From the Archives: The Lasting Influence of the Beat Generation

“On the Road Again” by Tad Friend, was originally published in the October 1995 issue of Vogue.

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In 1984 I went to William Burroughs’s seventieth-birthday party at the Limelight, a mammoth Manhattan nightclub, and fell into conversation with Allen Ginsberg. A decade before, Ginsberg had gloomily declared that “there is no longer hope for the Salvation of America proclaimed by… our Beat Generation.” But now, surrounded by Sting, Lou Reed, Kurt Vonnegut, and others more interested in Burroughs’s ashen visage than in writhing to “Beat It,” Ginsberg had perked up. I reminded him that he’d visited my college a few months earlier and taught us to meditate (while wreathed in marijuana smoke), and mentioned that I’d just read On the Road. And that I’d, you know, dug it.

“Yes,” Ginsberg said, smiling. “The Beat influence will come around again. It’s only natural after years of the Reagan-Nixon ugly spirit…Listen,” he added, reciting a Kerouac haiku: “Useless, use- less,/the heavy rain/Driving into the sea.”

Off the point? No, Beat.

Ginsberg was prescient: The Beats are back and have been taken up by a new generation. New York University recently held large conferences on the Beats and on Kerouac: 70 percent of those attending the latter were under 25. Beat ideas are chewed over at a Web site called Literary Kicks; Kerouac’s letters and a portable edition of his fiction are just out; in November the strenuously trendy Whitney Museum of American Art will unfurl “Beat Culture and the New America: 1950-1965.”

And next year Francis Ford Coppola will shoot Kerouac’s 1957 novel On the Road, most likely using black-and-white film to portray Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, who drive ceaselessly cross-country, tangling with women, the bottle, and the law, restless for bigger kicks. When the director held an open audition in New York last February, more than 5,000 people waited hopefully, snow dappling their berets. Coppola shook hands with them all, “paying attention to their aura.”

Beat nostalgia permeates such divergent phenomena as the uptick in heroin use; the return of the surly goatee and Vandyke (Dan Cortese, Ethan Hawke, Nicolas Cage, Michael Stipe, T. Coraghessan Boyle); literature majors at Ivy League schools wearing all black and cultivating an aura of poetic depression; the vaguely Zen reemergence of long-board surfing; the surge in coffeehouses where the window cat is named Ferlinghetti; even Volkswagen’s plan for an updated Beetle. “The Beats are everywhere,” says Bill Adler, president of NuYO Records, which specializes in “spoken word.” “It’s undeniable. It’s like mold.”

“There’s a real Renaissance on,” agrees Anne Waldman, director of a Boulder, Colorado, writing program called the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. “The young are drawn to the Beats’ camaraderie, the idea of travel, the experimentations with drugs and consciousness—the whole desire to go offtrack.”

“Beat style is the primary influence in the East Village,” the poet Sparrow wrote me recently. His eight-page handwritten letter, interestingly smeared with salad dressing by his daughter, defined that style as “people in shapeless clothes drinking coffee in cafes and writing in their spiral notebooks while listening to jazz—modern jazz…” Sparrow’s group of anarchic poets, the UNbearables, determined that the Beat thing to do was to picket NYU’s Kerouac conference for commodifying the myth of the outsider. Sparrow was particularly proud of his wry slogans “We’re a Bunch of Juvenile Idiots” and “They’re Right and We’re Wrong,” and he noted, “I read my poem ‘Poem’ (‘This poem replaces/all my previous/poems’) to thunderous applause.”

Calling me “Pops” and wearing all denim and a huge beaded neck-lace, Beat musician David Amram ushered me up to his Village apartment (half-made beds, jazz posters, bongo drums) for a “cosmic rap” about his pal Kerouac, who’d often visited Amram there. He wanted me to feel the angels of the place. More than 200 pilgrims from the Kerouac conference had mounted the same dingy stairs, pursuing apostolic succession. “They felt the magic in these walls,” Amram says, “and went out beaming.”

In short, peculiar ideas are once more afoot in the land: passion, sincerity, whimsy, a quest for belief. Jaded irony is dwindling with Letterman’s ratings. “No parody, no irony; we’re trying to be very sincere,” says director John Carlin of the forthcoming CD-ROM “The Beat Experience,” where the main environment is a Beat “pad.” “They invented the counterculture, and you can’t make fun of that.” You can, actually, but the Beats themselves scorned irony as an arid stance. “First thought, best thought” was Ginsberg’s rule for creating from the moment—advice that in the eighties was followed chiefly by Jeopardy contestants.

The Beats beguile with their feverish summons. As Kerouac famously put it in On the Road, “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved… [who] burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.” The Kerouac who hammered out On the Road on a continuous roll of paper in three Benzedrine-fueled weeks, and who finally toppled from alcoholism at age 47, continues to burn, burn, burn as an alluring legend.

