Foreword

The phrase "Beat generation" arose out of a specific conversation between Jack Kerouac and John Clellon Holmes in 1948. They were discussing the nature of generations, recollecting the glamour of the Lost Generation, and Kerouac said, "Ah, this is nothing but a beat generation." They talked about whether it was a "found generation" (as Kerouac sometimes called it), an "angelic generation," or some other epithet. But Kerouac waved away the question and said beat generation—not meaning to name the generation, but to unname it.

John Clellon Holmes's celebrated article in late 1952 in the New York Times Magazine carried the headline title "This Is the Beat Generation." That caught the public eye. Then Kerouac anonymously published a fragment of On the Road called "Jazz of the Beat Generation," and that reinforced the curiously poetic phrase. So that's the early history of the term.

Herbert Huncke, author of The Evening Sun Turned Crimson, and friend of Kerouac, Burroughs, and others of that literary circle from the forties, introduced them to what was then known as "hip language." In that context, the word "beat" is a carnival, "subterranean" (subcultural) term—a term much used then in Times Square: "Man, I'm beat," meaning without money and without a place to stay. It could also refer to those "who walked all night with shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steam heat and opium" (Howl). Or the word would be used as in conversation: "Would you like to go to the Bronx Zoo?" "Nah, man, I'm too 'beat,' I was up all night." So, the original street usage meant exhausted, at the bottom of the world, looking up or out, sleepless, wide-eyed, perceptive, rejected by society, on your own, streetwise. Or, as it once implied, "beat" meant finished, completed, in the dark night of the soul or in the cloud of unknowing. It could mean open, as in the Whitmanesque sense of "openness," equivalent to humility. So "beat" was interpreted in various circles to mean emptied out, exhausted, and at the same time wide-open and receptive to vision.

A third meaning of "beat," as in beatific, was publicly articulated in 1959 by Kerouac, to counteract the abuse of the term in the media (where it was being interpreted as meaning "beaten completely," a "loser," without the aspect of humble intelligence, or of "beat" as "the beat of drums" and "the beat goes on"—all varying mistakes of interpretation or etymology). Kerouac (in various interviews and lectures) was trying to indicate the correct sense of the word by pointing out its connection to words like "beatitude" and "beatific"—the necessary beatness or darkness that precedes opening up to light, egolessness, giving room for religious illumination.

A fourth meaning that accumulated around the word is found in the phrase "Beat generation literary movement." This phrase referred to a group of friends who had worked together on poetry, prose, and cultural conscience from the mid-forties until the term became popular nationally in the late fifties. The group consisted of Kerouac, Neal Cassady (Kerouac's prototype hero of On the Road), William Burroughs, Herbert Huncke, John Clellon Holmes (author of Go, The Horn, and other books), and myself. We met Carl Solomon and Philip Lamantia in 1948, encountered Gregory Corso in 1950, and first saw Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter Orlovsky in 1954.

By the mid-fifties, this smaller circle—through natural affinity of modes of thought, literary style, or planetary perspective—was augmented in friendship and literary endeavor by a number of writers in San Francisco, including Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and by 1958 some other powerful but lesser-known poets, such as Bob Kaufman, Jack Micheline, and Ray Bremser, and the better-known black poet LeRoi Jones. All of us accepted the term "beat" at one time or another, humorously or seriously, but sympathetically, and were included in a survey of Beat manners, morals, and literature by Life magazine in a lead article in 1959 by Paul O'Neil, and by the journalist Alfred Aronwitz in a twelve-part series entitled "The Beat Generation" in the New York Post.

By the mid-fifties a sense of some mutual trust and interest was developed with Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch as well as with Robert Creeley and other alumni of Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Of that literary circle, Kerouac, Whalen, Snyder, poets Lew Welch, Diane di Prima, Joanne Kyger, and Orlovsky, as well as myself and others were interested in meditation and Buddhism. (A discussion of the relationship between Buddhism and the Beat generation can be found in a scholarly survey of the evolution of Buddhism in America, How the Swans Came to the Lake, by Rick Fields.)

