

 

1.  Most celebrated (and influential) is Susan Sontag’s essay “Notes on Camp,” which itself cited Isherwood’s explanation in The World in the Evening in which his character Charles defines the term: “You can't camp about something you don't take seriously. You're not making fun of it, you're making fun out of it. You're expressing what’s basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance. Baroque art is basically camp about religion. The ballet is camp about love …”  For him Dostoyevsky, Mozart, and El Greco were camp, while Beethoven and Rembrandt were not.  Clement Greenberg in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” and Thomas Kulka in Kitsch and Art provide more hostile views.  For a variety of critics, see the essays in Redefining Kitsch and Camp in Literature and Culture, edited by Justyna Stępień.

2.  See, for instance, my examination of Boccaccio’s views posted this month as “Boccaccio on Poetry.”

3.  Often attributed to Baudelaire though I have not located the line in his oeuvres.  The first use is also  attributed to Privat d'Anglemont (1820–59) in the form “Je les ai épatés, les bourgeois.”   Flaubert used “terrifie les bourgeois” in a letter and by 1879 the Goncourts use “épater le bourgeois.”

4.  The term hepicat is also Wolof, meaning “one with open eyes.”  Dalby’s idea seems to have first been published in, of all things, the London Times of July 19, 1969.  It was accepted by many subsequent writers, including J . L. Dillard’s Black English (1972), Clarence Major in his Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang, (1994), Joseph Holloway and Winifred Vass in The African Heritage of American English (1997).  The derivation is prominently featured in John Leland’s Hip: the History (2001).  Dissenters include Jesse Sheidlower in Slate (December 8, 2004) who used the term “crying Wolof” to indicate false African origins for Black American usage.

5.  May 9, 1903.  The puzzling “next” is perhaps a way of saying “to what will happen next.”  Dorgan had referred to “Joe Hip” and “Old Man Hip.”  Hep is usually considered to have preceded hip.  In 1947 Harry the Hipster recorded “It Ain’t Hep,” declaring that hep had become passé, superseded by hip. 

6.  The Autobiography of Malcom X, 105.  I recall a similarly disparaging usage among my hip friends in  college who called slightly younger aspirants to the scene “hippie,” equivalent to teenybopper,  well before the term came into popular usage.  This use is verified by the glossary of the 1959 comedy album How to Speak Hip, according to which a hipster is defined as "a fully paid-up member of Hip society", whereas a hippy is "a junior member of Hip society, who may know the words, but hasn't fully assimilated the proper attitude."

7.  First published in New World Writing 11 (1957), reprinted in Gene Feldman and Max Gartenberg’s The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men (1958).  Rexroth reinforces the characterization of the hip as “disaffiliated” by Lawrence Lipton, doyen of the Venice Beach counter-culture.

8.  First published in Dissent (1957) and later reprinted as a pamphlet by City Lights and included in The Beat Generation  and the Angry Young Men.

9.  Norman Podhoretz, “The Know-nothing Bohemians,” Partisan Review XXV (1958).  Podhoretz was at least consistent in his reactionary activism.  In 1963 he published in Commentary "My Negro Problem—And Ours" in which he complained about his own feeling oppressed by African-Americans during his childhood, saying that Blacks "were doing the only persecuting I knew about - and doing it, moreover, to me," resulting in "the hatred I still feel for Negroes."  He later worked for the USIA, the Hudson Institute, and Rudy Giuliani. 

10.  See his column for April 2, 1958 in the San Francisco Chronicle.  Caen is also responsible for the equally annoying term hippie.  The September 21, 1959 issue of Life included a contrast of the lifestyles of West Coast hip artists with the people of small-town Hutchinson, Kansas.

11.  Maynard Krebs on the Dobie Gillis Show is one of the best-known, but even his image was subject to further devolution in the cartoon character of Shaggy Rogers on Scooby-Doo.

12. Mailer, Advertisements for Myself, p. 423.  The list, Mailer says, was originally notes for his “The White Negro” and the essay and list, he says, are “the intellectual core” of a proposed book.

