The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats

One of the most enduring narratives of the Beat literary generation is thatBeat writers were united in their stance as anti-intellectuals. Peruse any number of handbooks on the Beats, Beat encyclopedia entries, or book and essay chapters on Beat literature and one will find boilerplate language reifying key Beat counterculture mantras: Down with genteel formalism! Down with staid classrooms where the silence of the page obliterates the raucous roots of poetry! Down with stodgy intellectuals whose prudery puffs up a pasty American middle-class identity! Many Beat writers—notably Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg (1926–97)—were responsible for this chronic characterizationIt is not an altogether inaccurate representation; but neither is it true. As Bill Morgan's carefully edited edition of Ginsberg's academic lectures attests, Ginsberg was what he and many other Beat writers always were—serious students of literary history (American, European, and others). Compiled as The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats (hereafter referred to as A Literary History), the lectures demonstrate that the author of the “poem that changed America” (see The Poem That Changed America: “Howl” Fifty Years Later, ed. Jason Shinder [2006]) owed a deep debt of gratitude to that very history. “Professor Ginsberg,” as Anne Waldman addresses him in her foreword to the volume (xvii), may be a more accurate title for Ginsberg than “Kral Majales” or “Dharma Lion” ever were.A Literary History chronicles Ginsberg's career as a professor of American and English literature at both the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado (now the Naropa University), and Brooklyn College. Although Ginsberg lectured on dozens of literary giants over the years, the material in Morgan's volume, totaling almost one hundred lectures, focuses on the seminal Beat figures, including Ginsberg himself, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs. Additional lectures deal with Gregory Corso, John Clellon Holmes, Peter Orlovsky, Neal Cassady, and Carl Solomon.The lectures on Kerouac touch on On the Road (1957), The Town and the City (1950), and Visions of Cody (1972), but Ginsberg devotes most of the class time to Vanity of Duluoz (1968), which Kerouac wrote a year before his death. Defying the standard literary as well as lay interpretation of Kerouac as a drunken bum “incapable of any kind of artwork,” Ginsberg declares Vanity of Duluoz “some of [Kerouac's] finest prose and most curious hindsights…. one of his major novels and a departure from the romantic tradition” (60).The Burroughs lectures focus on Naked Lunch (1959), The Yage Letters (1963), and The Ticket That Exploded (1962), as well as on the cut-up method, which Burroughs and Brion Gysin developed. Ginsberg's treatment of Corso's poetry is probably the most expansive, encompassing The Vestal Lady on Brattle and Other Poems (1955), Gasoline and Other Poems (1958), The Happy Birthday of Death (1960), “Bomb” (1958), “Power” (1960), and Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit (1981). With respect to himself, Ginsberg addresses his indebtedness to William Carlos Williams, along with Christopher Smart and Paul Cézanne, discussing “Howl” (1956) and “The Green Automobile” (1959) in particular.Completing the volume are Ginsberg's reading list for his students who wished to continue their study of the Beat Generation, a definition of the Beat Generation, and a course overview—all of which are introduced by Waldman's foreword and Morgan's preface. Waldman, a somewhat-subdued Anthropocene political voice but still recognizable as that of Ginsberg's “spiritual wife,” as he called her (http://www.annewaldman.org), keenly situates the collected lectures as “a male/queer book” that “pushes to disabuse the world of the juvenile delinquent bad boy reputations” (xiii).Morgan uses his preface to discuss how Ginsberg developed and conceptualized the lecture series (“he was well aware that his knowledge and intelligence were transient, that his memory would fade… leaving his personal interpretation incomplete unless he took steps to document it himself” [xxii]—he never did compete the project), along with the pedagogical practices characterizing the lectures as distinctly Ginsbergian (brief discussions of literary techniques, personal commentary on the authors themselves, extended readings from the Beat texts, and massive reading assignments). These are accompanied by a detailed description of the process by which Morgan transcribed the taped lectures (“nearly 400,000 words, nearly 2,000 pages of text” [xxvii]) and edited the transcriptions. This process involved weeding out repetitive words and phrases, student questions, and comments from guest writers; multiple lectures on the same theme were also compressed into a single lecture.The result of this meticulous and undoubtedly tedious work is both satisfying and