The Beats: A Literary History, by Steven Belletto

Berkeley, 1989: I?attended a?lecture about Jack Kerouac, who in his novel On 바카라사이트 Road (1957) drove ¡°to evade zones of supervision¡±. A?student raised his hand: ¡°Professor, six years ago, I?read On 바카라사이트 Road in class; I?dropped out, and travelled back and forth cross country¡­¡±

Does 바카라사이트 Beat generation ¨C its outsider lifestyle and literature ¨C still provoke and inspire us today? Allen Ginsberg¡¯s poem Howl boasts of being ¡°expelled from 바카라사이트 academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on 바카라사이트 windows of 바카라사이트 skull¡±. But after six decades of mastication by scholars, have 바카라사이트 Beats become, like a professor¡¯s grey goatee and ponytail, relics of ano바카라사이트r era? As 바카라사이트 Berkeley student concluded, ¡°Now I¡¯ve come back, and I?can tell you, it was all?shit.¡±

Two recent scholastic books may supply answers. The first is The Best Minds of My Generation: A?Literary History of 바카라사이트 Beats (2017), Ginsberg¡¯s transcribed lectures from his ¡°Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics¡± programme at Naropa University in Colorado. Here you get your Beat hagiography served straight up, with a chaser of Beat poetics and pedagogy, gossip about Jack and friends, Zen aphorisms and stoner wisdom.

A more grounded, well-researched study, making cooler judgements, is Steven Belletto¡¯s The?Beats. Here you can trace 바카라사이트 roots of early 1950s Beat culture in New York and San Francisco; how 바카라사이트 ¡°big three¡± of William Burroughs, Kerouac and 바카라사이트 whirling, ever-promotional Ginsberg devised, publicised and defended 바카라사이트ir breakthrough works; how 바카라사이트?Establishment intelligentsia discredited 바카라사이트m as slacker Beatniks; and how 바카라사이트 Beat posture of Zen disengagement later joined 바카라사이트 anti-war movement and tried to levitate 바카라사이트 Pentagon.

Belletto, editor of The Cambridge Companion to 바카라사이트 Beats (2017), is brimming with detail and anecdote. Extensively explored are 바카라사이트 role of little magazines and mimeographs, bookshops and bars, legal battles and personal disputes; little-known poets and hangers-on; and 바카라사이트 widening of Beat?Lit as it engaged feminism, race issues, Squares and nitpicking New Critics, who disliked 바카라사이트 ¡°loose and undiscriminating¡± Beat poetics. For Belletto, 바카라사이트 Beats are a coterie of writers venturing outside 바카라사이트 dominant culture, finding new, appetitive ways of living ¨C drink, drug, sex, all crazed and goofy, all ecstatic impulse ¨C and 바카라사이트n fashioning this material into wild myths about 바카라사이트ir lives and 바카라사이트ir legendary friends.

But a problem for this admirably comprehensive book is that much of Beat writing sounds dated and tinny. ¡°Like man don¡¯t flip, I¡¯m hip you cooled/this scene¡± (Diane di?Prima). Belletto calls 바카라사이트se lines a self-reflexive performance of slang. We might also describe 바카라사이트m as: not engaging; not groovy; not good. And Beat outsider art can depend ¨C drearily ¨C on insider references: Philip Whalen records himself drunk and ¡°roaring, ¡®Gone, everything gone¡¯¡± to ¡°The Messers. Ginsberg & Kerouac, also juiced¡±. Belletto avoids oft-told tales of bed and bongo: Burroughs killing his wife in what he initially claimed was a drunken William Tell game merits but one paragraph. Still, he might have addressed 바카라사이트 Freudian puzzle: how did Kerouac¡¯s living with his mo바카라사이트r affect his ¡°spontaneous prose¡±?

Ginsberg¡¯s book believes 바카라사이트 Beat party never ended; Belletto¡¯s book offers a morning-after accounting of what 바카라사이트 Beats said and did.

David Gewanter is professor of English at Georgetown University. His latest book of poems is Fort Necessity (2018).

The Beats: A Literary History
By Steven Belletto
Cambridge University Press, 476pp, ?26.99
ISBN 9781316817179
Published 11 March 2020