13.  Letter to John Clellon Holmes, June 5, 1952 from Jack Kerouac, Selected Letters 1940-1956, edited by Ann Charters, p 368.

14.  See my essay “Drugs and Religion” on this site at https://williamseaton.blogspot.com/2016/06/drugs-and-religion.html.

15.  Jack Kerouac, Selected Letters 1940-1956, edited by Ann Charters, p. n224.

Scandals of the Romantic Poets

 

     This, like my piece on “The Hazardous Lives of the Sonneteers,” is meant to be more semi-journalistic and descriptive than scholarly.  This time, though, I did not suppress the endnotes.

 

      Artists today are often expected to be to some extent counter-cultural, displaying bohemian behavior and radical opinions, but this assumption is largely a recent one in the last two hundred years.  In Great Britain and in Europe, writers associated with the Romantic movement adopted a combative attitude toward their own societies, leading to the use of the term, originally military, avant-garde.  [1]  This general characterization of artists as rebels, often compounded of a mixture of reactionary philistine prejudice and accurate observation, though never encompassing all writers and painters, has been critical in the arts since. 

    In their own day the British Romantic poets were accused of every sort of immorality and, though it has no bearing on the evaluation of their writing, there was a good deal of substance to many of the charges against them. [2]  Many did seek to challenge the received ideas of their day, and these views, along with personal irregularities which may occur among all classes (but are perhaps more highlighted among artists) led to their condemnation by the guardians of propriety.  Drug abuse, irreligious views, and political radicalism, as well as lurid sexual irregularities were all alleged of the writers associated with Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley and Byron.  Without inquiry into why many of the principal poets of the day behaved, at least in youth, in ways that strayed so considerably from the norm, an assemblage of some of the data exploited by their critics looks hardly less sensational than stories from the National Enquirer. 

     In the Romantic era, the non-medical use of psychotropic drugs lacked a good deal of the cultural significance it has since acquired.  Opium and cannabis were not associated with artists; they were not even illegal and were soon to be ubiquitous in the formulation of panaceas.  Then as now, many addicts began with a doctor’s prescription.  Yet semi-recreational use existed as well.  Southey and Coleridge joined in “experiments” at the Pneumatic Institute inhaling nitrous oxide with such prominent scientists as Humphry Davy, Thomas Beddoes, and James Watt. [3]   

     With the conquest of India by Great Britain, opium became widely available and closely followed alcohol as the chief active ingredient of patent medicines.  Though consumed throughout English society, the medicinal preparation called laudanum was popular among the poets to such an extent that a number of books have focused on their use. [4]  Coleridge attributed “Kubla Khan” to an opium dream, and the poet’s lifelong use of the drug and his attempts to control, if not to cease, his consumption are documented in letters and memoirs.  Even more notorious was his friend, the essayist Thomas De Quincy, whose Confessions of an English Opium-Eater was a sensation in 1821.  Shelley took to carrying laudanum on his person to take against anxiety.  Crabbe, Jane Austen’s favorite poet and admired in his day by Byron and Scott, took opium for forty years.  Keats’ use of the drug is certain, but his degree of use is not. 

     Scholars continue to debate to what extent opium use influenced poetry.  Though opium’s effects are primarily soporific, many writers reported psychedelic effects on sensation and imagination, perhaps using the drug to justify flights of fancy and sublimity they would have experienced in any event.  Very like the drug users among the Beats, the Romantics drug use both to an expansion of vision and to a view of the artist as transgressive.  Whereas most earlier writers had striven either to cultivate connections with the power structure in the interests of patronage or, by the eighteenth century, to appeal to a bourgeois readership, this group considered themselves a counter-culture, and the subjective heavens and hells of opiate use doubtless intensified their belief in the primacy of the imagination. 

     Though opium consumption was no crime, admitting to unorthodox religious views not only attracted the strongest social opprobrium but was illegal as well. [5]  Shelley was expelled from Oxford for publishing The Necessity  of Atheism. [6]  He developed a sort of pantheism, claiming that “the universe is God” and arguing that Deism was reasonable and Christianity supported only by emotion.  He must “war against [the Christian god] for the sake of truth.” [7]  Wordsworth in his early work sounds very like a pantheist and Coleridge described him approvingly as “at least” “a semi-atheist,” [8] though both came to defend the Established Church later in life. 

