Modern Mind by Watson Peter

Author:Watson, Peter [Watson, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2000-01-01T15:00:00+00:00

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for ancient heavenly connection to the

starry dynamo in the machinery o f night

Kenneth Rexroth, a critic and key figure in what was to become known as the San Francisco poetry renaissance, said later that Howl made Ginsberg famous ‘from bridge to bridge,’ meaning from the Triboro in New York to the Golden Gate.29 But this overlooks the real significance of Ginsberg’s poem. What mattered most was its form and the mode of delivery. Howl was primitive not just in its title and the metaphors it employed but in the fact that it referred back to ‘pre-modern oral traditions,’ in which performance counted as much as any specific meaning to the words. In doing this, Ginsberg was helping to ‘shift the meaning of culture from its civilising and rationalising connotations to the more communal notion of collective experience’.30 This was a deliberate move by Ginsberg. From the first, he actively sought out the mass media – Time, Life, and other magazines – to promote his ideas, rather than the intellectual reviews; he was a market researcher, after all. He also popularised his work through the expanded paperback book trade – the publisher of Howl was Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of City Lights, the first paperback bookstore in the United States.31 (In those days, paperbacks were still seen as an alternative, potentially radical form of information distribution.) And it was after Howl was picked up by the mass media that the Beat culture was transformed into an alternative way of life. The Beat culture would come to have three important ingredients: an alternative view of what culture was, an alternative view of experience (mediated through drugs), and its own frontier mentality, as epitomised by the road culture. Ironically, these were all intended to convey greater individualism and in that sense were slap in the middle of the American tradition. But the Beats saw themselves as radicals. The most evocative example of the road culture, and the other defining icon of the Beats, was Jack Kerouac’s 1957 book On the Road.

Kerouac, born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac in Lowell, Massachusetts, on 12 March 1922, did not have a background propitious for a writer. His parents were French-speaking immigrants from Quebec in Canada, so that English was not his first language. In 1939 he entered Columbia University, but on a football scholarship.32 It was his meeting with Ginsberg and Burroughs that made him want to be a writer, but even so he was thirty-five before his most famous book (his second) was published.33 The reception of Kerouac’s book was partly helped by the fact that, two weeks before, Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems had been the subject of a celebrated obscenity trial in San Francisco that had not yet been decided (the judge eventually concluded that the poems had ‘redeeming social importance’). So ‘Beat’ was on everyone’s lips. Kerouac explained to countless interviewers who wanted to know what Beat meant that

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