“I love to hear the name of Kerouac crop up for the idea of traveling around, living life as it comes,” says artist Jack Pierson, whose photos and bricolages conjure up road trips and sad motels. “Like Kerouac, I think my art on the wall is just a postcard from the life— which is the real art.” Yet, Pierson makes clear, “it’s not like I want to sit down and read his books.”

Many of Kerouac’s 25 books are indeed unreadable; at his worst, as Truman Capote waspishly noted, he was not writing but typing. Despite the continuing resonance of such works as Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, the Beats have triumphed less as literature than as an inflammatory metaphor of… of something.

In fact, what we think of as Beat is a mishmash of misperceptions. Like Johnny Depp, who recently bought Kerouac’s scruffy raincoat for $ 15,000, we exalt this original youth culture’s artifacts over its actual ideals. “I was trying to wear my black dress every day, being confident with my style like a real Beat,” X-Girl designer Daisy von Furth says with crestfallen reverence, “but then it got too hot.”

Fashion is especially prone to investing the Beats with scattershot notions. Donna Karan’s fall collection was all black—lots of skinny pants worn with flats; Ralph Lauren’s Ralph collection often includes berets and blue-and-white-striped T-shirts; and Miuccia Prada opened her fall show with a Beat segment featuring black pencil pants and boxy coats. “Our fisherman’s T-shirts and black leggings are definitely a Beat appropriation, style over content,” says von Furth. “We’re trying for an international-beatnik-and-Godard-film thing, but a lot of people have confused it with the Jackie O. look.”

Whatever. As musician Amram points out, the look’s historical antecedents aren’t Beat, anyway: “The whole beret-and-dark-glasses thing actually came from Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk, who wore them in the early forties to show allegiance with Sartre and the Europeans.”

The Gap also tried to borrow some of the Beats’ thunder with ads trumpeting that both Kerouac and Gingsberg “wore khakis.” Both men’s khakis came, in fact, straight from the Salvation Army. “Jack just wore whatever he could manage to pick up,” says writer Joyce Johnson, Kerouac’s former girlfriend. “He had the most horrible, gaudy Hawaiian shirts.” Robert Frank’s loopy 1959 film Pull My Daisy, featuring Kerouac, Ginsberg, Amram, Gregory Corso, and Larry Rivers, shows what they really wore: nubby sweaters, threadbare khakis, and flannel shirts. In other words, the Beats founded grunge.

Pretty cool. But we need the Beats to be cooler than we are, and so we make them cooler than they were. We don’t want to hear that Kerouac lived most of his adult life with his mother, Mémêre, allowed visiting friends to sleep together in his guest room only if they were married, and denounced hippies. Or that “Jack would hate Clinton and Hillary,” as his biographer Ann Charters notes, “because he didn’t like women in positions of authority, and he supported the Vietnam War. He’d probably think Newt Gingrich was an interesting guy.”

The message Kerouac drunkenly helped compose to President Eisenhower in the mid-1950s—”Dear Eisenhower, We love you— You’re the great white father. We’d like to fuck you”—is manifestly angry, juvenile, phallocratic, and so forth. It’s also admiring.

What kind of rebellion was this? And where has it taken us?

Allen Ginsberg remembers first hearing beat, a word Jack Kerouac had seized on in 1948 to mean “exhausted, at the bottom of the world… rejected by society, on your own, streetwise.” A loose affiliate of men in New York and San Francisco in the 1950s and early 1960s, the Beats valorized spontaneity; Zen; marijuana, peyote, gin, and coffee; wild road trips; the lowlife; a ruthless honesty about transmuting private feelings into public art; and a childlike appreciation for woolly word-yokings such as “peanut- butter cockroaches” and “fried shoes.” (Try it yourself: shadow juice… sordid egg… lethal marmalade. Kind of fun.)

Beat was built on the borrowed rhythms, long breath lines, and rambunctious lifestyle of bebop musicians such as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. (Like Elvis, the Beats made black music the basis for a new—and arguably watered-down—aesthetic.) Primarily a literary movement, Beat later came to encompass new forms like Assemblage, happenings, and independent cinema.

What the Beats sought was an America far from that of Joseph McCarthy, bobby socks, and Levittown. This unbuttoned search terrified the mainstream: Even Playboy demonized the Beats as “modern-day nihilists for whom it was enough, apparently, to flout and deny.” The media also diluted the Beats’ appeal by ginning up the beatnik stereotype, a mumbling, bongo-slapping, fringe-bearded layabout epitomized by Maynard G. Krebs on TV’s Dobie Gillis. By 1959 you could rent a “beatnik” for your party, and Johnny Carson and other comedians were soon cracking jokes about “cats” and “chicks” sharing a “pad,” smoking “weed,” and “wigging out” all the “squares.”