     Coleridge himself had become a free-thinker upon reading Voltaire as a schoolboy, before slowly drifting back through Unitarianism to orthodoxy.   Often labeled an atheist, Byron throughout his life expressed an ambivalence about Christianity.  In his preface to his Vision of Judgement, an encomium praising George III, Southey (who had been in political and religious questions as radical as other Romantics) attacks the “Satanic school” of poets as “men of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations, who, forming a system of opinions to suit their own unhappy course of conduct, have rebelled against the holiest ordinances of human society, and hating that revealed religion which, with all their efforts and bravadoes, they are unable entirely to disbelieve.”  [9]  Conservative forces claimed that Byron’s clubfoot indicated his diabolism. [10]  In his youth Southey had been known as an atheist, though he was always willing to acknowledge “an intelligent first cause.” [11]  To the public the poets’ behavior considered along with such literary projections as Byron’s Manfred and Cain and Shelley’s Prometheus to leave little doubt that the whole group were rebels against heaven. 
     In politics virtually all the Romantics were originally supporters of the French Revolution, a view which made them radicals in their day.  Wordsworth made two trips to revolutionary France where he attended meetings of the Jacobin Club and the National Assembly and composed his “Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff” who had criticized the revolutionary regime.  He rapidly turned conservative in politics as well as religion, by 1818 advocating what he called a “softened feudalism” [12]

     Shelley, on the other hand, maintained a consistently revolutionary view.  His “Song to the Men of England” could hardly be plainer:

 

The seed ye sow, another reaps;

The wealth ye find, another keeps;

The robes ye weave, another wears;

The arms ye forge, another bears.

 

And there is perhaps no more bitter line of political poetry in English literature that the first of Shelley’s “England in 1819” which calls George III “An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King,”  The poem concludes with a hopeful prospect of a glorious Phantom” which “may burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.”  Indeed Marx’s daughter was proud to claim him as a socialist.  [13] 

     Likewise supporters of France, Coleridge and Southey planned an egalitarian commune in America, to be governed by the principles of "pantisocracy," meaning rule by all and “aspheterism” or the collective ownership of all property.  Unsurprisingly, the project was never far advanced.   The two collaborated on The Fall of Robespierre commenting on the events in France.  In 1796 Coleridge published a short-lived newspaper The Watchman in Bristol which argued for the universal suffrage and the abolition of the slave trade.

     Leigh Hunt, though less read now than his friends Keats and Shelley, was a political influence on the Romantic circle.  In a series of journals beginning with The Examiner he published articles critical of the British government and, in particular, of the Prince Regent, later George IV.  Charles Lamb’s “The Triumph of the Whale” ridiculed the “Prince of Whale’s” corpulence and dissipation.  Hunt’s own piece “The Prince on St. Patrick’s Day” (with epigrams by Lamb) in which the prince is denounced as “a violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in debt and disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties, the companion of gamblers and demireps, a man who had just closed half a century without one single claim on the gratitude of his country, or the respect of posterity." [14]  This language was sufficient to get Hunt and his brother (the printer) arrested for libel.  Though the Hunts had before been charged with libel, English juries had refused to convict them.  This time, however, the two were found guiltyand sentenced to two years in prison.  Something of a cause célèbre, Hunt took advantage of the corrupt practices of the day to make his accommodations in Surrey County Gaol a comfortable two-room private suite in the infirmary.  There he decorated his living space, concealing the bars behind Venetian blinds, papering the walls with floral prints, painting the ceiling with a cloudy sky, and importing flowers, books, and a piano, as well as comfortable couches.  According to Lamb, “there was no other such room, except in fairy tale.”  Attended by a servant, he there received a stream of visitors including Lamb, Byron and Thomas Moore. [15]  After he had served his term, when he went to Italy at Shelley’s invitation, the motive was in part to publish ta political paper not subject to British censorship. 

