Beatniks and Rednecks
Scott Kirwin
I'm not much into lifestyles anymore. As I've gotten older I've become more family-focused, and group-identity is down there with "paint the basement walls" in terms of priorities. But one group that I've always liked were the Beatniks of the 40s and 50s.
I still have the copy of "On the Road" that I read in high school, took to college, then to Japan, Africa and finally to middle age in Suburbia. Opening the book today it is hard not to feel the rush, the flight into the unknown, the celebration of living and breathing and "being" that Kerouac captured in that work. "On the Road" is a long trip across America and through the human spirit, and even as I live in the same house I've lived in for years, the book still tempts me to grab the Wife, the Kid and the Pets and just start driving West - job, mortgage and credit card debt be damned.
I got to thinking about the Beats at a parish carnival the Family visited Saturday night. The parish was in a working class part of town where liquor stores and gas stations compete with one another for prime space along the main boulevard before it ends at the Interstate. The Wife noticed that the people in the crowd seemed to wear their tax brackets on their faces, prematurely aged from a life of hard work, hard living, and hard playing. Cigarettes were ubiquitous, and it was impossible to get away from the smoke. Hip-Hop culture dominated the predominantly white crowd, but there were a large number of mixed-race families and a few Latinos, one wearing a silk-screen of the black Virgin Mary with the words "La Raza Unida" printed underneath. Was the shirt racist? I asked to the Wife. "Don't be so sensitive," she wisely replied.
I felt like an outsider, but I usually do in large crowds which is why I do my best to avoid them. But the Kid loves carnivals and being a Parent trumps personal likes or dislikes, so we had gone together. As I stood in line, watching the Ferris Wheel "Carny" work the ride, I noticed that unlike the board expressions shown by the other Carnies, the man seemed to enjoy his job. He was polite to the riders and even joked with them as he manned the throttle, locked the pipe railing, and warned each rider to mind the latch.
The Beatniks came from working-class backgrounds for the most part, but they were intellectuals too. Some of them had served in World War 2 - Kerouac in the Merchant Marine which during the War wasn't exactly the safest job - and others, like Allen Ginsberg, came from academia. Neal Cassady, Kerouac's and Ginsberg's muse for their early works, even came from a hard-scrabble background of a drunk and abusive father.
They were not elitist - or at least they didn't start out to be. The Beats celebrated the Working Man. They appreciated the artistry and skill shown by workers doing their jobs, a concept which connected them spiritually to Zen Buddhism as exemplified by the poetry of Gary Snyder and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Photographer Robert Frank's landmark work, The Americans, shows slices of everyday American life and manages to convey the beauty and perpetual motion of its land and people in a way missed by the Look and Life photographers of the era.
I'm speaking in generalizations somewhat here, which happens whenever you talk about groups of people - especially those counting "loners" like Kerouac and "socialites" like Ginsberg as members. But it struck me as I walked through the crowd that the Beats were the last counter-culture group that weren't elitist. Ever since the Beats evolved into the Hippies of the '60s and the Hippies found themselves at odds with the "common people", the counter-culture has been elitist and when that counterculture became "pop" culture, that elitism came too.
Today's pop culture sneers at what it calls "Red States" or the "Nascar Crowd" - yet the Red States continue to swell with immigrants from other states and NASCAR remains the fastest growing sport in America. Green Day may make a killing on calling them "American Idiots" yet the same people that buy their records continue to enlist in the military. I wandered through the crowd and realized that this was the America that remains undefeatable. It was a crowd that wouldn't be losing any sleep over the treatment of terrorists at Guantanamo and probably cared as much about America's image abroad as they did about Michael Moore's grooming habits or lack thereof.
And I realized that the elites come and go, but these people will always be here. They might have a few more piercings and tattoos than their predecessors, but they will remain solid and steadfast, constituting - dare I say? - the bedrock of American society.
