The Beat generation writers have had a very good press if one uses as a standard the extent to which public curiosity has been focused on them, but they have had an indifferent to poor press if the function of a good press is to clarify. The bulk of what has been written about them has taken their delinquent conduct and assertions of disengagement at face value, with the result that they are condemned as lacking any serious connection with American culture and as being as much outside society as they themselves contend they are.
This is a convenient position to take but not a very useful one, even if the whole truth about them were their adolescent alienation from society. Beat literature may turn out to be an ephemeral oddity that fifty years from now exists only for desperate Ph.D. candidates, or it may prove to have been the night-town madness out of which one or two authentic writers were born, but that is another matter. In the meantime, the important and easily-overlooked fact is that it is in the American grain, and that however we react to it we are reacting to part of ourselves.
The Beat generation writers are in what may be called the subversive tradition in American literature—”subversive” because writers in this tradition so often appear as destructive forces to the middle class from which they come. To the writers of the subversive tradition organized society tends to be the Enemy. The Enemy is corrupt; hamstrung by convention; hypocritical, smug, selfish, superficial; ruled by fear, cliche and sentimentality; suspicious of the individual and creative originality; afraid to let itself go, to trust what Keats calls the holiness of the heart’s affections; passionately addicted to that great American document, the dollar bill. Obviously, the Enemy does not always recognize itself in this description.
The seeds of this tradition arrived with the first settiers and quickly flowered in such people as Thomas Morton, Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, that antinomian daughter of the inner light who today might be quite at home in a San Francisco pad. But the shape of this tradition is clearer for us if we begin with Emerson and Thoreau and the reformist turmoil of the 1840’s, when, as Emerson reported to Carlyle, “Not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his pocket.” If the Beats are “way out” the transcendentalists were there ahead of them, less licentiously but not less flamboyantly.
Thoreau (an important figure for the Beats) is the ideal subversive. He not only writes but acts out in hyperbolic terms his criticism of the Enemy’s corruption; he both states and is civil disobedience. Then there is Hawthorne, a disputed figure, admittedly, but even by D. H. Lawrence’s reading a subversive in disguise; Melville, ambiguous but more certainly a subversive; Whitman, the spiritual father who all but overwhelms Allen Ginsberg, and the Twain of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the fatherhood of Kerouac’s On The Road. The Enemy’s reaction to Twain’s masterpiece, long ago expressed in the Boston Transcript, has a familiar ring today: the Public Library committee decided to exclude the book because it was “rough, coarse and inelegant, dealing with a series of experiences not elevating.., being more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people.”
But it is in our own century that the subversive tradition has proliferated. For nearly two generations now the American writer has been distinguished by his dissatisfaction with the shape and aims of society. This is apparent enough in London, Dreiser, Anderson, O’Neill, Odets, Eliot, Wolfe, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, Nathan and Mencken, many of whom society has already admitted into the family library. The dissatisfaction—or subversiveness—is even more marked, because in contexts more immediate to us, in writers like Hemingway, Steinbeck, Miller, West, Mailer, Salinger, Wright, Algren, Vidal, Bowles and Saroyan. At present, all writers of value, says Kenneth Rexroth in an apologia for the Beat generation writers, agree on the “diagnosis of an absolute corruption.” The statement is defensible only if we allow Mr. Rexroth to pick the valued writers, but at least it puts the emphasis where it belongs.
The fact is that the writer is by nature the critic of the society of “intelligent and respectable people.” He and that society are locked in a dialectic. The dialectic sometimes proceeds on moderate terms, particularly when there is no question of the writer’s important position within society or when he speaks for a socially valued elite. But in America, and especially in the twentieth century, this dialectic has been carried on in hyperbolic terms: the extreme positions that society takes have been countered by the writer’s extreme positions.
