Beats and the New Left

BEATS AND THE NEW LEFT. The first major post–World War II literary rebellion, the Beat Generation of the 1950s, was a cultural rather than a political movement. Based on a highly individualistic anarchism, the Beat movement denounced capitalist Moloch without the slightest hope for a Marxism whose authoritarianism was frequently assailed. Beat opposition to militarism, racism, and economic injustice was consistent and fervent, but it was generally secondary to celebration of hallucinatory drugs, homosexual sex, mystical religion, and exotic experiences of all kinds. The term Beat refers to the state of beatitude originally set as a prime goal of the movement’s originators. The issues and style of the Beats are relevant to discourse about the Left primarily because the Beats set the tone for the counterculture of the 1960s with which the New Left was intimately bound.

The Beats came from various parts of the country, but they had clustered in San Francisco by the mid-1950s. Unable to find acceptance in either the commercial or literary press, the Beats took up two artistic activities that would have a profound influence on the burgeoning counterculture—public performance and self-publishing. Public performances originated in coffeehouses but moved to all manner of public forums. Poetry was projected by the Beats as a spoken or sung art best experienced in a public place and not as an individual and silent act of reading. When the original Beats generated a following throughout the nation, poetry readings became a fixture in the alternative culture. With the development of various political movements in the 1960s, the reading of poetry at rallies, teach-ins, demonstrations, and other political events became commonplace. The style of reading and the sense of poetry as a social force were directly related to the Beats.

Self-publishing had been critical to American literary innovation since at least the time Walt Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass. Drawing on that tradition, Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti opened the City Lights bookstore in 1953 and inaugurated a Pocket Poets Series with his Pictures of a Gone World (1955). The small books that fit easily into pants pockets totally bypassed the established publishing and review complex. What soon differentiated the venture from similar efforts was that Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956) sold first in the thousands and ultimately nearly a million copies. Ferlinghetti had defied the cultural hegemony of the dominant culture yet had reached a mass audience. Coming at a moment when new printing technology was greatly reducing the labor and cost involved in self-publishing, Ferlinghetti’s success spawned the creation of new presses whose numbers reached into the high hundreds by the late 1960s. This movement, in turn, meshed with the creation of the alternative weekly newspapers that were such a vital force in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Ferlinghetti retained his commitment to an alternative press. Long after he and other writers he first published were famous enough for the commercial press to take on, he continued with independent publishing. A full quarter of a century after Howl, he was publisher of Free Spirits: Annals of the Insurgent Imagination, an anthology featuring anarchist, Beat, surrealist, eccentric, and independent Marxist artists of various nations and disciplines.

The Beats first achieved national attention when Ginsberg was charged with obscenity for reading Howl in a San Francisco coffeehouse. The long poem was featured in a special issue of Evergreen Review that was totally dedicated to the Beat movement and included Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac, Michael McClure, Robert Duncan, Brother Antoninus, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and other new writers. Editors Barney Rosset and Donald Allen posited a tradition for the Beats by publishing selections from Henry Miller and Kenneth Rexroth as well. Miller was included because of the language precedent he had set in Tropic of Cancer and Rexroth linked the Beats to political dissent. In a San Francisco “literary letter,” Rexroth berated American Marxist writers as authoritarian and obsequious to political power, and in a poem, Rexroth paid homage to the Kronstadt insurrection, Peter Kropotkin, Makhno’s peasant anarchists, Carlo Tresca, and Alexander Berkman.
None of the Beats possessed the ideological sophistication of Rexroth, but they shared his disdain for the established Left. Ginsberg wrote negatively of the regimes in Czechoslovakia and Cuba, and he lamented Che Guevara as a tragic hero on a futile mission. Such immediate political concerns continued to crop up in his life and work. In the 1967 siege of the Pentagon by the antiwar movement, Ginsberg led a group that sought to levitate the Pentagon by humming OM, a beatific Buddhist-derived incantation. Whether that act was scene-stealing performance or religious conviction, Ginsberg was present not only to end a specific war but militarism itself. His advocacy of poet as spiritual guru, as acknowledged legislator of morality, was easily translated into more political terms by radical writers.

Other themes of Beat culture prefigured and entwined with political issues of the 1960s and 1970s. Gary Snyder wrote often about the need to defend the environment and respect the rights of other animals. William Everson, a lay monk who also published as Brother Antoninus, sought to reconcile traditional religions such as Roman Catholicism with the new mysticism, sexual liberation, and social activism.

William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, the two major prose writers of the Beats, were more problematic for the Left. Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) lauded individual freedom and mobility, but the more Kerouac wrote, the more his various right-wing sentiments became evident. His personal influence faded quickly and he became a heavy drinker who had little contact with other Beats. In novels like Naked Lunch (1959) Burroughs used obscene and surreal images to assault the generic police state, but his vision remained essentially nihilistic. While Ginsberg enjoyed being a celebrity, Burroughs avoided the limelight and admitted much of his life was a personal disaster. He had accidentally killed his wife while playing with a pistol and spent many years severely addicted to drugs. More so than any other Beat icon, however, Burroughs insisted on the necessity of maintaining a permanent alternative culture. He said his work is “directed against those who are bent, through stupidity or design, on blowing up the planet or rendering it uninhabitable.”

On some issues, the New Left took strong exception to Beat thinking. The attempt to achieve change through mystical means was an obvious sore point. A deeper concern was the debate on how society should deal with drugs. Drug use was a taboo in the traditional Left, but recreational drugs became an accepted element in the New Left environment. How far such usage should go, especially in the face of the destructive role of drugs in much of society, pit the freedom of individual choice against the self-protective needs of society. Ginsberg and Burroughs wrote extensively of their pursuit of exotic drugs, often in travels to developing nations. Their indifference to the political oppression in those nations seemed like that of other Westerners who exploited the Third World for personal, economic, or recreational purposes. Feminist critics found Beat culture not only to be mostly male but also male chauvinist.

On the other hand, the New Left responded positively to the dynamic language and theatrics of the Beats. This was most evident in the ploys of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, but generally speaking the freewheeling nature of the New Left style owed far more to the Beats than any leftist influence. