What It Is—Whence It Came

The term Beat Generation is an apt coinage to characterize the angry, roving youngsters whom writers like Kerouac have caught in print. But beat is a national phenomenon which knows no barriers of age—or economic or social status. From the dope-addicted frigid cat to the baby-faced imitator wistfully wishing he were vicious, the beat attitude infiltrates all levels of our society. It is examined here by three writers: Herbert Gold analyzes it; Sam Boal takes us to an upper-class beat party in New York; Noel Clad shows us the spiritual glaciation of San Francisco's beatville, a rarefied region of nothing going nowhere, coolly.

IN Greenwich Village a dreamy young beggar in a tattered Ivy League summer suit and a buttondown collar with both buttons missing turns on an uptown couple to ask, "Gimme a quarter for a Cadillac, hey?"

In New Orleans a pretty little department store model approaches a man at a party, takes off her sweater, then her bra, and says, "Let's ball, dig,"—by which she means, Let's try a new far-out sound on the hi-fi. If he reaches out to touch anything but the tone arm, she will say, "You're through, frantic boy. You are sawed off." He disappears from future guest lists.

In Denver a gaggle of young lads, not knowing what to do on a warm spring evening, steal a car each, drive them to the other side of town, park, steal a few more, drive back to the starting point, park, and then settle down to giggle about the confusion of the owners and the police. Silence. Return of boredom. Yawn. Finally one says softly, "Pops, why didn't we think of picking up on some chicks?"

In St. Louis a girl and her friend, who used to be a drummer with a well-known quintet, both of them suffering withdrawal symptoms—he has been working to support their habits by pimping for the girl—beg an old pal to put them up with bed and fridge for a few days. While the friend is away at work, they telephone a friend in San Francisco, give him the bit, and after gassing awhile, suggest that they both just keep the connection and leave the telephones off the hook. Their friend won't get the bill until they are gone, far gone. Why do this to him? "He's square, so square, man."

In Detroit a hi-fi engineer clucks sympathetically at the plight of a young couple (continued on page 84)Beat/what it is(contined from page 20) in college. It's true love, but they have no place to go. The back seat of a car is for puppy love and sprained backs. OK, they can use his apartment. What they don't know is that there is a microphone concealed in the mattress. Their friend invites them to a party where he plays the tape before strangers.

In San Francisco a group of young poets announces Religious Poetry Night, attracting a hall full of the plump, mournful ladies (purple hats, veils, heaving freckled bosoms) who adore such things. The first poet gets up to read. "C——— S—————!" he shrieks at the audience.

On State Street in Chicago a frozen-faced grifter stops a passer-by, pushing out his hand and murmuring, "What you say, pop? Give me a piece of skin."

"I'm sorry, I don't know you."

"I don't know you either, man, but you like to have a party?" He slides off and away with a passive dreamy girlish look which has nothing sweet about it: it plots impossible meanness, anything to make him feel something. He doesn't know anybody, and says "man" to everybody because he can't be bothered remembering names.

In midtown Manhattan a writer, Jack Kerouac, prepares for his interview on TV. "We're beat, man," he says. "Beat means beatific, it means you get the beat, it means something. I invented it." For the television audience he announces, "We love everything, Billy Graham, the Big Ten, rock and roll, Zen, apple pie, Eisenhower—we dig it all. We're in the vanguard of the new religion." Jack Kerouac likes to write of Charlie Parker as God and himself as the Prophet.

These are hipsters.

Who is the hipster, what is it? The pure beast is as hard to track as the pure "student" or "midwesterner," but let us follow the spoor of history and symptoms. We will probably find that "pure hipster" is a phrase like "100% American"—an unstable compound with an indefinite content.

Hipsterism began in a complex effort of the Negro to escape his imposed role of happy-go-lucky animal. A few highly self-conscious urban Negro men sought to imitate "white" diffidence, or coolness, or beatness. They developed a style which was both a criticism of their Bible-shouting and jazz-loving parents and a parody of the detached, uninvolved city ofays. They improvised on an unstated theme—like bop—and if you weren't with it, with it and for it, you heard nothing but jangle. The horn rims of the intellectual came to be known as bop glasses. They blew fine abstractions. The joke was a good one.