The fifth meaning of the phrase "Beat generation" refers to the broader influence of literary and artistic activities of poets, filmmakers, painters, writers, and novelists who were working in concert in anthologies, publishing houses, independent filmmaking, and other media. These groups refreshed the long-lived bohemian cultural tradition in America. Among major interactive figures were: in film and still photography, Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie; in music, David Amram; in painting, Larry Rivers; in poetry and publishing, Cid Corman, Jonathan Williams, Don Allen, Barney Rosset, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. This energy fell out into the youth movement of the day, which was growing, and was absorbed by the mass and middle-class culture of the late fifties and early sixties.

Some essential ideals of the original artistic movement can be traced clearly in these poets' writings, and continued intergenerational interest decade after decade has been magnetized by a number of consistent themes which might be summarized as follows: An inquisitiveness into the nature of consciousness, leading to acquaintance with Eastern thought, meditation practice, art as extension or manifestation of exploration of the texture of consciousness, spiritual liberation as a result. This led toward sexual liberation, particularly gay liberation, which historically had a part in catalyzing women's lib and black lib. A tolerant nontheistic view developed out of exploring the texture of consciousness, thus cosmic anti-fascism, a peaceable nonviolent approach to politics, multiculturalism, the absorption of black culture into mainstream literature and music, as, for example, Kerouac's spontaneous "bop prosody" or the odd identity of the group of poets later called the Beat generation: Burroughs, white Protestant; Kerouac, American Indian and Breton; Corso, Italian Catholic; myself, Jewish radical; Orlovsky, White Russian; Gary Snyder, Scotch-German; Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Italian, Continental, Sorbonne-educated; Philip Lamentia, Italian authentic Surrealist; Michael McClure, Mid-west U.S. Scotch; Bob Kaufman, Surrealistic African-American; LeRoi Jones, Black Powerful, among others. So art's viewed as sacred practice, with sacramental approach to each other as characters. The color of candor emerges with good humor and as inadvertent spontaneous frankness, unpremeditated directness in life and in art, the end of secrecy and paranoia that runs beneath macho sexual politics and demagoguery all the way up through CIA-KGB and nuclear machinations. There's further realization we can destroy the human residence on the planet if we don't trust and exercise our better natures, thus an end to nineteenth-century Marxist-Capitalist myth of progress with expansionist imperial rivalry.

Our interest in psychedelic substances as educational tools, particularly marijuana, mushrooms, and LSD, led to a more realistic approach to drug laws, recognizing that tobacco and alcohol are physically more destructive than all other drugs except cocaine. Thus the junk problem should be decriminalized and medicalized, and hemp, now a problem, should be transformed into an asset for the failing family farm to help reinhabit the countryside and provide some sustainable product (cloth, rope, et al.) as alternative to plastic consciousness.

And finally, appreciation of eros, sacramental approach to sexual joy. Those are the main themes that have run through the art and poetry and prose of the writers I mentioned from the very beginning in the forties through the public poetry readings that surfaced in the mid-fifties into common consciousness. Many of these values have entered mainstream thought—e.g., ecology, grass, gay lib, multiculturalism—but haven't seen fruition in government behavior, so that now we have more folk in our prisons or under government surveillance than any country West or East.

This "Beat generation" or "sixties" tolerant worldview provoked an intoxicated right wing to go into "Denial" (as in AA terminology) of reality, and reinforced its codependency with repressive laws, incipient police state, death-penalty demagoguery, sex demagoguery, art censorship, fundamentalist monotheist televangelist quasi-fascist wrath, racism, and homophobia. This counterreaction seems a by-product of the further gulf between the rich and poor classes, growth of a massive abused underclass, increased power and luxury for the rich who control politics and their minions in the media. Prescription: more art, meditation, lifestyles of relative penury, avoidance of conspicuous consumption that's burning down the planet.

I think younger generations have been attracted by the exuberance, libertarian optimism, erotic humor, frankness, continuous energy, invention, and collaborative amity of these poets and singers. We had a great job to do, and we're doing it, trying to save and heal the spirit of America.

ALLEN GINSBERG
1996