     It is a measure of the degree to which ideas of radical reform permeated the poetic scene of the day that even Keats, far less an activist partisan than others, left nevertheless no question of what side he was on in the contradiction between the wealthy and the working class.  His sonnet “Written On The Day That Mr. Leigh Hunt Left Prison” attracted an attack from Blackwood’s Magazine.  Perhaps the best statement of his political views is contained in a long letter from September 1819 in which he laments that the French Revolution stimulated a reaction which “spread a horrid superstition against all inovation and improvement – The present struggle in England of the people is to destroy this superstition. What has rous’d them to do it is their distresses – Perpaps on this account the pres’ent distresses of this nation are a fortunate thing – tho so horrid in the[i]r experience.”  To Keats “This is no contest beetween whig and tory – but between right and wrong.” [16]  The primary thrust of the aggressive ridicule of Keats in the conservative journals was his class origin.  The term “the Cockney school” [17] focused with unashamed class prejudice on the “plebian origins and education” of Keats and others.

     Byron defended the Luddites in the House of Lords where he had associated himself closely with radical reform.  For instance, in a stirring speech in 1812 he declared that Luddite demonstrators dismissed as a mob were in fact nothing but the country’s working people.

 

it is the mob that labour in your fields and in your houses – that man your navy and recruit your army – that have enabled you to defy all the world and can also defy you when neglect and calamity have driven them to despair. You may call the people a mob but not forget that a mob too often speaks the sentiments of the people.   [18]

 

 

Byron wrote for the radical British publication The Liberal and joined a secret society of Italian nationalists, and ultimately, of course, he died in service to what might be called an anti-colonial struggle. 

     While drug use and transgressive religious and political beliefs might offend many Britons, they surely took an even greater interest in the writers’ sexual lives.  Wordsworth had had a child with Annette Vallon in revolutionary France, and others of the Romantics had turbulent personal lives, but the real scandals concerned Shelley and Byron, who were accused of immorality based on behavior that, even today, would be condemned by most. [19] 

     Shelley had said of marriage in Queen Mab of marriage that "a system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness.”  Still, he eloped and married Harriet Westbrook, daughter of the owner of a thriving coffee house and schoolmate of his younger sister, in 1811 just after her sixteenth and his nineteenth birthdays.  Though they had two children, they had all but separated by the summer of 1814, when he eloped once more with Mary Godwin, herself sixteen at the time.  Her illegitimate step-sister Claire Clairmont accompanied them to Europe and remained with the ménage becoming Byron’s lover and mother of his child Allegra. 

     The complexities of life among these free-thinkers is suggested by the fact that some biographers think that, while socializing with Godwin’s family, Shelley had also been a lover of Fanny Imlay,  (daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and an American businessman) in 1814.  She committed suicide two years later as did Harriet Shelley, who was five months pregnant (there is debate about who the father may have been).  Meanwhile, Harriet’s sister Eliza had moved in with the couple and Shelley had conceived a passion (apparently unconsummated) for Elizabeth Hitchener, an unmarried schoolteacher, and suggested that she join the household, sharing all property. [20]  T. J. Hogg, the co-publisher with Shelley of The Necessity of Atheism, flirted with Harriet only -for Shelley to assure him he could not be jealous.  Later, he may well have encouraged Hogg and Mary to sleep together. [21]  During Shelley’s residence abroad, he fathered a child in Naples (falsely claiming when registering the birth that his wife was the mother).  He was involved as well in romantic attachments with Jane Williams, who lived with her lover in the same building as the Shelleys, as well as Sophia Stacey, who was staying at the same pension in Italy, and Teresa (Emilia) Viviani, teen-age daughter of the governor of Pisa and the muse of Epipsychidion.

