Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Their Transcendentalist Gloom
Using Jack Kerouac’s Visions of Cody (written 1958, published 1972) and Tristessa (1960) and Allen Ginsberg’s poems ‘Howl’ and ‘Kaddish’ (1956 and 1959), this chapter explores the dissonance between Romantic American and reactionary European impulses in t
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Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Their Transcendentalist Gloom
The Lost Generation Mark II Like Henry Miller, the Beat Generation is inseparable from the zeitgeist that made it famous. The names Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg—and to a lesser extent William Burroughs—bring to mind youth rebellion in the late 1950s and 1960s, bohemian road tripping across the American continent, risqué and liberating poetry readings in San Francisco and the heroic artistic origins of a rebirth in social and cultural ideas. Jack Kerouac’s slogan-friendly homage in On the Road to people who are ‘mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time’ sums up a group image that has endured not only in popular but in artistic and scholarly circles ever since (2011, p. 7). From the moment the Beats came to widespread public recognition—1957, when Ginsberg’s cult fame for reading ‘Howl’ at the Six Gallery was eclipsed by On the Road’s storming of the New York Times bestseller list—they were associated with ecstasy, romance and redemption. Unsurprisingly, elements of the popular press and of the literary establishment worried about the decadent example they were setting to young people. But for those on board, this movement went down in cultural history as a progressive break with the old and explosion of the new. Ginsberg, who lived the longest and was always more interested in securing the Beat brand, spent the last thirty years of his life retelling a legend about how he and his friends began by fighting to determine their own destinies and ended up determining a whole generation’s. Unlike © The Author(s) 2020 G. Stevenson, Anti-Humanism in the Counterculture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47760-8_3
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Kerouac—who bristled under the spotlight—Ginsberg was eager to oblige journalists, academics and stars of successive countercultures by confirming the social and artistic legacy the Beats had left. In print and TV interviews, in his own essays, in prefaces for reissues and anthologies of Beat work, at marches against the Vietnam War, and through collaborations with Bob Dylan, Patti Smith and The Clash, Ginsberg made sure the world would not forget that his, Kerouac and Burroughs’ rebellion had been the catalyst. These, as he put it tearfully in a documentary on Dylan, were proof that the ‘torch had been passed’ to generations who had ‘listened well’ (Scorsese 2005). In political terms, Ginsberg wrote in his preface to Kerouac’s posthumously published Visions of Cody, the hippy spirit was directly and nobly descended from the Beats: ‘peace protester adolescents from Cherry High with neck kiss bruises sit & weep on Denver Capitol Hill lawn, hundreds of Neal & Jack souls mortal lamblike sighing over the nation now, 1972’ (Kerouac 2012a, p. 1). For his part, Kerouac had no time for what Ginsberg had made of the movement, appearing dishevelled on French TV in the year of his death to decry the ‘bohemians’ who ‘came along with their sandals and long hair and just sat watching us’ (Kerouac 1959). If Gins
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