Then their white friends took up the fashion, complicating the joke by parodying a parody of themselves. Cool music was the artistic expression of this hypertensive chill. However, in order to keep from dancing, keep from shouting, keep from feeling, a further help was needed and it was found in heroin. Some of the earlier hot musicians had used marijuana, many drank; these were springs toward jumping high in a group. There was a strong prejudice against the cats who went on junk, expressed in the superstition that you might mainline a fatal bubble of air into your veins. Uh-uh, no baby, they said: and in practice they found that the junkie blew lousy drum or horn, no matter what he thought he was blowing.

The new generation preferred supercelestial private music, however. Heroin dissolves the group and each man flies alone all the way to Barbados. And without flapping his arms.

Many other young Americans felt beat, wanted to keep cool, and so into the arms of the first hipster society, that still unravished bride of bop quietness, ran three angry herds: 1. Mainstreet thugs with their sideburns, their cycles, and their jeans; 2. college kids and a few literary chappies, finding in the addict's cool stance an expression of the frustration of fluid-drive lives in which the juicebox had gone dry; and 3. Upper Bohemia, tired of Van Gogh, Italian movies, charades, and sex, and so ready to try anti-art, anti-sex, anti-frantic non-movement. These latter comprise the Madison Avenue hippies, models who strip merely to express their hatred of fashion magazines, admen and lawyers who marry call girls, a host of Ivy League symbol-manipulators, bloated with money and debt, pink with General Electric sun tans and shame, who express their benzedrine blues by wigging at night near a blasting rig. "Well, you know ... Albert Schweitzer doesn't make me climb the wall ... Is it true he eloped with Kim Novak?"

"Everyone says," remarks the pretty girl who seeks to please, "that I'm exceptionally fastidious, but would you like me to do something nasty for you? I really wouldn't mind. My name is Grape Nuts, what's yours?"

Let us now move in closer to the hipster's harried heart. When the hipster makes it with a girl, he avoids admitting that he likes her. He keeps cool. He asks her to do the work, and his ambition is to think about nothing, zero, strictly from nadaville, while she plays bouncy-bouncy on him. When the hipster makes it with boys, it's not because he's a homosexual and cares for it—it's for money, a ride home, pass the time of night while waiting for the band to come back on. When the hipster steals a car, he doesn't keep it or sell it; he hides it where the squares will have trouble finding it, and writes "Mort à Louis A" in soap on the windshield. When the hipster digs music, Proust, or religion, it's to talk over, it's to carry around in his jeans, it's to hit his buddies with; it makes no sense or feeling, and the weirder it is, the cooler the kick.

In other words, the hipster is a spectacular instance of the flight from emotion. He is like a sick refrigerator, laboring with tremendous violence, noise and heat, and all for one purpose—to keep cool. This refrigerator is powered by crime without economic need; an editor to one of the hipster writers complains, "Jeez, when I slept on park benches and boosted from the A & P, I did it because I had to. My kick was that I needed sleep and food. I didn't do it to tell people about." The refrigerator is powered by sex without passion; the sole passion is for the murder of feeling, the extinguishing of the jitters. The refrigerator is powered by religion without faith; the hipster teases himself toward the black battiness of oblivion, and all the vital refreshment which religion has given the mystics of the past is a distraction from the lovely stupor he craves. Unlike Onan, who spilled his seed upon the ground, the hipster spills his brains and calls it piety. He also wears music, art and religion as a kind of badge for identification. Instead of the secret handshake which got him into Uncle Don's Boys' Club or the Orphan Annie Secret Society, he now says, "You dig the Bird? Proust? Zen?"

"I'm hip," says his friend. This phrase means: No need to talk. No more discussion. I'm with you. I got you. Cool. In. Bye-bye.