     If providing even a brief summary of Shelley’s erotic involvements is difficult, to do the same for Lord Byron is impossible.  He was constantly pursuing both men and women.  His gay liaisons began the Trinity College choirboy John Edleston during his college days, and included his servant William Fletcher who attended Byron from 1804 until his death.  When he traveled to Greece, he felt much freer about homoerotic relationships and took numerous lovers including the fourteen-year-old Nicolas Giraud.  He indefatigably pursued his teenaged Greek page, Lukas Chalandritsanos, and, finding him uncooperative, managed to locate many who were more complaisant, reporting to his gay friends in England that he had managed over two hundred "pl and opt Cs,” a code for sexual indulgence derived from the phrase "coitum plenum et optabilem" in Petronius's Satyricon.

     He had as well an extraordinary number of heterosexual affairs, becoming perhaps the leading sex symbol of his time.  Most notoriously, he had an affair for years with his half-sister Augusta Leigh and very likely had a child with her.  In his “Epistle to Augusta” he imagines the joy of “a home with thee” and declares sentimentally, “The tie which bound the first endures the last!”

     In the interest of both cash and respectability he married Annabella Milbanke in 1815, but, following the birth of their daughter Ada the following December, she found his constant philandering (during this period he was linked to actress Charlotte Mardyn and Lady Caroline Lamb among many others) and she concluded that she could not live with him and sued for divorce. 

     The combination of his infamy and his debts caused him to go abroad in April 1816.  Though his reputation for sexual misdeeds was known to all, he was doubtless fleeing exposure for his gay lovers.   He was attacked in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in an article describing him as diabolical.  “It appears, in short, as if this miserable man, having exhausted every species of sensual gratification, -having drained the cup of sin even to its bitterest dregs, — were resolved to show us that he is no longer a human being even in his frailties, but a cool, unconcerned fiend, laughing with detestable glee over the whole of the better and worse elements of which human life is composed.”  As a result, Byron complains "I was advised not to go to the theatres, lest I should be hissed, nor to my duty in parliament, lest I should be insulted by the way; even on the day of my departure my most intimate friend told me afterwards that he was under apprehension of violence from the people who might be assembled at the door of the carriage." [22]  In Europe he cultivated an affair with a married woman Marianna Segati in whose house he was staying, then with another married woman, Margarita Cogni.  When he broke up with this last lover, she committed suicide.  He turned then to the Countess Teresa Guiccioli with whom he lived for several years.  At the time of his death he was lavishly patronizing a nine-year-old Turkish Muslim girl. 

     So the bill of particulars one wishing to condemn the Romantic poets might compile is varied, lengthy, and, in large part, well-substantiated.  Since then the actions of the poètes maudits, the Lost Generation, denizens of Greenwich Village, and the Beats have likewise been condemned.  Whatever the ethical lapses in the lives of the poets in any age, their behavior can have no relation to the evaluation of their work.  As much as the perceived contrast in beliefs and lifestyles between unconventional artists and those exemplifying the status quo may reveal about the social codes of their times and our own, such data have nothing to do with the reason we remember these men at all: their work.  In the evaluation of art terms such as immorality or blasphemy, sedition or dissipation can carry no weight.

     Yet the partial displacement of the arts from the central power structures of society has made a difference in both themes and styles.  It may be that a lineage of creative types stretching back to archaic semi-psychotic shamans, through wandering Old English scops like Widsith, gypsy goliards, minstrels and showpeople has long tended to act and think in somewhat more independent fashion than the local masters who, for all their wealth, were obliged to accept the assumptions of their time.  The bourgeois may have envied as well as condemned the free-thinker and free-liver, but it was not until the time of the Romantics that it came to be expected that artists often live by different rules than others. 

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1.  The term was first used to describe art by was first used in the cultural sphere in 1825 by the Saint Simonian mathematician Olinde Rodrigues in his essay, “L’artiste, le savant et l’industriel.”

2.  Similar claims have been made concerning virtually every avant-garde movement since, often, as in the originating example, with some reason.  The attacks on Keats and Hunt focused more on their supposed “plebeian origin and education” to quote the letter from Z. (John Gibson Lockhart) in Blackwood’s for May 1818 now so8und thoroughly out of date.