That turtleneck-wearing impostor is hard to shake. “More than the actual Beats,” says artist Jack Pierson, “I like the whole idea of the Beats you see in The Lucy Show, when Lucy and Vivian go to a beatnik club and try to fit in as hip chicks.” But Beat mannerisms devoid of Beat spirit just aren’t Beat. Compare Allen Ginsberg’s legendary 1955 poem “Howl”: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,/dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix…” with 10,000 Maniacs’ 1987 song “Hey Jack Kerouac”: “cool junk-booting madmen, street-minded girls in Harlem howling at night…” Witness also Madison Avenue’s recent spate of feeble beatniky ads for Cappio cappuccino, Pepe jeans, the Wendy Melt, and McDonald’s (“I unwrap/The bad boy/Oooh… /The joy/Of Mickey D’s/Egg McMuffin sandwich”).

Even genuine Beat traits have often been transmitted in isolated, exaggerated form. Beat roots are tangible in the bleak, burned-out wanderings chronicled by Larry Clark in his photographic books Teenage Lust and Tulsa and his movie Kids; in the blabby confessionalism of talk shows like Jenny Jones and Ricki Lake; in the New Age yearnings of Shirley MacLaine; and in gay pride—Burroughs and Ginsberg were out-of-the-closet pioneers.

Joyce Johnson notes that the Beats were able to be so protean “because the women [in their lives] had the jobs and kept things going.” Yet feminist thinker Barbara Ehrenreich suggests that the Beats unwittingly boosted the women’s movement by undermining both the family and the glamour of buying a new fridge. She writes that their “two strands of male protest—one directed against the white-collar work world and the other against the suburbanized family life that work was supposed to support—come together into the first all-out critique of American consumer culture.”

Beat is so freely interpretable because it’s interior, a state of consciousness. Unlike mod, punk, or disco, it calls no physical objects to mind, and our culture apprehends visually (we’ll believe we truly know the Beats once Coppola’s movie comes out). “What we’re doing is taking the Beats’ intangible ideas and trying to create tangible goods in their spirit,” explains interior designer Jeffrey Bilhuber, whose work evokes early-Bond bachelor pad. “Their stream of consciousness and simplicity,” he concludes, “is like our having a consistent point of view from the entrance hall to the attic.” Well… maybe.

A huge range of Beat interpretations permeates the arts, pop music perhaps most of all. Bob Dylan acknowledges a big debt to Kerouac and Ginsberg, both in his hallucinatory language and in his disinclination to do recording retakes. Keyboard player Ray Manzarek says the Doors would never have formed if it weren’t for Kerouac. Kurt Cobain put out a CD with William Burroughs, who was also worshiped by the punks (Patti Smith lauded him as “up there with the pope”), David Bowie, and, of course, Steely Dan (whose name comes from a dildo in Naked Lunch).

“We’ve been very influenced by the Beats in terms of the joy of manipulating language,” says Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo. “Also in using our lives as subject matter, and in our disenfranchised view of modern life.” And the cult of the Grateful Dead, with their relaxed, druggie, we-never-play-the-same-song-the-same-way-twice-so-tape-if-you-want-to ethos, is pure Beat—and very mainstream, as demonstrated by the massive media keening over Jerry Garcia’s death.

The work of such Beat filmmakers as Bruce Conner, Kenneth Anger, and Stan Brakhage now seems eerily familiar. If you fast-forward, say, Anger’s Scorpio Rising (a skull, a man buckling his jeans, butts stubbed out in an ashtray, motorcycles, James Dean photos), you suddenly see what it gave rise to: the whole MTV and Oliver Stone style of nonlinear, imagistic editing. (It’s fitting that Hank Corwin, who had a hand in editing Stone’s JFK and Natural Born Killers, is editing the “Beat Experience” CD-ROM.) Furthermore, as writer Rick Woodward noted recently, “Tune in to any beautifully bleak, high-grain, low-definition MTV video and you’re probably watching refracted [Beat photographer and filmmaker] Robert Frank.”

MTV has tried to cash in on the neo-Beat spoken-word phenomenon with a few specials and a regular Fightin’ Wordz feature, and by giving a lot of airtime to beat-rappers Digable Planets. And VH1’s Naked Cafe is set in an L.A.-style coffeehouse and features a talking coffee cup. Both networks miss the point: Every minute they’re on, they’re commercializing Beat style.