The language of hipsterism is a means toward non-communication, a signal for silence. The truest lingo is narcotics, because this more than anything gives Little Boy Beat what he wants—release from imagination and the body—an illusion not of omnipotence, as we are sometimes told, but of a timeless browsing in eternity. In other words, a cool simulation of death. The sentimental and sensational talk about drugs producing sex maniacs is nonsense. The man on a habit needs nothing more than his fix. Quiet, quiet. He may perform terrible violence to get the drug, but not sex: pleasure has nothing to do with the dreamy high of heroin. The pale soft face of the addict, with his smudged passive eyes and his drooping mouth, is almost ladylike in its sweetness. It has no fight or love in it.

Heroin enables the hipster to stand guard over his soul, dreaming of cool nothing, beautiful beat nothing, while his feet go ratatat and he strokes a switchblade, a hand, or a copy of Swann's Way. Needless to say, the proto-and quasi-hipsters do not usually go all the way to the perfection of heroin.

The current fad for the hipster—his language, manners and attitudes—indicates that he is, as that fearful phrase goes, "no isolated phenomenon." Jack Kerouac proclaimed, "Even the Ivy League is going hip." Emerging out of bop, narcotics, and the subtle rebellion of the Negro against the charge of being "happy, excitable, emotional," the hipster takes one of his chief public models from that most authentic American source, the movies. He ignores the injunction of the pious 13th Century moralist, John of Garland, who wrote: "Be not a fornicator, O Student! Stand and sit upright, do not scratch thyself!" The Stanislavsky hipsters scratch as if their soul's unease were actually juicy fleas, slouch as if leaning to catch Marlon's word from earth or James' from vaulted heaven. The movie shadow of Dean or the Brando of The Wild One is a part of the image of the hipster, whether he be the smooth pink Ivy League metahipster, staring at himself in the mirror of one of those shops where they apparently do operations to remove the bones from men's shoulders, or the long-chinned hairy proto-hipster with a girl jiggling on the behind seat of his Harley-Davidson "74." In many theatres where The Wild One played, there was a lineup afterwards in the men's room, the cyclists in their nail-studded black jackets scowling with adoration into the mirror as they rehearsed their public roles. Each man was Brando, distant and violent. Each man was Marlon, cool and beat. They stood in a row without shame, almost without vanity (so pure it was), like neophytes for sacrifice in their penitential leather, silver trim, side-burns, and duck-ass haircuts. Scratch not, O Hipster!

And so the hipster's lines of communication spread from a four-bit movie-house in a small town of the midwest to the chic saloons of New York and the Coast. He reminds us of the teddyboys of England, the breaking-loose wild brats of defeated Japan, the existentialist zazous of Paris, tootling the petrified dixie they learned from old Beiderbecke records. His apologists, particularly the literary hipsters of San Francisco and New York, are fond of reaching back into history to invoke the criminal gods of French poetry—Rimbaud, who mysteriously vanished into Africa, Villon, who ended up dancing on the gallows, Genet, who is now a poet and play-wright hero of Paris after a career of thievery, blackmail, and male prostitution. The very important difference between the American literary hipster and his foreign models is that the great artist-criminals were true outcasts from society: they did not pick themselves up by the seat of their own pants and toss themselves out. They were driven by class differences and economic pressure. A few of the Americans have performed spectacularly—mostly in the loonybin; one even played William Tell with his wife and blew her head off—but these are individual troubles, not the product of any vast and windy guilt of society. Who ain't got personal troubles? I dig yours, man; but I got mine too.

In any case, the 1958 hipster is not the bold medieval troubadour prince of song and con, nor the romantic adventurer poet of later times, nor the angry driven Depression stiff: he is the true rebel without a cause. No, of course he has a cause—his charred self, but a self without connection or need. He is a reticent boyo with a yen for thuggery, a reluctant visitor to the affairs of men, a faintly girlish loiterer near the scenes of violence. If he can't be a big boom-boom hero in a war, like Gary Cooper, at least he can take the muffler off his rod, like Marlon. Mainly he is afflicted with the great triumvirate disease of the American male—Passivity, Anxiety, Boredom. Individualists without individuality, a sleepy brawl of knowing non-thinkers, the lonely crowd at its grumbling loneliest, the hipsters fall naturally to the absolute submission of a marriage to heroin. Like the submission to boredom in television and all the other substitutes for personal creativeness in American life, narcotics involve an abdication of good sense by men deprived of the will to make their own ways.