3.  Laughing gas remained a subject of interest.  In the late nineteenth century William James and his associates used it in an attempt to experience mystical states.  See lectures XVI and XVIOI of Varieties of Religious Experience (1901).  James had earlier written an anonymous article on “The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy” in The Atlantic Monthly as well as an 1898 piece in the Psychological Review on “Consciousness Under Nitrous Oxide.”

4. The classic study is still M. H. Abrams The Milk of Paradise (1971), but see also the earlier Opium and the Romantic Imagination by Alethea Hayter (1968) and Elizabeth Schneider’s Coleridge, Opium, and Kubla Khan (1983).  Nicholas Roe claims in his John Keats: A New Life (2012) that Keats, too, was a regular user. 

5.  Britain’s blasphemy laws were not abolished until 2008 in England and Wales and 2021 in Scotland.  A similar law remains in effect in Northern Ireland.  The last conviction in England in 1977 involved a gay publication so doubtless homophobia played a role in that case.

6.  In  1834 a proposal to allow attendance by Dissenters was defeated in Parliament.  Until 1854 in order to matriculate at Oxford a student needed to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of Anglican faith.  In Cambridge the requirement lasted two years further and only in 1871 were non-Anglicans allowed to teach in those institutions. 

7.  Letter to Elizabeth Hitchener, June 20, 1822.

8.  Letter from Coleridge to John Thelwall May 13, 1796.

9.  Byron was then inspired to write his own Vision of Judgment in response and in his own preface he aggressively denounces Southey for rushing in “where he had no business” and accusing him of being a traitor to the progressive views he had once held. 

10.  One example is The Dorchester Guide; or, a house that Jack Built (1819), a satirical pamphlet of 1819.  The anonymous publication warns that “the mind is corrupted” by Byron’s “sweet and harmonious” poetry and says his real identity is revealed to those who “look at his feet,” a reference to his club-foot, for proof of his association with the devil.

11.  Letter of Robert Southey to John Prior Estlin, 9 April 1797.

12.  See his “Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmoreland.”  He had accepted the patronage of Lord Lonsdale since 1813.

13.  Edward and Eleanor Marx-Aveling, “Shelley and Socialism,” To-Day, April 1888.

14.  The Examiner, 22 March 1812.

15.  See Leigh Hunt, Autobiography.

16.  To George & Georgiana Keats, September 17, 18, 20, 21, 24, 25, 27, 1819.

17.  The term, referring primarily to Keats, Hunt, and Hazlitt, originated in a series of eight hostile reviews in Blackwood's Magazine in 1817 and 1818.

18.  George Gordon Byron, The Works of Lord Byron including the suppressed poems complete in one volume (Paris, A. and W. Galignani, 1828), p. 555.

19.  While far greater latitude in lifestyle had been accepted through the twentieth century, the last few decades have seen a renewed wave of condemnation of certain artists and politicians on the basis of what is deemed by their critics unacceptable sexual behavior.

20.  Bieri, James (2008). Percy Bysshe Shelley: a biography. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 170, 193–5

21.  Richard Holmes, Shelley, the Pursuit (London:1974), pp. 391, 594, 678.

22.  “Some Observations upon an Article in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine,”  Blackwood’s, August 1819.  The response was unpublished until John Murray’s 1833 edition of The Works of Lord Byron.

 

