Thinking about the Beats

The first time I read Jack Kerouac's On the Road was at the suggestion of some guy I hung out with in Honolulu during one of those summers, way back when, when I used to spend the breaks between Berkeley school terms in the Islands. A family thing, and not really part of the story. This guy was over there doing the same kind of thing, killing time between semesters in the most dissolute way he could find, with a buddy from San Francisco State. They were self-styled intellectuals of a sort, and had the kind of buddy chemistry which necessitated that both of them act like pretentious assholes most of the time. I was a sucker in those days for that kind of thing, or maybe it was just homesickness for conversation different from the simplified talk, often in pidgin, that went on between me and the locals, who probably resented (justifiably) my presence in the Islands in the first place. Anyway, one of these guys was working his way through Kerouac's classic novel, also a kind of buddy story. He talked about it a lot while I was driving them around Oahu. It occurred to me after a while that the car I had access to was the whole point of the "friendship" from their perspective. He (the shorter and more self-consciously intellectual of the two) talked mainly about the hipster language in the book, the "gone chicks," everything being "way cool," everyone needing to "split" all the time. In some ways he was making fun of the style, I suppose, the way he made fun of everything. One dull Sunday they finagled me into driving them to a polo match on the windward side of Oahu, which I grudgingly did, but then when they began getting drunk and snotty, as always happened, I excused myself by saying I needed to use the outhouse, then got in the car and drove back to Honolulu. They must have had a hell of a time trying to get back to Honolulu themselves, which they tried to tell me about not long after in an angry telephone call. I just laughed and hung up. I wasn't actually afraid of two fake intellectuals from San Francisco State. The locals? Sure, often. But not those two guys.

But I've found, as you have, that even out of disappointing liaisons in life you learn things, you pick up things of value. And so after a few years I bought a copy of Kerouac's book myself. That was my introduction to the Beats. Unconsciously if unwillingly influenced by the wise guy of a few years back, I focused at first on the colloquial and disheveled style of Kerouac's writing, which led me away from the point. I was a little too formalistic and doctrinaire in my approach to art in those days. My cousin, the ace novelist from Santa Cruz (via common ancestors from the Cumberland Gap), straightened me out on the significance of the Beats. My cousin was about the same age in 1955 as I attained in 1970, so while my reference points were Hippie, his were Beat. He explained his admiration for Kerouac (and he really would not brook my trivial carping about writing style) by talking about what it meant to hear dissenting voices during the Eisenhower Era, how all of society talked about the perfection of modern (increasingly suburban) American life, when just under the surface, a sensitive soul (like Kerouac) could plainly see that things were going terribly, terribly wrong. He wasn't the only one. Lewis Mumford, writing in The City in History in 1961, described an America where post World War II development left an "end product [as] an encapsulated life, spent more and more either in a motor car or within the cabin of darkness before a television set." So deranging was this forming lifestyle, in fact, that Mumford blamed it for the insanity which led to the nuclear arms race. Nuclear annihilation, indeed, could be seen as a suicidal escape from the oppressions of Modern America.

As is my habit when encountering something new and interesting, I read lots of the Beats after that. My first run-through of Tropic of Cancer impressed me as the best novel I'd ever read. It was almost miraculous in its evocation of time and place. And then Miller's dark counterpart to Steinbeck's Travels with Charlie, Henry's own book about touring America called The Air Conditioned Nightmare. For one thing, the title could simply not be improved upon. I realized my cousin had been influenced by these writers in his satirical vignettes about modern America, in his Charlie Bates stories. "Gas Mask" concerns Charlie's encounter with the Ultimate Traffic Jam on an unnamed Los Angeles freeway, a gridlock so final, so finished, that he eventually abandons his car, lowers himself by rope from the freeway, rents an apartment in a nearby high-rise, and watches his immobile car through binoculars. A new life, a love interest, also come about while he lives in this state of deracinated anomie. Indeed, how can you better describe the rootless nature of American life than through such a brilliant parody?

In My Dinner with Andre there is a riveting moment in the long conversation when Andre talks about the Sixties as the final convulsion of a society rebelling against the forces of standardization and commercialization, the reduction of the landscape to a tacky "crapscape" (Jim Kunstler's matchless epithet) of chain stores, fast food joints, big box outlets, the whole American Trail of Sorrows. The rebellion failed, as Andre noted, and eventually Americans "became the keepers of their own prisons." We became collaborators in our captivity, a kind of cultural Stockholm Syndrome. Almost all of us do it now: consume too much, pay too much attention to celebrity, fill the seas, the skies, our minds with garbage (as Pete Seeger sang), encourage our kids, above all, to "make it" in American society. We live in a country which is dominated completely by Big Business which owes its primary (only) loyalty to the global network of trade. The sense of a commons is so attenuated that we sit complacently by as more and more Americans fall into poverty and out of the medical system. A mercenary army fights endless wars, and their deaths are significant only as political footballs for parties competing for the plum jobs available at the public trough. Calls to patriotism have turned to ashes in the mouths of hypocritical legislators who are simply looking for manipulative angles.

One might say that it is those who stand at the cusp, at the interface, between eras who see things most clearly. There is a moment, a twinkling, when the horror can be appreciated because the culture being abandoned is still visible, still around, as its evil successor begins to materialize. Such were the Beats. Eisenhower himself, now a kind of patron saint of America's conformist age, became something of a Beat in his final warning about the rise of the Military-Industrial Complex. It is here now, in force and in all its menacing glory. A charter member of the corporate ruling class received 53% of the popular vote in the last presidential election. The government is now in the full-time business of spying on its own citizens, compiling dossiers, subjecting them to "mathematical algorithms" by an elite and secret class of apparatchiks with no accountability. No amount of money spent on defense or in ongoing wars seems too great for Congress, even if Social Security, Medicare and the federal government itself are headed toward bankruptcy. Instead of making decisions (the nominal reason for their election), the legislative freeloaders idle away their hours passing nonbinding resolutions.

The Beats, in fact, were on to something. But now there is really no one left to Howl, to go On the Road, to point out the Nightmarish tenuousness of our decadent life. No one, at least, who can influence matters decisively. I suggested to my able cousin at one point that Charlie Bates make a comeback, that he turn his satirical gifts to the vexations of the Bush Era. Plausible, it might have seemed, as a suggestion. But not really possible. The broad audience is gone; it exists only as an illusion in the minds of those who remember that golden era of American dissent. Change in these United States will not come about through peaceful evolution or through hortatory satire. The body politic will fall apart through degenerative processes already well underway. "A throe, an eschatological heave," said another quasi-Beat, Norman Mailer in The Armies of the Night.