"I dig everything, man."

"What do you want to do now?"

"I don't know, man. Get some kicks somehow."

If the description of the hipster as "passive" strikes you as harsh, look up the dictionary definition of the word: "Med. Pertaining to certain morbid conditions characterized by deficient vitality and reaction."

The word hipster came in with bop, which is a way of keeping cool musically, at the same time as narcotics addiction burgeoned—a way of keeping cool sexually. The drug-taking hipster is not a sexual anarchist; he is a sexual zero, and heroin is his mama, papa, and someone in bed. (The pusher in A Hatful of Rain is called "Mother.") Not every quasi-hipster mainlines into the tattoo on his arm, of course, but the style of life is set by those who do. The coolest boys call each other "daddy-o," as if their passivity extends to thinking of every man as a potential guardian father. Of course, the traveling musician also cannot be bothered to remember names, so everyone is "man," "pops," "daddy-o." They worship the purple fantasy of torn-tee-shirted masculinity created by Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and others who have invented a new theatrical type—the male impersonator. Adorably brutal, stripped of the prime attributes of manliness—intelligence, purpose, control—they are the curvaceous Mae Wests of popular melodrama. Having died, James Dean and Charlie Parker are defined as immortal. Living and growing up a bit, Marlon Brando is a traitor to this myth of saintly suicide by sports car or heroin. They might have forgiven his giving up the bongos, but his receding hairline is a disgrace to the cause. The strong silent hero must also be weak and pretty.

One of the curious bypaths of hipsterism leads to their far-out religious camp. Jack Kerouac says, "We're in the vanguard of the new religion," which is a little like the monk in the story who claimed that he was the world champion for humility. They picked up on St. John of the Cross for a time, Catholic ritual, St. Francis of Assisi (they were St. Frantics); then they moved on toward Byzantine, Greek, and Orthodox fantasies, with ikons and incense; they made the Dostoievsky scene. In recent years some have taken to calling themselves Zen Hipsters, and Zen Buddhism has spread like the Asian flu, so that now you can open your fortune cookie in one of the real cool Chinese restaurants of San Francisco and find a slip of paper with the straight poop: "Dig that crazy Zen sukiyaki. Only a square eats Chinese food." Promiscuity in religion stands, like heroin, for despair, a feverish embracing of despair, a passive sinking into irrationality. Zen and other religions surely have their beauties, but the hipster dives through them like a side show acrobat through a paper hoop—into the same old icy water of self-distrust below. The religious activities of the hipsters cure their unease in the world the way dancing cheek to cheek cures halitosis.

No wonder the hipster says, "Nada, I'm beat—I'm right in there, see—I'm the most religious, the most humble—I'm swinging, man." He stammers because something is missing, a vital part, the central works. His soul, sense of meaning, individual dignity (call it how you like) has been excised as unnecessary by a civilization very often producing without good purpose. He feels that love is not love, work is not work, even protest is not protest anymore. On the consumer's assembly line, in the leisure-time sweatshop, he pieceworks that worst of all products of anxiety—boredom. This is the response of retreat from the cold inanities of his time payments, luxurious discomfort, dread of the successful future. Boredom is a corollary to anxiety. As the middle-class man now buys a brick for the new church (Does God need that basement bowling alley?), so the hipster tries to find himself in intuitions of meaning through the Anchor edition of Zen tales, or through some other fashionable interior decoration. Naturally he stammers, "Cool, mon, real cool." He wants to stop moving, jittering, flittering. He displays himself as exemplary because he has no wife, children, responsibilities, politics, work. The middle-class man both has and does not have these things. Who can call moving bits of paper a job? Most Americans are paper-movers. How is love of wife and children more than a social habit when a man feels qua man (not as husband or father) that he has no authority except in his own home?