dissatisfying. On one level, the editing process, understandable because of the sheer magnitude of the available materials, leaves a reader with a text that simultaneously is and is not the voice of Allen Ginsberg. Instead, a disturbing monotone dominates. What is missing is Ginsberg's charismatic personality projected through his distinct vocabulary and syntax. Consider the following excerpt from the Allen Ginsberg Project website featuring his lecture on his early composition of two sonnets: AG: Then I tried some combination … then Shakespeare, then I tried a Shakespeare sonnet (again, the same year (1948) [sic]. The occasion was reading the entire manuscript of Kerouac's The Town and the City, and because it was so monumental and poderoso, powerful I thought, and the prose was so grand, at the end, toward the end, it got towards Thomas Wolfe-ian, Herman Melville-ian prose, that I realized that we must be on the train to some vast destiny, that all our day-dreamy arty. walkings-under-the-Brooklyn-Bridge-in-the-moonlight must be prophetic, and were for real, rather than just goofs, fooling around, flopping, out of grad school, or something. (http://allenginsberg.org/2018/03/wednesday-march-7/) In Morgan's volume, the passage becomes more prosaic, less conversational; gone is the “poderoso” quality of the novel as well as the whimsical descriptions of the young men's gleeful wanderings—and, most disappointing, Ginsberg's long, cataloguing breath line is transformed from the 91-word sentence above into six sentences averaging 15.6 words: In 1948 Jack Kerouac's first book, The Town and the City, was published. I read the manuscript and I was amazed that any of us had actually accomplished a work of art. It was the first time anybody that I knew had done anything that looked like a professional novel. It hadn't occurred to me that we would grow up and do things that were as real as what you read about in the New York Times. I was so amazed that I wrote a sonnet after reading Kerouac's manuscript. It refers to the general social scene that we were living in then. (343) In the Ginsberg Project version, a student also interjects brief comments about poets Andrew Marvell and Abraham Cowley and queries Ginsberg about the genre of the poems that Ginsberg wrote. With an equally brief and teacherly retort, Ginsberg simply tells the student, “It's a sonnet.”Granted, the style makes it easy for a reader either to skim the volume or to immerse oneself in it; and needless repetitions, as Morgan noted, are avoided. Sadly, however, the Ginsberg who wrote “Howl,” “Kaddish” (1961), and “Wichita Vortex Sutra” (1966) is also erased. Perhaps including in the foreword an example such as the one I have just discussed would aid a reader in determining when it might be advantageous to rely instead on the Ginsberg Project version.Readers of the lectures should also adopt a healthy skepticism about some of Ginsberg's declarations. He confidently declares that Kerouac “was a member of the communist party” when he was a young man (135; emphasis added), but there is no evidence of such membership (see Kerouac himself in his correspondence in the early 1940s with his close friend Sebastian Sampas acknowledging that, while both he and “Sabby” had rightfully embraced “Socialism and Progress” as an antidote to “cruelty ugliness bigotry” [Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1940–1956, ed. Ann Charters (New York: Viking, 1955), 51–52], he informed Sampas, “I am a Leftist…. I couldn't be otherwise, I may not be a Party-liner…. [T]hey haven't done any good and most of them are a trifle too intolerant … and unless the Party improves here, I'll never join it” [Selected Letters 53]).Similarly, Ginsberg, in a lecture on Visions of Cody, characterizes Kerouac as “great at America” but as someone who perceived life “across the border” as “an evil other world” (116). Kerouac in Ginsberg's mind always saw “America and the promise of America” as the subject of his writing. Very little, if any, mention is made in the lectures of Kerouac's hybrid identity (American, French Canadian, and Canadian Iroquois), a subject that contributed significantly to both Kerouac's personal identity and the development of his writing—and one that has become an important topic in recent Kerouac scholarship (see Hassan Meleny's Kerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory [2016] and Sara Villa's “Le Club Jack Kerouac and the Renaissance in Beat Scholarship on Kerouac's Franco-Canadian Background” [Journal of Beat Studies 6 (2018): 89–108]).Then, too, much of the content in the lectures has also been available in Beat texts about and by Beat writers, including scholarly treatises on Ginsberg, Ginsberg's own editions of his texts (the “Howl” facsimile in particular [“Howl”: Original Draft Facsimile (1995)]), and biographies and collections of correspondence between Beat writers. Even so, having access to this information as it was perhaps first presented to a public audience is exhilarating. Genuine value resides in experiencing these ideas expressed in a pedagogical context, in observing even from a temporal distance an artist transforming into a teacher who assists young writers and educators to appreciate and understand Beat aesthetics in their own lives and in complex literary histories.In addition, at many points along the way, a reader of the Ginsberg curriculum can encounter new and useful insights. Anyone who still harbors the belief that T. S. Eliot was anathema to the Beats can garner a corrective from the lecture on Ginsberg's early sonnets discussed above: “‘But all the streets are burning everywhere.’ I took that from T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, where he's on a dead patrol in the middle of the night in the fog during an air raid in London” (344). Likewise, Ginsberg's discussion of the similarities between Burroughs's cut-up method and The Waste Land (1922) is illuminating in its implied Beat embrace of modernism's insistence on complex diction and syntax in the context of literary montage (188). Ginsberg notes as well that Burroughs derived his method to some extent from Eliot's 1930 translation of Saint-John Perse's poem Anabasis (1924).Equally helpful are Ginsberg's responses to criticism of Kerouac's alleged racism as expressed in On the Road. This issue is prickly, partially because calling Kerouac racist has become almost as ubiquitous and mechanical as the Beat anti-intellectual claim, particularly when discussing the infamous Denver passage in On the Road, in which Sal Paradise laments the fact that he is not “a Denver Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap,” wishing to be anything but a “‘white man’ disillusioned” (On the Road: Text and Criticism, ed. Scott Donaldson [New York: Penguin, 1979], 242). Rejecting the by-now-standard reading of these passages as racist romanticism, Ginsberg defends Kerouac's apparently privileged reading of Blacks and other minorities as happy-go-lucky by explaining Kerouac's recognition that “there was some integrity in connection with their suffering, an integrity of awareness of it that was different from the white world that was more fake and plastic” (244). Ginsberg does not connect this interpretation with evidence from other texts in Kerouac's Duluoz legend, but if one looks beyond On the Road, one can find evidence signifying what Ginsberg called Kerouac's heartfelt recognition of Black oppression. In Pic, a seldom-read Kerouac novel (written in 1950, published in 1971), the first-person narrator, an African American boy named Pictorial Review Jackson, takes a bus ride from North Carolina to Philadelphia with his cousin Slim. Once the bus stops in Philadelphia, they move from the back to the front, Slim explaining that their front-seat privilege is the result of their crossing “Jim Crow's line.” Naively, Pic remarks that he didn't see any line: “[D]id we run over it or underneath?” Slim quietly and earnestly explains that “there is such a line, only thing is, it ain't on the ground, and it ain't in the air neither, it's jess in the head of Mason and Dixie, jess like all other lines, border lines, state lines, parallel thirty-lines and iron Europe curtain lines is all jess 'maginary lines in people's head and don't have nothing to do with the ground” (Pic [New York: Grove, 1971], 172). Passages such as this have to be considered alongside those such as the Denver passage in On the Road if an honest effort to explore Kerouac's racial attitude and beliefs is to have any integrity. As the Pic excerpt illustrates, Kerouac reveals a libertarian populist belief that America, if not the world, is a space in which the individual, no matter skin color or sex or economic status, should have the right to move freely, without constraint. Lines of division are human charades. Or as Ginsberg lectured, a conceptual breakthrough that some Beat Generation writers made was the discovery that America, certainly not a single white vision of the country, “was not the entire universe of consciousness or discourse or manners or plumbing” (254).By the end of A Literary History, a reader who comes to the book knowing of Ginsberg's dedication to documenting and preserving the life works of the “best minds of his generation” may conclude, along with Morgan, that “without Ginsberg there would be no Beat Generation” (xxii). Such hagiography is difficult to resist, especially considering the voluminous evidence of Ginsberg's efforts to locate Beat writers—for the most part rightly so—in a pantheon of American literary giants. While the origins of the Beat Generation, certainly the term itself, can be traced back, not to Ginsberg, but instead from John Clellon Holmes to Kerouac, to Burroughs, and finally to Herbert Huncke, Ginsberg's role as a devoted literary archivist and historian compels one to admit that, without him, what we know today as the Beat Generation would likely not exist.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.