SUSO

Inspired by drugs, rebellion and the flowering of consciousness, the Beat Generation took to the road to find themselves within America.

W / JEAN HANNAH EDELSTEIN
I / GEORGE TSIOUTSIAS

The narrative of Jack Kerouac’s early years was, in many respects, an archetypal tale of a twentieth-century American hero: without his intrinsic wanderlust and sense of wonderment, he could have been every inch the exemplar of the American dream rather than a countercultural icon.

Born in 1922, the descendant of hard-working immigrants from Quebec, Kerouac was a star athlete at his high school in Lowell, Massachusetts. This secured him a football scholarship to Columbia University in Manhattan. A bachelor’s degree from one of the United States’ oldest and most elite universities could have been a ticket on an express train to the American middle class, to membership of the suburban-dwelling masses who possessed the touchstones of middle-American aspiration: white picket fences, 2.1 children, identikit housewives.

But this proved to be the high point of Kerouac’s brief moment as an all-American boy. Columbia didn’t work out: relegated to the bench of the football team after a falling-out with his coach, he dropped out of university altogether. Discharged from the navy on psychiatric grounds (so-called ‘mental illness’ would dog him for the rest of his short life), he spent the Second World War working in the Merchant Marine.

It was at this point, in his early twenties, that Kerouac embarked on the peripatetic lifestyle that would define the rest of his life and work. When he wasn’t at sea, he was wandering elsewhere in North America, primarily in New York: mingling with a group of new friends who were either lazy, immoral Bohemians or creative geniuses at the forefront of an important and fresh cultural movement. It all depended on who you asked.

The friends were William S Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, who would go on to write The Naked Lunch and Howl, respectively, two of the seminal works of their generation. And there were other key figures, creative men like Neal Cassady and Louis Carrier, as well as countless other writers, artists and intellectuals who had so rebelliously chosen to cast off the starched-collar constraints of the American mainstream in favour of a new movement that established a new set of rules - or, some might say, traversed a new set of freedoms; of expression, of thought, of sexuality, and of self-destruction.

"[Beat] involves a sort of nakedness of mind and, ultimately, of soul..."

Now, more than 50 years since this group of men (though they had female associates, the movement was at heart one of rebellion against middle class white masculinity) brought their peculiar rhythms to the pavements of New York and the transcontinental highways of America, they are still widely recognised and celebrated as a generation unto themselves – the Beats. But when they were infecting the youth of America with their particular brand of subversive creativity, it wasn’t clear if they were genuine pioneers of a groundbreaking American cultural movement or merely a noisy, feckless and intoxicated collective of dilettantes. It’s still hard to be sure.

What defined the Beat Generation? Some believed that the phenomenon was greatly overblown by the media: “Three friends does not make a generation,” said Gregory Corso, another writer who associated with Kerouac. In the beginning, it’s true that this generation was just a small group of friends – a clique who were passionately engaged in developing their careers as authors and poets, despite the fact that they spent as much of their time in greasy cafés and dive bars, hitching rides and hopping freight trains as they did working on their dog-eared manuscripts.

Most wrote for years before publishers took any notice of what they were doing, and in many cases an odd twist of fate was required before they were thrust into the mainstream. Howl became famous when the owner of the San Francisco bookshop that stocked it was taken to court for violation of obscenity laws because of the frank way in which it described Ginsberg’s homosexuality. The publicity led to a tremendous increase in sales, and it remains a key text in the canon of the era, even though few literary critics admire the quality of the writing.

It was Kerouac who came up with the term ‘Beat’ in the first place, but he wasn’t referring to the syncopated rhythms of the jazz music much-loved in the hipster circles within which he moved. Rather, it spoke to their weariness; the ‘weltschmerz’ described by the German poet Jean Paul, and captured in the work of Byron and Leopardi. They were tired, physically ‘beat’. It took a New York Times Magazine article published in 1952 to expand the reach of the term from a small group of friends to a movement that was sweeping America.

“The origins of the word ‘Beat’ are obscure, but the meaning is only too clear to most Americans,” wrote John Clellon Holmes, who was himself considered a Beatnik, although not at the centre of the movement. “More than mere weariness, it implies the feeling of having been used, of being raw. It involves a sort of nakedness of mind, and, ultimately, of soul; a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness.” In an era of apple-pie Americana that was defined by prosperity, optimism and a political agenda in opposition to the scourge of communism, this was not just subversive: it was dangerous. The Beat lifestyle, according to Holmes, was nihilistic and self-centred, but at the same time it was driven by the search for a source of comfort that the two dominant streams of American faith – Christianity and consumption – could not provide to the post-war generation. “For the wildest hipster,” Holmes wrote, “there is no desire to shatter the ‘square’ society in which he lives, only to elude it.” Buddhism played an important role, for Kerouac in particular: until the end of his life, he dabbled in the faith, combining it with the Catholicism he’d been raised with in a juxtaposition appropriate to the Beat sensibility.

Kerouac will speak forever to each successive generation of young dissatisfied readers who try to make their own way in a mercurial world.

Superficially, Beat literature was about this dedication to elusion, illustrated most forcefully in Kerouac’s iconic On the Road, a slim novel which is at once gloriously groundbreaking and astoundingly tedious. Written in 1951 but not published until 1957, the book serves as the definitive text of the Beat Generation, a largely autobiographical account of how Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs and their other friends and acquaintances met in New York and proceeded to drive aimlessly back and forth across the United States. They were fuelled by drugs and alcohol, which contributed to their reputation as ne’er-do-wells, but it wasn’t just a road trip: they shared a burning desire to forge new identities and meanings that were utterly separate from the conformist majorities of the 1950s.

The writing itself was louche and unruly, a passionate and unwieldy narrative, a brain-dump. Kerouac purportedly completed the book in a three-week jag which he claimed was fuelled only by coffee, although at that stage he had already been through one round of treatment for the drug and alcohol dependencies which would plague and eventually truncate his life before he turned 50. With his greatest work written when he was still young and vital, Kerouac remains enshrined in the collective American memory as forever young, handsome, rebellious – not the impoverished, miserable alcoholic he was when he died.

“There are those who believe that in generations such as this there is always the constant possibility of a great new moral idea, conceived in desperation, coming to life,” Holmes explained in 1952. But On the Road has shown remarkable endurance in terms of maintaining a readership for 50 years. Its definition of enlightenment is, at best, nebulous: ultimately the book is about a search that never really ended.

The reign of the Beat Generation was brief – by the 1960s, Ginsberg and Kerouac had begun to experiment with LSD alongside Timothy Leary. Kerouac died before 1970, but many of the other Beats slowly blurred into the hippie movement, with which they shared a common search for enlightenment, although the hippies approached it with a more bleary-eyed dedication to love.

Ultimately, for all of the hue and cry over the lawless attitudes of the Beat Generation towards society, literature and art, it is clear that much of what drove them to search for a new kind of enlightenment amidst the peculiar age in which they lived was neither new nor fresh. It was the vital, smart young man’s desire for identity, for his own territory, to make his mark without following in the exact footsteps of his father. It was the same inclination that drove Westward expansion in the United States a century before Kerouac and his friends took to the road, and it is the same urge that causes young people to continue to make Kerouac’s work seem vital. He will speak forever to each successive generation of young, dissatisfied readers who try to make their own way in a mercurial, malevolent world where, just as it did in the 1950s, conformity feels like the enemy of youth, creativity and all that is beautiful and new – but pursuit of the inverse can still leave an enduring emptiness.