The Spiritual Imagination of the BeatsWomen Writers of the Beat Era: Autobiography and IntertextualityWorld Beats: Beat Generation Writing and the Worlding of U.S. LiteratureKerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory

Not so long ago, there seemed to be a consensus about what constituted the Beat generation. At its heart lay the triumvirate of Jack Kerouac (the “King of the Beats”), Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, respective authors of the Beat hypercanon, On the Road (1957), “Howl” (1956), and Naked Lunch (1959). Revolving around them was an outer circle of poets and novelists, including Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane di Prima, Gary Snyder, LeRoi Jones (later, Amiri Baraka), John Clellon Holmes, Philip Whalen, and Michael McClure, as well as the charismatic Neal Cassady, “secret hero” of “Howl” and the model for Dean Moriarty in On the Road. For some, the canon could be extended into the 1960s to incorporate figures such as Bob Dylan, Richard Brautigan, and Tuli Kupferberg, the last of whom not only jumped into the East River as an unnamed figure in “Howl” but also, a decade later, resurfaced as cofounder of the Fugs, at the heart of the 1960s New York avant-rock scene. Never mind that some of these writers (Snyder, Ferlinghetti) were adamant that they had never been Beats, or that others (Baraka) swiftly moved into other areas, or that it was hard to explain just what made Burroughs a Beat, barring his friendship with Ginsberg and Kerouac; the central canon seemed established, and debates about peripheral figures hinged on nuance or personal preference. Never mind, too, that a group allegedly representing freedom from hegemonic American Cold War–era oppression was overwhelmingly made up of white male authors whose attitudes toward women and people of color were recognized, even by Beat aficionados, as highly problematic.In any case, the desire to codify a Beat canon seemed to run against the slipperiness of such classifications during the 1950s, when Beat, Black Mountain, New York school, confessional, San Francisco Renaissance, and other movements served as permeable, loose-fitting monikers for artists who could not be pigeonholed within watertight generic boxes. In recent years, however, catalogs of Beat authors have been rewritten to extend the Beat canon across gender, race, space, and time. The Cambridge Companion to the Beats (2017), edited by Steven Belletto (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press), while retaining a central place for the original triumvirate, contains essays highlighting the difficulties inherent to “Locating a Beat Aesthetic” (Regina Weinreich) or to separating “Myths and Realities” (Nancy M. Grace) alongside others devoted to topics such as “The Beats and Sexuality” (Polina Mackay), “The Beats and Gender” (Ronna C. Johnson), and “The Beats and Race” (A. Robert Lee). Essays by, among others, Todd F. Tietchen and John Whalen-Bridge deconstruct any residual notions of the Beats as a distinctively American phenomenon inspired by a mix of transcendentalism and jazz, focusing instead on the transnational networks linking writers across space and time. A. Robert Lee’s own The Beats: Authorships, Legacies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2019) commences with a systematic breakdown of Beat into a lengthy list of tributaries and subsidiaries, featuring “Beatniks and Hippies,” “Beat and Women,” “Afro-Beat,” “Little Magazines” (5–38), and so on, and extending Beat through to the punk rock of the 1970s, 1980s, and beyond. At another historical extreme, Sheila Murnaghan and Ralph M. Rosen’s edited collection, Hip Sublime: Beat Writers and the Classical Tradition (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 2018), features chapters tracing literary genealogies from Catullus, Sappho, Xenophon, and many others through to Kerouac, di Prima, Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, Kenneth Rexroth, Charles Olson, and Robert Duncan, both debunking the “know-nothing” anti-Beat tradition that has run unabated since the publication of On the Road and further reshaping exactly how Beat should be defined and which authors should be considered Beats.Even a casual glance at the titles of the four books under review here illustrates how each takes for granted such extensions of classification. While David Stephen Calonne’s The Spiritual Imagination of the Beats largely relies on a long-established roster of Beat authors, Calonne’s originality resides in his interest in the traces of hidden religions and religious subcultures from around the world that reemerge with writers such as Burroughs and Snyder. Other than a chapter on di Prima, the female Beats whose work has been recognized in recent years by scholars such as Ronna C. Johnson and Nancy M. Grace in their groundbreaking edited collection, Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 2002), are largely ignored by Calonne. Likewise, while the featured authors represent a broad spectrum of ethnic, religious, and sexual identities, the chapter on Bob Kaufman’s fusion of