Thus Dreiser’s remorseless realism counters the daydream of an acquisitive paradise; Mencken’s irreverent mockery counters the stultification that comes from worshipping false gods; Wolfe’s restless, romantic search for the meaning of America counters the naive and dangerous clarity with which a business society tries to define America; Hemingway’s tight-lipped heroics counter the attempt to end heroism by organization; Salinger’s and Capote’s sentimental sympathy for the misfit and the outcast counters the callousness that goes with conformity and respectability; e. e. cummings’ anarchism counters the growing conviction (to reverse Emerson’s phrase) of the insufficiency of the private man; and Miller’s and Kerouac’s irrationalism counters the positivism of a society huddled desperately around its nuclear experts.
To recognize this is not necessarily to accept as infallible the diagnosis of society’s evils expressed or implied in these writers. Nor is it to demand of them, as a criterion of value, a workable social program, which, if you could find it at all, might only reflect a political, economic and social virginity. The point is that such direction and order as society has depends upon all the dialectic tensions within it, and so far as this argument between the writer and society is concerned the important thing is neither position taken separately but the two together. Each is with respect to the other a control (though by no means a Hegelian guarantee) against potentially destructive excesses.
Thus, for instance, the corruption of society drove Twain to attack it, but his awareness of society’s opposition (which was also a demand) freed him from the fear of a nihilistic strain in his own personality which could have been destructive to his artistic effort. One can even say (contra Van Wyck Brooks) that the pressure of society forced Twain to measure it by its own professed Christian standards more severely than he would otherwise have been inclined to, which was exactly what his book and society needed. Completely liberated from the tension of this conflict between Twain and society, Huck Finn would have little value, morally, socially or artistically.
The trouble is that in proportion as the terms of this dialectic have become extreme, the word “society” in literary circles has come to mean that part of society that is insensitive or hostile to the values of the writer; and the writer, taking his synecdoche literally, has often imagined himself as a thorough-going outsider. This throws an emphasis on the heroic adventure of writing and makes it possible for beginners and second- stringers, who do not pay enough attention to their proper business, to do a good deal of swaggering and posing as they equate literature with opposition to orthodoxy. It also makes it possible to forget the point Twain’s great story dramatizes: that the important moral and social function of writers in the subversive tradition has been to counter the corruption of the whole of which they are articulate parts. That, like Twain and Fitzgerald, they have so often found the corruption to be within themselves only gives their statement of it authenticity and drama.
All of this is true of the Beat generation writers. No matter how completely they try to cut themselves off, they remain a critically engaged part of society, though the directness and value of their engagement may be less than that of many of their subversive predecessors. One cannot read Holmes, Kerouac, Corso, Ferlinghetti or Ginsberg without realizing that their interest, even to themselves, is always in relation to the society that contains them. They depend upon the city, the physical symbol of society, to exacerbate in them the pearl of beatness.
The inarticulate hipster who feels that a violent attachment to the values of society is square dramatizes by the attitudes he assumes a rebuke of society. But the articulate hipster with his fundamental assumption of society’s corruption is even more plainly engaged. Even stylistically he depends upon the literature of the square world, the rhythms and patterns of which he cannot get out of his head. Kerouac’s spontaneous prose depends for its effect upon traditional prose, just as Wordsworth’s “language really used by men” depended for its effect upon the poetic diction he was trying hard not to write. To recognize this is not necessarily to invalidate Kerouac’s prose or Wordsworth’s verse, but simply to recognize that in matters of style, as in all other matters, no man is an island.
The Beat writers have an at least functional awareness that they are a part of society that is countered and to an extent controlled by another part. Like Twain they have a kind of subconscious expectation that the rest of society will ultimately keep them from destructive excess, even though they may as individuals destroy themselves. On the other hand, society has a similar expectation: that critics of this sort ideally, granted, more responsible critics than these—will protect it from its excesses. For all the indignation the Beat writers have aroused, I think it must be admitted that the general reading public is remarkably permissive towards them, as it has learned to be towards all writers in the subversive tradition—as if it is a part of a developing national awareness of that tradition’s function as the hyper-sensitive, if often quite fantastic, conscience of America. This is indicated in the number of twentieth century writers now generally accepted as part of the mainstream of American literature, who when they first appeared seemed shockingly outside it.
