Those Beats!

Imagine me in 1959: I was 22 years old, living in Nebraska where I’d lived virtually all of my life, renting my first apartment, starting to earn my living by writing headlines for society-page stories on the Lincoln (Neb.) Evening Journal, nursing wounds received from discovering that I was not going to get married and live happily every after like my mother and Cinderella. I was a member of the so-called Silent Generation, and silent many of us were, back in the fifties, in the aftermath of Joe McCarthy and the Korean War. Speechless. A strange condition for a woman who aspired to be a writer. I had trained in journalism and creative writing at the University of Nebraska, worked as a political reporter on the school newspaper, and followed, as a discipline, Joseph Conrad’s adage that a writer, above all else, must make a reader see. I practiced the fine art of observation, posting myself on the edge of events and mentally translating images into words: that, and eating and fucking, were my extra-curricular preoccupations. I was terribly distraught that I was still living in Nebraska. The state, at that time, seemed to me to be the epitome of hypocrisy and sterile living. Behind the habitual Midwestern smile lurked, I believed, a judgment as harsh as that of the Bible-belt Jehovah on which it was based. Living seemed largely a question of minding your P’s and Q’s, something I was not particularly adept at. Something I resented.

Then chance, or fate or serendipity dropped Jack Kerouac’s On the Road into my hands. I read the book avidly, its words pouring directly into my veins as fast as they must have flowed out of Kerouac’s fingers: nonstop onto an unbroken roll of United Press teletype paper. I read so rapidly I didn’t half understand Kerouac’s words, but something of the life being described became comprehensible to me, foreign as it was to the young woman who’d been born and bred in the conservative Midwest. Yeow! His words shot through me like a fusillade. I was undone, a changed person. Immediately I bought a straw-covered bottle of Chianti, a candle, and a pad of paper. Then, slightly inebriated, I began to write by candlelight, scribbling words onto paper as fast as my hand could compose, following instinctively Kerouac’s model of Spontaneous Prose. My University classes were forgotten. The novel liberated me as it did many others of my generation. For the first time since I began to write in 1948, I felt free to say anything I wanted to. Kerouac obviously felt free to; why shouldn’t I? For I, in those blissfully naïve pre-feminist days, felt the equal of any man.

* * *

But not even Kerouac prepared me for Allen Ginsberg. The opening lines of Ginsberg’s “Howl” exploded in my brain like a fireball. Again, the material was completely foreign: I’d never heard of a fix. But on another level, the words struck home: hadn’t I seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by conformity? Hadn’t I howled through black streets at dawn? Certainly I knew the dark night of the soul he seemed to be describing.

When I encountered Moloch, I had to look him up to discover that he was a deity to whom parents sacrificed children. The ensuing lines begat a kind of terror in me, as I fell further under the spell of Ginsberg’s chanting, his rhythmic repetitions. Reading him was like listening to music, utterly satisfying on some sensual level. By the last refrain, I was mesmerized. I didn’t know who Carl Solomon was to him, but on some other, deeper level, I knew! I knew! The electricity flowed to me; I was dazzled.

“It’s the Holy Ghost comes through you” when you write, wrote Kerouac. Now, more than ever, I knew what he meant. I released myself to my own Holy Spirit, which seemed to exist in me although I was no longer a Christian. And the impulse to write, with me since I was eleven, took on a more tangible form, became more heated, moved in me and through me in ways I could never have foreseen. I decided to trust it completely.

Ginsberg worked on me not only as a writer; he appealed to me on a human level as well. Much as I had been influenced by Kerouac, I couldn’t imagine ever wanting to meet him. I knew his kind: either we’d go to bed or I’d be ignored, perhaps even put down. But Ginsberg was another case. For one thing, he was homosexual, so that allowed the possibility of sexual interaction to be set aside. For another, he seemed to be accessible, as I found, indeed, he was.

These two excerpts published in slightly different form in “Those beats!” The 60s without Apology, University of Minnesota Press.