The birth of the beatnik
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Description: By James Campbell, author of This is the Beat Generation, 1999. Excellent background to the naming of the beats by Herb Caen - post Sputnik.
'This Is the Beat Generation' by James Campbell - Houston Chronicle Subscribe to the Houston Chronicle Top Stories in US & World Super Bowl XLVIII turns into Seahawks' rout of Broncos
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| Page title: | 'This Is the Beat Generation' by James Campbell - Houston Chronicle |
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| Description: | The book people were talking about The Plague by Albert Camus, a carefully crafted political allegory, not his sort of thing at all. Ginsberg was promoting his new collection of poems, Cosmopolitan Greetings, and we met in the deserted bar of a hotel just a few doors from the house in which Henry James had lived at the turn of the century. Ginsberg came shuffling across the floor of the lobby towards me, dressed in a suit, well-pressed blue shirt, and tie. The thing that impressed me most about Ginsberg had nothing to do with political subversiveness or beatness; it was his ability to memorize great chunks of English and American verse of every era. [...] he decorated my copy of Cosmopolitan Greetings with a drawing of a stern-looking Buddha floating above a skull with flower in its mouth. [...] I had worried that he might accuse me of speaking ill of him and his Beat colleagues. Ginsberg and Burroughs were then in residence at the Hotel Rachou—later known as The Beat Hotel—and Ginsberg worked hard at persuading the roguish proprietor of the Olympia Press, Maurice Girodias, to take on the most dubious of all his books, Naked Lunch. Over on the West Coast, Michael McClure was similarly elusive, while the editor of a seminal Beat magazine agreed at first to meet me, then changed his mind when I declined to provide a list of questions from which there would be no deviation. Later, I read her memoir, which contains anecdotes about Ginsberg visiting the Trillings' apartment on Riverside Drive, and found her portrait of him to be bedeviled by misunderstanding of his aims and motives. Had she been gracious enough to agree to be interviewed, I might have included her misplaced emphases in my version of Ginsberg's relationship with the Trillings, simply because "this is how she says it was". Freed from the entrapping spools of the cassette tape, I concentrated on reading the books, ferreting out letters and other personal scraps of paper (the most precious of research materials), sifting through contemporary newspapers, tracking down a ton of weird and wonderful magazine articles spawned by "beatnik", the kitschification of Beat, and walking up and down the avenues of New York and the hills of San Francisco, imaginatively superimposing old landscapes, old styles of talk, old ways of seeing the world, on to the streets of today. Jack Kerouac never resolved the troubles which beset him from the mid-1950s onwards, and which are described here; he died in front of a television set, a year and a half after the death of his muse and driver, Neal Cassady. Ginsberg and Burroughs continued their remarkable exploratory careers, remained devoted friends, and died, a few months apart, in 1997. |
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| Date | Creation Date: 25-apr-1990 Expiration Date: 26-apr-2014 |