The Beats Revisited

On the Road is now 50 years old, so of course there are new editions and all sorts of critical reappraisals that tell us what everybody already knows: sometimes the Beats are good, and sometimes you’re better off watching the Simpsons episode with Ned Flanders’ parents. The real question is how we can cash in.

But first, since my previous columns have generated literally fours of questions, I will explain the name “Columbia Babylon.” Clearly the best references can only be deciphered by an elite circle—in this case a few undoubtedly well-adjusted film students and middle-aged gay men with Myrna Loy posters all over their studio apartments. These people have heard of the book Hollywood Babylon, a litany of studio-system era scandals compiled by former child actor Kenneth Anger, who grew up to become the director of a handful of cult films.

Importantly, unlike the tabloid magazines of our debased period, there is no fawning reverence or faux-concern—it is all spite and bitchcraft. It is also available in Butler, although I should point out that it will probably make you ashamed of yourself—perhaps even physically ill. Amazon’s prices are also quite reasonable.

But back to the apparently quite lucrative Beat industry. Somehow, against all odds, there are more books about them than they managed to spew forth themselves. Many of these are purportedly insider accounts, so it would be helpful to know whom to friend now, just in case new incarnations of Jack and Allen are already among us, smoking tea and giving way too much credit to Walt Whitman.

Of the primary sources—Kerouac’s Vanity of Duluoz and Ginsberg’s The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice—I will devote more space to Kerouac because Vanity of Duluoz is retrospective, and seeing what persists through the years is more interesting than reading Ginsberg’s contemporaneous journals, which are full of things like a dialogue between his conscience and the Muses, a mock-Wasteland (“To college then I came”), and a legalistic “sexual dictionary” notable mostly for its quaintness (“fellatio—mouth sodomy,” e.g.).

And of course proposing a direct one-to-one correlation between them and us would be ill-advised because, recent events notwithstanding, the ’40s are over (not that ridiculous idiocy is acceptable at any time). But we can all probably identify with old, bitter Jack Kerouac’s reconstruction of young Jack Kerouac looking out his window to the names on the frieze of the “new” library, or hobbling on crutches across campus, taking in “lovers arm in arm, hurrying eager students in the flying leaves of late October, the library going with glow, all the books and pleasure and the big city of the world right at my broken feet.”

He also has complaints about the Core. Some are valid—having to read Homer in three days while going to football practice and working as a dishwasher in John Jay; others less so—“... what did Columbia College offer me to study in the way of a course of theirs called Contemporary Civilization but the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Russell and other assorted blue-printings that look good on blue paper and all the time the architect is that invisible monster known as Living Man?”

Where Kerouac differs from most of us is that he was a football star, an All-American boy turned into whatever it was he turned into. He started only twice in high school in Lowell but was recruited by several schools and chose Columbia over Boston College, which resulted in his father being fired. I don’t know enough about the 1930s Massachusetts Catholic football political climate to know if this is true, but it’s the segue for a typically concise rant about success and its pitfalls (earnest teenage mobs trampling the flowers in your garden).

After spending a year at a prep school (he apparently took no math at all in high school), Kerouac moved to Morningside and played in one whole game for the freshman team before hurting himself. But in that game, Spectator said that he was “probably the best back on the field,” a fact which he cited years later in a poem to head football coach Lou Little—“He didn’t believe what he read in the Spectator ‘Who’s that Jack’”—which was reproduced still later in Vanity of Duluoz. Of course I know nothing about the members of the 1940 Spectator sports section, but their current counterparts are always full of insight and not at all loutish, with opinions that will certainly be worth noting three decades from now.

He broke his leg in the following game and spent the rest of the year winning the class vice-presidential election and eating filet mignon and hot fudge sundaes that he later refused to pay for—“Why should I? My leg still hurts on damp days. Phooey. Ivy League indeed.” Spectator had high hopes for the 1941 Lions and “chunky sophomore speedster Jack Kerouac,” but he left early in the fall to “see the Southland and start my career as an American careener.”

Allen Ginsberg also bounced around (Merchant Marines, Denver, etc.), but unlike Kerouac managed to graduate (in just under a decade; I have absolutely no comment about which school he would have wound up in today). The lessons from his time here are relatively simple: 1. Clean your dorm-room windows—don’t use their grime to announce to the world which group of people Nicholas Murray Butler hates; 2. Don’t tell the NYPD you were hanging out with a burglary ring because you were looking for “realism,” unless eminent professors are willing to talk to the judge for you.

Overall lessons are similarly straightforward. You should read On the Road (although anyone who has not read it—which I suppose is technically possible—should probably start with the one that has paragraph breaks, not the new, original scroll version) and then Big Sur, if only to calm down. You should read Allen Ginsberg’s poetry (selected, not collected). And you should be nice to everyone, because, as the fairly unspectacular undergraduate lives of Jack and Allen attest, it’s impossible to know who will grow up to be famous and give you fodder for tell-all books, a genre completely dissimilar from the Beats’ entire oeuvre.

Robert Ast is a senior in the School of General Studies.
Columbia Babylon runs alternate Mondays.
Specopinion@columbia.edu