And part of it for me with Kerouac is that, as you say, he and the other members of the Beat Generation were counter-culture without being elitist. Or as I've been known to put it, that the Beats were true individualists, different from the culture around them, and at the same time different from one another. They were truly blazing their own trail, instead of simply consuming a prefabricated and mass-marketed "culture of rebellion," as has become a routine part of American culture since the late 60s.
I don't know, I have mixed feelings about the 60s— on the one hand, I myself am very obviously a product of the 60s; but on the other hand, I always had reservations about the mass-produced nature of so much of 60s nonconformity, "nonconformity for the millions, everybody different exactly alike."
I've got several shelf-feet of books by and about Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Cassady, and some lesser known figures in their crowd such as John Clellon Holmes. Have you ever read Cassady's unfinished autobiographical piece, The First Third? Rough-hewn, but mesmerizing. I also have read and reread the three volumes of Burroughs' Junky and Queer and The Yage Letters I don't know how many times. Burroughs' routine, in that last volume, about purple-assed baboons and FDR's court packing scheme is a classic. Thoroughly obscene, but a classic: "I'll make the cocksuckers glad to mutate," he [FDR] would say, looking off into space as seeking new frontiers of depravity.
Kerouac has been an influence on me on many levels, from my lamentably liberal use of the dash in writing, to the horrendous summer I turned 40, when I ran away across the continent to Seattle for six weeks...
They don’t want the right wing cramming their version of Christian family values down their throats.
Equally, they don’t want the ultra PC, feelings based, “man is the problem” crap foisted upon them from the left.
And you’re going to find a whole lot of us hanging out here at Dean’s World.
Thanks for the memories. Having started high school in 1948, joined the US Army Reserves in 1958 right after high school, gone off to two years active duty late in the Korean war a year later, I was sort of a child of the 1940s and 1950s.
In the late 1950s, when I was on and off at the University of Illinois Chicago Undergraduate Division, the old Navy Pier campus, I talked, played, drank and played chess with a varied group of people in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, many of whom were students or staff at the nearby University of Chicago. Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap, for anybody who knows that part of town.
Not of a few of these folks were those of the Kerouac or Ginsberg genre. None of them were pretentious, and all of them were among the most individualistic men and women I have ever met.
Believe it or not, some of us, including me, were sports car types as well as readers of all kinds of material and thinkers upon all kinds of topics. I had a 1956 Austin-Healey 100 2-seat roadster in those years, complete with side curtains in place of the expected windows. Right across 55th street from Jimmy's was Pickett's garage, where we would congregate, compare our more or less exotic machinery, learn about the ideosyncratic nature of some of the machinery we were handling and sometimes trying to repair on our own. Most of you reading this are too young to remember MG-TCs, Jaguar XK-120s, AC-Aces, Mercedes 300SL gullwing coupes or the early Healeys. But there they were, big as life. And none of us knew what we had lost until all these passed into history.
Somehow, the beats, the sports car owners, students of economics, philosophy, law, arts and much else were somehow outside the norm of life in the mid-to-late 1950s. We could sense it and intermingle. Partly because we all were instinctually tolerant of one another's differences and senses of individuality.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Thanks for the memories. Having started high school in 1948, joined the US Army Reserves in 1958 right after high school...
By my calculations, this indicates that Arnold Harris must have spent some 9 years in High School. Were you all that troubled a student, or....?
I joined the US Army Reserves in 1952, after high school, and was called up for two years of active duty the following year.
But as chance would have it, I learned to touch type in the US Army. Typographical errors and all.
I ought to get Stefi to read this stuff back to me before I post it for the hopefully temporary immortality of the Google indices.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
The closing line of William S. Burroughs' routine about purple-assed baboons and FDR's court-packing scheme ought to read, "I'll make the cocksuckers glad to mutate," he [FDR] would say, looking off into space as if seeking new frontiers of depravity.
He enlisted - he wasn't drafted.
They kicked him out, he didn't do a Klinger.
I mention this because he once freaked out on someone who was disrespecting the flag, which lead to a rift of sorts with Cassady.
Jack Kerouac: the uncle I never had...