Art and Life in the Haight Ashbury

     Doubtless the most prominent elements of the artistic legacy of the youth movement of the 1960s are the psychedelic rock music of bands like Big Brother and the Holding Company and the Grateful Dead, the innovating cartoon work from Zap and others, and the graphic design of the concert posters and the underground press, notably the pioneering Oracle.
     The Haight Ashbury itself produced few memorable paintings or sculptures and relatively little of lasting literary value in part because hip artists in the center of the scene sought to make life as a whole into art with street theater, extravagant costumes, community-based music, and a slyly ironic argot. Though the Beat poets had formed the best-known segment of the hip movement during the fifties and several of their principal representatives, born between 1919 and 1935, [1] read at the first Human Be-In in the Golden Gate Park Polo Grounds in January of 1967, the culture of the Haight-Ashbury was far less productive of lasting literary monuments than that of North Beach had been.
     The ambition to make everything an objet d’art naturally led to a paucity of distinct objets d’art. The widely shared goals of enlightenment and the transformation of American culture were inconsistent with aesthetic experience as a unique sort of consumption marked off, indeed exalted, by its separation from everyday life and often associated with the privileged. Along with the resistance to limiting art to self-consciously produced objects for a specialized marketplace came a democratic reluctance to glorify a few “geniuses” whose names are a sort of commercial brand and to cultivate anonymous art and art for free in which professional ambitions had no relevance at all. [2]
     Nonetheless the Diggers, the leading formation of the Haight-Ashbury scene, had emerged from earlier literary publications such as Beatitude and Underhound and other specifically artistic formations such as R. G. Davis’ San Francisco Mime Troupe and the Artists Liberation Front. They produced written texts from the beginning. As the Haight neared its crest, The Communication Company, with Claude Hayward and Chester Anderson at its center, assumed the task of publishing for the collective as members of a movement rather than as individual artists or advocates for strictly aesthetic values. Building on the legacy of the Digger Papers that had already appeared, the Communication Company printed hundreds of handbills as well as works of poetry by Richard Brautigan, Michael McClure, and Lew Welch.
     Having acquired “one brand-new Gestetner 366 silk-screen stencil duplicator” and “one absolutely amazing Gestefax electronic stencil cutter,” “Chester & Claude” announced the Communication Company with a manifesto titled “Our Policy.” The document, though printed on new equipment, has a makeshift appearance that reinforces its message. Across the top is inscribed The Communication Company in a hand that betrays nothing of art school polish. Beneath are detailed the group’s goals in a stencil made from a manual typescript, including a section headed “our plans and hopes,” of which only one of the twelve was explicitly (if vaguely) artistic: “to publish literature originating within this new minority.”
     Yet even this ambition is couched in terms associated with radical politics. The use of the term “minority” is surely influenced by the dawning of black consciousness with its demand for the publication and study of African-American writers. The implication can only be that hip writers, like members of ethnic subcultures, have their own experience couched in a unique rhetoric, and that the Communication Company could serve a role in the dissemination of this particular vision parallel to that of, say, the Third World Press of Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubuti).
     This collectivist emphasis questions the egocentric focus of Romantic theory with its fondness for the “genius” and privileging of individual vision, though it resembles in part such models as IWW culture, Dada, and Situationism and draws from the evolving forms of conceptual and performance art. The first of the “plans and hopes” of the new publisher, however, far from referring g to any of these precedents, is simple: “to provide quick & inexpensive printing service for the hip community.” In the first instance this meant “to print anything the Diggers want printed” and “to do lots of community service printing.” They hope in the way “to function as a Haight/Ashbury propaganda ministry” in the form of a new sort of journal “to supplement The Oracle with a more or less daily paper.” [3] They hoped thereby to counteract the straight press, what they called “The Chronicle’s fantasies.”
     Yet their language suggests that pursuing these goals would require language other than the journalistic norm. Seeking “to compete with the Establishment press for public opinion” would require their being “outrageous pamphleteers,” and “to produce occasional incredibilities out of an unnatural fondness for either outrage or profit, as the case may be.” In the end, the individualist impulse survived with the penultimate ambition “to do what we damn well please,” followed only by a reminder of the reality principle: “to keep the payments up” on the printing equipment.
     Though the authors of “Our Policy” allowed themselves a theoretically unlimited license to fiction and betrayed a fondness for provocation, their aim was congruent with that of the Diggers as a whole: to contribute toward defining, fostering, and protecting the hip youth movement as a whole. Anything less would have struck them as “Art as a fantasy pacifier,” in the words of the handout “Trip Without A Ticket.” This manifesto may be fairly taken to represent the most fully formed statement of the artistic ideology of the Haight, having been originally printed by the Diggers as a whole and then in part revised and later reprinted by the Communication Company.
     “Trip Without A Ticket” compares Americans to psychiatric patients, stupefied by tranquilizing drugs, sleepwalking through the horror of modern life, in desperate need of awakening, of “the single circuit-breaking moment that charges games with critical reality.” Without “the cushioned distance of media” people would cease to be the programmed “normals” required by the status quo and would be transformed into “life-actors” capable of seeing through the culture’s “consumer circuses” and feeling real rapport with the victims of American imperialism.
     The central form through which such eye-opening may occur is theatrical. To create “a space for existing outside padded walls” entails the elimination of the conventional theater building as well as the psychiatric unit. Art becomes an escape plan, with dramatic actions enacted in the everyday world rather than plays behind a proscenium arch, actions that function as “glass cutters for empire windows,” depending on the “universal pardon for imagination” that underlies “the intrinsic freedom of theater.” Only such a new “guerilla” theater can create “life-actors” and generate “a cast of freed beings.” In sum they aimed at establishing a “theater of an underground that wants out” aiming “to liberate ground held by consumer wardens and establish territory without walls.”
     In this way any location “that is free becomes a social art form. “Ticketless theater. Out of money and control.” Several vignettes illustrate precisely what this might look like in practice. “A sign: If Someone Asks to See the Manager Tell Him He's the Manager.”
     “Someone asked how much a book cost. How much did he think it was worth? 75 cents. The money was taken and held out for anyone. "Who wants 75 cents?" A girl who had just walked in came over and took it.”
     Not only is there no ticket; there is as well no script and no barrier between audience and performer. Clearly calling for participatory improvisatory theater set on the stage of the world, this is art without artifacts, beauty carved from the circumstances of everyday life, symbolic action that implies a new world view. With this vision the flotsam of unwanted surplus goods in the Free Store and in the world is transmuted into the tools by which liberation becomes available. “Fire helmets, riding pants, shower curtains, surgical gowns and World War I Army boots are parts for costumes. Nightsticks, sample cases, water pipes, toy guns and weather balloons are taken for props.” The magic appears when the cash nexus is removed. “When materials are free, imagination becomes currency for spirit.”
     Citing Gary Snyder on the necessity to “pin down what's wrong with the West,” the “Trip” finds models for such community-based ritual not so very distant from California. The specific mythic meaning of the original ritual is less important than the involvement in the moment and attentiveness to the constant stream of sensory detail.
     
