Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (90 page)

No one could have predicted that when he stood up to recite his poem
Howl
in San Francisco in October 1955, Allen Ginsberg would spark an entire alternative ‘Beat’ culture, but on a closer reading of the man himself, some signs were there. Ginsberg had studied English literature at Columbia University under Lionel Trilling, whose defence of American liberalism he had found both ‘inspiring and off-putting.’ And while he composed
Howl,
Ginsberg worked as a freelance market researcher – and therefore knew as well as anyone what conventional attitudes and behaviour patterns were. If he could be sure what the norm was, he knew how to be different.
²³

Also, Ginsberg had for some time been moving in a world very different from Trilling’s. Born in Paterson, New Jersey, the son of a poet and teacher, in the 1940s he had met both William Burroughs Jr. and Jack Kerouac in a New York apartment where they were all ‘sitting out’ World War II.
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Burroughs Jr, much older, came from a wealthy Protestant Saint Louis family and had studied literature at Harvard and medicine in Vienna before falling among thieves – literally – around Times Square in Midtown Manhattan and the bohemian community of Greenwich Village. These two aspects of Burroughs, educated snob and lowlife deviant, fascinated Ginsberg. Like the older man, Ginsberg suffered from the feeling that he was outside the main drift of American society, a feeling that was intensified when he studied under Triding.
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Disliking the formalism of Trilling, Ginsberg was one of those who developed an alternative form of writing, the main characteristics of which were spontaneity and self-expression.
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Ginsberg’s style verged on the primitive, and was aimed at subverting what he felt was an almost official culture based on middle-class notions of propriety and success, an aspect of society now more visible than ever thanks to the commercials on the new television. Still, the evening when
Howl
received its first performance was hardly propitious. When Ginsberg got to his feet in that upstairs room in San Francisco, about a hundred other people present could see that he was nervous and that he had drunk a good deal.
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He had, according to one who was there, a ‘small, intense voice, but the alcohol and the emotional intensity of the poem quickly took over, and he was soon swaying to its powerful rhythm, chanting like a Jewish cantor, sustaining his long breath length, savouring the
outrageous language.’
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Among the others present was his old New York companion, Jean-Louis – Jack – Kerouac, who cheered at the end of each line, yelling ‘Go! Go!’ Soon others joined in. The chorus swelled as Ginsberg lathered himself into a trancelike state. The words Ginsberg opened with that night were to become famous, as did the occasion itself:

Kenneth Rexroth, a critic and key figure in what was to become known as the San Francisco poetry renaissance, said later that
Howl
made Ginsberg famous ‘from bridge to bridge,’ meaning from the Triboro in New York to the Golden Gate.
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But this overlooks the real significance of Ginsberg’s poem. What mattered most was its form and the mode of delivery.
Howl
was primitive not just in its title and the metaphors it employed but in the fact that it referred back to ‘pre-modern oral traditions,’ in which performance counted as much as any specific meaning to the words. In doing this, Ginsberg was helping to ‘shift the meaning of culture from its civilising and rationalising connotations to the more communal notion of collective experience’.
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This was a deliberate move by Ginsberg. From the first, he actively sought out the mass media –
Time, Life,
and other magazines – to promote his ideas, rather than the intellectual reviews; he was a market researcher, after all. He also popularised his work through the expanded paperback book trade – the publisher of
Howl
was Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of City Lights, the first paperback bookstore in the United States.
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(In those days, paperbacks were still seen as an alternative, potentially radical form of information distribution.) And it was after
Howl
was picked up by the mass media that the Beat culture was transformed into an alternative way of life. The Beat culture would come to have three important ingredients: an alternative view of what culture was, an alternative view of experience (mediated through drugs), and its own frontier mentality, as epitomised by the road culture. Ironically, these were all intended to convey greater individualism and in that sense were slap in the middle of the American tradition. But the Beats saw themselves as radicals. The most evocative example of the road culture, and the other defining icon of the Beats, was Jack Kerouac’s 1957 book
On the Road.

Kerouac, born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac in Lowell, Massachusetts, on 12 March 1922, did not have a background propitious for a writer. His parents were French-speaking immigrants from Quebec in Canada, so that English was not his first language. In 1939 he entered Columbia University, but on a football scholarship.
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It was his meeting with Ginsberg and Burroughs that made him want to be a writer, but even so he was thirty-five before his most famous book
(his second) was published.
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The reception of Kerouac’s book was partly helped by the fact that, two weeks before, Ginsberg’s
Howl and Other Poems
had been the subject of a celebrated obscenity trial in San Francisco that had not yet been decided (the judge eventually concluded that the poems had ‘redeeming social importance’). So ‘Beat’ was on everyone’s lips. Kerouac explained to countless interviewers who wanted to know what Beat meant that it was partly inspired by a Times Square hustler ‘to describe a state of exalted exhaustion’ and was partly linked in Kerouac’s mind to a Catholic beatific vision.
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In the course of these interviews it was revealed that Kerouac had written the book in one frenzied three-week spell, using typing paper stuck together in a continuous ribbon so as to prevent the need to stop work in the middle of a thought. Though many critics found this technique absorbing, even charming, Truman Capote was moved to remark, ‘That isn’t writing; it’s typing.’
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Like everything else Kerouac wrote,
On the Road
was strongly autobiographical. He liked to say he had spent seven years on the road, researching the book, moving with a vague restlessness from town to town and drug to drug in search of experience.
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It also included the characters and experiences of his friends, especially Neal Cassady – called Dean Moriarty in the book – who wrote wild, exuberant letters to Kerouac and Ginsberg detailing his ‘sexual and chemical exploits.’
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It was this sense of rootless, chaotic, yet essentially sympathetic energy of the ‘courage-teachers’ that Kerouac sought to re-create in his book, it being his deliberate aim to do for the 1950s what the F. Scott Fitzgerald novels had done for the 1920s and the Hemingway books for the 1930s and 1940s. (He was not keen on their writing styles but was anxious to emulate their experience as observers of a key sensibility.) In a flat, deliberately casual prose, the book did all the stock things people say about radical ventures – it challenged ‘the complacency of a prosperous America’ and brought out clearly, for example, the role of pop music (bebop and jazz) for the young.
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But most of all it gave us the road book, which would lead to the road movie. ‘The road’ became the symbol of an alternative way of life, rootless but not aimless, mobile but with a sense of place, materially poor but generous and spiritually abundant, intellectually and morally adventurous rather than physically so. With Kerouac, travel became part of the new culture.
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The Beat culture’s turning away from Trilling, Commager, and the others was every bit as deliberate as Eliot’s highbrow imagery in his poetry. The highly original use of a vernacular shared by the drug, biker, and Greyhound bus subculture, the ‘strategic avoidance’ of anything complex or difficult, and the transfer into an ‘alternative’ consciousness as mediated by chemicals were in all respects assiduously subversive.
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But not all the alternatives to traditional high culture in the 1950s were as self-conscious. That certainly applied to one of the most powerful: pop music.