jazz with Buddhist and Dadaist sources is the only one to look at an African American writer.Mary Paniccia Carden’s Women Writers of the Beat Era focuses on autobiographical writings by women including di Prima (again), Bonnie Bremser, ruth weiss, Joanne Kyger, Joyce Johnson, and Hettie Jones, and shows how these authors “join already-formed conversations about their roles . . . their literary work, and their places in history” (18), a crucial observation in illustrating how belatedness of recognition continues to impede understanding of writings outside the male Beat canon. Importantly, Carden explores how female Beats write narratives that run parallel to, yet also subtly undermine the Kerouac/Ginsberg representation of, “domestic realms as locales of conformity and repression,” representing their “bohemian homes as sites of freedom and experimentation” (22). Thus, in Memoirs of a Beatnik (1969), for example, di Prima constructs a space in her Sixtieth Street pad in which she is able to read, study, write, and discuss art with like-minded members of her community, while simultaneously using that space as the focal point of the pornographic narrative that is ostensibly at the heart of the book. At times, such an approach can lead Carden to state the obvious, as when she observes how the juxtaposition of the passages “A Night by the Fire: What You Would Like to Hear” (a lengthy account of an orgy) and “A Night by the Fire: What Actually Happened” (a description of the need to huddle together to keep warm in a cold apartment) “throws the verisimilitude of other, similar [pornographic] scenes into question” (40), implying that readers might not previously have doubted such verisimilitude. Nevertheless, the approach does enable her to present an important rejoinder to the dominant critical readings of di Prima’s life narratives, in which her autobiography, Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years (2001), is seen as an authentic record of her life at that time and Memoirs of a Beatnik is viewed as little more than a tawdry potboiler, written as a result of the need for quick money.Jimmy Fazzino’s World Beats is, as the subtitle makes clear, a transnational study of the “worlding” of US literature, deeply influenced by theorists such as Gayatri Spivak (planetarity), Wai Chee Dimock (deep time), and James Clifford (translocalism). In chapters on Kerouac, African American Beat writers, Philip Lamantia, Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and, intriguingly, Maxine Hong Kingston and the “Post-Beat Canon,” Fazzino roams across continents and times to locate Beat aesthetics within, alongside, and beyond Pan-Africanist rhetoric, surrealism, and the Latin American and North African origins of Naked Lunch, the latter of which also inform Gysin’s 1969 The Process (“an exemplary work of postcolonial Beat fiction” [30]), and finally in Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey (1989), in which Kingston’s protagonist, a fifth-generation Chinese American San Franciscan flaneur, reads San Francisco through Kerouac in a way that combines reverence with an exposé of “the condescension, if not outright racism, present in Kerouac’s work” (202).Ironically, given Kerouac’s status as the quintessential Beat, Hassan Melehy’s Kerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory is the most radical of the four books reviewed here. Indeed, Melehy rightly commences with the claim that this positioning of Kerouac “limits understanding” of his writing (2), since it has led to an obsession with his life and consequent dismissal of his work as having any kind of sustained importance. At the heart of Melehy’s reconsideration is his assertion that Kerouac’s fiction and poetry are the products of his position as a member of a French Canadian community that was unwelcome in the United States. Rather than viewing Kerouac as a representative of hegemonic whiteness, Melehy sees him as “heavily marked by the culture of survivance,” so that “the history and culture of Franco-American New England, and more broadly of Francophone North America, are always in the background and frequently in the foreground of his writings” (15). Melehy’s Kerouac is an outsider in the United States, marginalized by language as well as culture, who is compelled to wander endlessly in a futile search for a fixed identity. Like Proust, he writes remembrances, in this case recovering a sense of his French Canadian past in fictional representations of his early life such as Dr. Sax (1959), Maggie Cassidy (1959), and Visions of Gerard (1963), and tracing the roots of his name in his trip to France, as depicted in Satori in Paris (1966), but always discovering that geography, language, and history conspire to ensure that such a selfhood remains elusive. As Melehy concludes, (for Kerouac) “survivance, contrary to what it purports to be, can only be a matter of reconstruction, and hence of construction or performance” (160), an observation that could also be applied to di Prima’s autobiographies or to many other Beat texts.

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