"The Mexican Day of the Dead is celebrated in cemeteries. Yellow flowers falling petal by petal on graves. In moonlight. Favorite songs of the deceased and everybody gets loaded. Children suck deaths-head candy engraved with their names in icing."

     A parallel imagistic flow follows with the scene translated into the terms familiar to the Haight.


"A Digger event. Flowers, mirrors, penny-whistles, girls in costumes of themselves, Hell's Angels, street people, Mime Troupe.
Angels ride up Haight with girls holding Now! signs. Flowers and penny-whistles passed out to everyone.
A chorus on both sides of the street chanting Uhh!--Ahh!--Shh be cool! Mirrors held up to reflect faces of passersby."


     The hip community was influenced by a number of modern trends in art including improvisation, chance, collaboration, found objects, and street art, yet the most characteristic work that arose from the Haight-Ashbury eschewed the pretty in favor of the illuminating. The Haight Ashbury ethos favored the collective expression of the neighborhood and the movement as a whole to the promotion of individual art egos. The very fact that we have few works of poetry or fiction that fully embody the spirit of the age itself embodies the Haight Ashbury ethos. In order to recover some sense of what art meant in that time and place it is necessary to study the ephemera, and central to any such understanding must be the publications of the Diggers and the Communication Company.



1. Ferlinghetti (born in 1919), Ginsberg (1926), Gary Snyder (1930), Kandel (1932), McClure (1932), and Brautigan (1935) all read. The younger generation was represented by rock musicians.

2. The Cockettes founded by Hibiscus in 1969 insisted that one needed no talent whatsoever to perform. The associated Kaliflower Commune was exceptionally long-lived with related individual and groups active today.

2. Anderson was born in 1932, Hayward was younger, born in 1945.

3. Comparable to the daily publications from the Sorbonne’s École des Beaux-Arts in the spring of 1968 and the Occupy Wall Street Journal in 2011.