When a man's house is his only castle, then he has no castle.

Both smugness and ambition are characteristics of human beings, not of animals, though rats and rabbits can be taught despair by repeated electric shocks. Faced by the threat of absolute manipulation, the hipster mobilizes himself for a last stand—and hops about the cage, twitching his tail, bumping the charged wires.

The cliché which tells us that Americans love Things, Possessions, does not go far enough. Americans also demand experiences of power, one way or the other, in person or out of the picture tube. This seems normal enough to be a condition of life, but not when the starved mirage of power crowds out the quietness which gives experience meaning and organizes a man to face his private issues of working, loving, having children, dying. Certain experiences lead away from rather than toward, and faster and faster we go: the experience does not help; we try wilder experience; this does not help; still more wild, wilder. The extreme of a flatulent submission to the mass media eventually stops all experience in its tracks, in the guise of giving perfect experiences which make it possible to carry on. Television as a medium of entertainment is not the villain any more than good whiskey is a villain; they can both be good friends. It is the bleared submission by depleted souls which destroys. Relaxation is one thing—sharing experience vicariously is a great experience to which the imagination entitles us. To be stunned is another matter entirely. Despair by electronic shock.

Sensitive to all this, the hipster has decided to quit—resign—have no more of it. Instead of being part of a mass audience before the picture tubes, he becomes an audience of one before the hypo. He gives up on the issue of being human in society. He decides that the problem does not exist for him. He disaffiliates. The man who cares is now derided for being "frantic."

But of course the hipster is still a part of a bewildered America in which Tab Hunter confides to an interviewer that he can only sleep with his Teddy bear in bed with him. The hipster is victim of the most hopeless condition of slavery—the slave who does not know that he is a slave and is proud of his slavery, calling it "freedom." Incurable? Nearly. The posture of negation and passivity thinks it is religion and rebellion; instead it is a mob phenomenon. These Nihilists sail dreamy down the Nile of throughway America, spending many a sleepless day figuring out something real cool to do at night, and end up trying to convince themselves, as Jack Kerouac does, that Charlie Parker is God. Kerouac's birdmen in his novel, On the Road, search for coolness within their beatness, hipness within their jeans-and-dirty-hair dream of quickies with marvelous girls (who also wear dirty hair and jeans). Occasionally, as in the Kerouac variety of superfrantic sub-hipster, sex takes the place of dope. This is a kind of sex which also takes the place of sex. The way some men gloat over possessions, he keeps score of his hero's erotic blitzes, forgetting that—if you are the trooper who uses sex as a weapon—every notch in a weapon weakens the weapon.

The hipster is a street-corner, bar, and partying phenomenon, a creature of mobs. One Rimbaud may be a genius; a crowd of them is a fad. An earlier fad for psychoanalysis had this in favor of it: Freud believed in the prime value of emotions, but in a necessary control by the intelligence. In other words, he valued society despite the discontents of civilization. The hipster gives up society, gives up intelligence, and thinks he is doing this in favor of the emotions; but he has already, without making a decision about them, let his feelings seep away through a leaky personality. What is left is a spasmodic jerk, though some of the individual spokesmen also have vivacious talent. No wonder that the madhouse is seen as the refuge of their "best minds." Catatonia, here we come.

These shrill moonbirds turn out to be rigid earth satellites, rocketed by bureaucrats beyond their ken into the air of reality, where they circle in a pattern determined without choice, give out a diminishing signal, draw to earth and burn, crumble, vanish.

When Yeats looked into the future to find a terrible savior, an evolution up from animality into something strange and wonderful:

What rough beast, its hour come round at last.

Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

—he did not mean James Dean. Perhaps, as they claim, the tunneling hipster's avoidance of feeling can lead to a new honesty of emotion. Perhaps a ground hog might someday learn to fly, but man O man, that will be one strange bird.