On Being A Bit Beat (Some Notes for an Article)

Bringing it all back home,

with Moroccan gunibri

My wife has been making some notes for a future article, based on some of the things I told her (and which I had drawn from my school sixth-form essay on the Beat poets):

"The search for freedom and self-knowledge through emotional spontaneity, restless (almost nomadic) travelling and openness to new experience does not belong exclusively to the 'seeking generation' that came to be known as the Beats in the 1950's; nor does the love of improvisation, jazz, blues or 'bop' in all its artistic manifestations".

  Hitchhiker's gun-bunker "hotel", Gibraltar

The essence of the beat philosophy of life, that questing 'nakedness of soul' and liberating desire to escape from conformity is as alive and relevant today as it’s ever been. Each decade since the Fifties has brought new perspectives and insights and reinforced the Beats’ messages about the need to refuse to accept censorship or self-censorship and about refusing to be limited by formal structures or conventions.

 In Big Sur, 1978

In August 1998, we were back in Big Sur, California, conscious of its connections with Jack Kerouac and Henry Miller. We have often felt a sense of place and association with Kerouac - whether in Tangier, Greenwich Village, Columbia University, San Francisco, Lowell or Big Sur. We had the pleasure of meeting and talking to Carolyn Cassady, widow of Neal Cassady, the hero of On the Road in Uppsala, Sweden, in May 2004. She had been living near Bracknell in England since 1983, and has written a fascinating account of “My Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg” in Off the Road (Penguin Books, 1991).

Tangier ca 1962

From two articles of the time

Beat Poetry at Izzy Young's Folklore Centrum, Stockholm

DKT (centre) Corfu, 1967/68

DKT, California

Lowell

From a school essay on the Beats:

How was it that Kerouac defined the origins of the word “Beat” in the New York Times Magazine? “More than mere weariness, it implies the feeling of having been used, of being raw. It involves a sort of nakedness of mind, and ultimately, of soul; a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness.”

When he visited London one Spring, unshaven, with a pack on his back and just fifteen bob in his pocket, looking “like a bum”, Jack Kerouac was to see Victoria Station, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Buckingham Palace, the Mall, the Strand, Trafalgar Square, Fleet Street, Buckingham Gate, Chelsea, Piccadilly, the British Museum, the Old Vic and the King Lud pub (see Lonesome Traveller, “Big Trip to Europe”, 1960). Apart from the countryside (seen mostly from the train), he seems to have noted the city’s traffic, fumes and fog. But he was obviously excited by the thought of England and savoured the sceptered isle, the fog of “real old London”, the look of English women, the Blakean lambs in the meadows, the Teddy Boys. “Paris is a woman but London is an independent man puffing his pipe in a pub”, he writes.

'Once, when my husband was still at school' (notes my wife), 'he wrote to complain about a poem printed in some other school’s magazine, a Mexico City Blues chorus that a pupil had clearly plagiarised from Jack Kerouac, and signed as his own work'. But Jack wouldn’t have cared:

“Take a chorus, it’s free! Blow one for me!
You don’t know how far that sky go.”

Two more great lines by Jack (a good epitaph?):

“When rock becomes air
I will be there”.

(Mexico City Blues, 231st Chorus).


The paradox remains that, long before he died, Kerouac had renounced "the road" and his lifestyle was not in the least bit "Beat", as we had come to understand the term he himself invented or defined.

Good website:  http://www.jackkerouac.com

The Beats Abroad

The Beats I met

Were really beat,

Not acting beat-

They'd faced defeat

In jail, survived,

Kept low,

Jumped bail,

Been on the run,

Far from the Hole-

Hid out with saints

And Spanish gypsies;
Sought sanctuary -
Found peace in Greece.

JP, 1967.