In a pluralist society such as ours there are, of course, all sorts of tensions: regional, racial, economic, political and religious. The potential for turmoil is tremendous. What stands against it is whatever we hold in common as Americans, and much of this we are not aware of, since it is expressed in patterns of conduct that have become habitual. We are very little aware, for instance, of the extent to which we have protected ourselves by a general, if mainly implicit, agreement not to court turmoil by divisive action. The result is that the very considerable degree of harmony we live in has at its base a dangerously negative and apprehensive element, and that a great deal of the dialectical interchange that is necessary for the health of society is suppressed.
This fear of dissension helps to explain the dearth of popular satire (why, for instance, T.V. loads up on horse opera and retires Sid Caesar to the guest-star pool), but it also helps to explain the extreme attitudes of subversive writers like the Beatniks, who are in a sense forced to bear more than their fair share of the dialectic burden. Society, possibly because of its uneasy conscience, fails to engage itself effectively with such opposition; perhaps it is best to say that it dares not for fear of coming face to face with its deviation from the American Dream.
It would follow, I think, that until society releases its normal interplay of criticism the subversive tradition in literature will continue to take up (will be even forced by society to take up) the extreme positions of such works as Miller’s The Air Conditioned Nightmare, West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, Algren’s A Walk on the Wild Side or Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. The solution for society is not to take subversive writers to its bosom, hoping that they will settle down to contented sequels of Executive Suite. The solution is to engage seriously with them in the act of criticism.
Such an engagement would assume that the Beat writers merit no preferred treatment simply because of their tradition-sanctioned subversiveness; and it would assume that they must prove themselves as writers and not expect to get by on novelty, shock-effect or sublime intentions. As a matter of fact, Beat writing suffers as literature because of its unhappy conviction that it is impossible to “make,” in the traditional artist’s sense, without corrupting. Hence the Beat writers’ violent and surrealist dislike of the New Critics and the university poets. The poet is defined as prophet or visionary; he is a seer more than a maker; the sign of his authentic vision is the quality of unchecked outpour, of rhapsodic, jazz-inspired improvisation in his utterance. He is the poet as inspired madman. Hence the importance of Kerouac’s hero, Dean Moriarty, whose chaotic, rhapsodic life is itself a Beat poem.
The appeal of the Beat writers is, however, bound up with their visionary, rhapsodic concept of the poet. In their enthusiastic acceptance of the visionary and spiritual element in life, in their indiscriminate assertion that all is holy—that we are all, as Kerouac says, angels even if we do not know it, in their passionate concern with the individual and their rejection of all that inhibits his free development, in their unqualified commitment to experience, they underline traditionally sacred American patterns of thought and action.
But at the same time, by isolating and dramatizing to the hilt these patterns, they can force us to reexamine some familiar subversive themes at a moment in our history when we most need to. We are at a point when we can least afford to be uncertain about the role of intellect, about the right relation of the individual to society, about the nature of man, about the extent of our involvement with all men everywhere. Ginsberg’s “Howl” is a very American poem and Kerouac’s On the Road is a very American novel. By this I do not mean that they are for that reason either good or bad as literature, but simply that they give us back as in a distorting mirror the anarchism and antinomianism, the dream of utopian freedom and innocence to be found in a commitment to instinct and feeling, that have always been elements in American culture; and which, if they are not consciously confronted and controlled, will, as they have often in the past, muddle our efforts to live effectively as a society in a complex world.
Dean Moriarty may strike one as the silliest holy fool in all literature. Nevertheless, he is a recognizable caricature of an image in the American heart as he rushes madly about the country, shirking all social obligations, trying passionately to dig everyone and everything, convinced that if he goes fast enough and has enough violent experiences the great ultimate secret will be laid bare to him. Kerouac’s subversive service is to hold up that image while we measure ourselves against it.