No matter how far back in time we can date popular music, its expression was always constrained by the technology available for its dissemination. In the days of sheet music, live bands, and dance halls, and then of radio, its impact was relatively limited. There was an elite, an in-group who decided what music
was printed, which bands were invited to perform, either in the dance halls or on radio. It was only with the invention of the long-playing record, by the Columbia Record Company in 1948, and the first ‘single,’ introduced by RCA a year later, that the music world as we know it took off. After that, anyone with a gramophone in their home could play the music of their choice whenever they pleased. Listening to music was transformed. At the same time, the new generation of ‘other-directed’ youth arrived on the scene perfectly primed to take advantage of this new cultural form.

It is usually agreed that pop music emerged in 1954 or 1955 when black R & B (rhythm and blues) music broke out of its commercial ghetto (it was known before World War II as ‘race music’). Not only did black singers enjoy a success among white audiences, but many white musicians copied the black styles. Much has been written about the actual beginnings, but the one generally agreed upon has Leo Mintz, a Cleveland record store owner, approaching
Alan
Freed, a disc jockey at the WJW station in Cleveland, Ohio, and telling him that suddenly white teenagers were ‘eagerly buying up all the black R & B records they could get.’ Freed paid a visit to Mintz’s store and later described what he saw: ‘I heard the tenor saxophones of Red Prysock and Big Al Sears. I heard the blues-singing, piano-playing Ivory Joe Hunter. I wondered. I wondered for about a week. Then I went to the station manager and talked him into permitting me to follow my classical program with a rock ‘n’ roll party.’
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Freed always claimed that he invented the term
rock
’n’
roll,
though insiders say it was around in black music well before 1954, black slang for sexual intercourse.
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But whether he discovered R & B, or rock ‘n’ roll, Freed was certainly the first to push it on air; he shouted at the records, rather like Kerouac yelling ‘Go!’ at Ginsberg’s first performance of Howl.
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Freed’s renaming of R & B was shrewd. Repackaged, it was no longer race music, and white stations could play it. Record companies soon caught on, one response being to issue white (and usually sanitised) versions of black songs. For instance, some regard ‘Sh-Boom,’ by the Chords, as the very first rock ‘n’ roll number.
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No sooner had it hit the airwaves, however, than Mercury Records released the Crew Cuts’ sanitised ‘cover’ version, which entered the Top Ten in a week. Soon, white performers like Bill Haley and Elvis Presley were imitating black music and outdoing them in terms of commercial success.
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Films like
The Blackboard Jungle
and TV programs like
American Bandstand
further popularised the music, which above all provided a cohesive and instantly recognisable force for teenagers everywhere.
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For the sociologically minded, early pop/rock songs reflected Riesman’s theories very neatly – for example, Paul Anka’s ‘Lonely Boy’ (1959), the Videls’ ‘Mr Lonely’ (1960), Roy Orbison’s ‘Only the Lonely’ (1960), and Brenda Lee’s ‘All Alone Am I’ (1962), although loneliness, one assumes, had existed before sociology. A crucial aspect of the rock business, incidentally, and often overlooked, was the hit chart. In the new transient conformist communities that W. H. Whyte had poked fun at, statistics were important, to show people what others were doing, and to allow them to do the same.
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But the most significant thing about the advent of rock/pop was that it was yet another nail in the coffin of high culture. The words that went
with the music – fashion, the ‘altered consciousness’ induced by drugs, love, and above all sex – became the anthems of the generation. The sounds of rock drowned out everything else, and the culture of young people would never be the same again.

It was no accident that pop developed as a result of the white middle classes adopting black music, or a version of it. As the 1950s wore on, black self-consciousness was rising. American blacks had fought in the war, shared the risks equally with whites. Quite naturally they wanted their fair share of the prosperity that followed, and as it became clear in the 1950s that that wasn’t happening, especially in the South, where segregation was still humiliatingly obvious, the black temper began to simmer. After the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on 17 May 1954 that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional, thereby repudiating the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine that had prevailed until then, it was only a matter of time (in fact, eighteen months) until Rosa Parks, a black American, was arrested for sitting at the front of the bus in a section reserved for whites, in Montgomery, Alabama. The civil rights movement, which was to tear America apart, may be said to have begun that day. Internationally, there were parallel developments, as former colonies that had also fought in World War II negotiated their independence and with it a rising self-consciousness. (India achieved independence in 1947, Libya in 1951, Ghana in 1957, Nigeria in 1960.) The result was that black writing flourished in the 1950s.