Robert Altman’s seemingly meandering spontaneity owes a debt to the Beats, as do Jim Jarmusch’s black-and-white meditations (Stranger than Paradise, Down by Law) and Richard Linklater’s smart, affectless Slacker. And every road movie, from the vivid (Thelma & Louise, Something Wild) to the inert (Kalifornia), slavishly follows On the Road‘s picaresque, two-for-the-highway blueprint.

“Burroughs is one of the building blocks in my writing,” says writer-director Gus Van Sant. “When I spliced three full completed screenplays together on the computer to make My Own Private Idaho, that’s something he would have done. It’s sort of magical; it’s like throwing the chapters into a bin and then pulling them out one by one. It allows the universe to dictate, instead of your thinking mind.”

Sincere, communitarian Beat ideals have even penetrated the insincere, lonely world of stand-up comedy. “We invite comics not to do their act,” says founder Kathy Griffin of her “Hot Cup of Talk” series at Los Angeles’s Groundling Theatre. Essentially, it’s an evening of off-the-cuff storytelling. “Quentin Tarantino has talked about his fear of rats and how women love him, I’ve talked about my date with Quentin and how women love him, and Janeane Garofalo has done a lot of sounding off. We rely on word of mouth and charge only $3, which seems very Beat. When someone tries to stick in a joke from their act, there’s a lull—the audience is waiting for freshness. For something from that moment.”

In literature, curiously, Beat acolytes are hard to find. The Whitney Museum identifies Paul Beatty as a “younger poet influenced by Beat culture”; Beatty himself declares, “The movement didn’t influence me.” The poet Sparrow is similarly wary. “I labored to rebel,” he says. “I’m interested in clarity and succinctness, not in their babbling style. But all these editors tell me I’m too Beat. Maybe they’re right; I seem to be a third-generation Beat poet. It’s a horrific fate.” Modern poets, says UNbearable Ron Kolm, need to “clear the Beats’ overweening psychic space, kill off Daddy a little bit”—as the Beats themselves did by spurning literary modernism for jazz.

Writers also get nervous when irony is removed from their arsenal. “This magazine was supposed to foster a new but Beat-like sense of community,” says Daniel Pinchbeck, cofounder of the literary and arts journal Open City (and the son of Beat Joyce Johnson). “But young writers seem mostly comfortable telling jokes instead of staying up all night and creating spontaneous poetry. They’re too aware of their place in the marketing mechanism to search for spiritual values. So sometimes I feel like giving up.”

“Poets working now don’t aspire to the Beat lifestyle, to be outsiders,” agrees Bob Holman, the proprietor of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. “They want to be at the center, on TV, publishing their books like everyone else.”

In fact, though, the Beats themselves often longed to be at the center. That Burroughs now appears in Nike ads, that Ginsberg recently sold his archives (including beard clippings and a pair of old tennis shoes) to Stanford University for about $1 million, or that Kerouac haunted literary conferences, eager for acceptance, shouldn’t surprise us. The Beats were the first movement to use the media to shape their own image, to mythologize themselves as a generational phalanx. (Kerouac wanted to retitle On the Road as The Rock and Roll Generation, and Robert Frank’s film Pull My Daisy was going to be called The Beat Generation.) John Clellon Holmes, who wrote the first Beat novel, Go, in 1952, later brooded that they erred in so vigorously burnishing their own legend. “Probably all that will last… are a rash of vaporous anecdotes, and the few solid works that were produced,” he wrote. “We have paid for the audacity of daring to label ourselves a ‘generation.'”

And though the Beats were footloose, they were never anarchic. “It was a nationalistic, patriotic rebellion,” says Peter Schjeldahl, the art critic who still considers himself a Beat. “The reaction now is against sixties righteous liberal values, just as the Beats were opposed to the approved values of FDR liberals. They were the voice of the free citizen proving he was free—Huck Finn was the original beatnik.”

Fittingly, Beat composer David Amram’s A Little Rebellion: Thomas Jefferson, premiering this month at the Kennedy Center, will close with narrator E. G. Marshall reading from On the Road. Thomas Jefferson and Jack Kerouac: two great patriots. Seeing the Beats in this context ennobles them: They sought to recall America to its origins, to itself.

Shards of the Beat influence are everywhere and happily so: As cultural critic Dave Hickey notes, it’s cheering that boredom has now replaced apathy—boredom is at least the desire for desire. But anyone who tries to ape the Beats’ lifestyle is decades late and doomed to unwitting parody; revolts are revolting the second time around. Smoking pot is now less the act of an outlaw than of a future presidential candidate.

Indeed, if we seek a modern-day follower of the actual Beats—that is, a conservative patriot who challenges the orthodoxies of the day, alarms good liberals, is childish, spontaneous, unable to stay with one woman, a funny, language-drunk performer and shrewd self-promoter—the person who best fits the bill shows just how much times have changed.

Rush Limbaugh: the Beat we deserve.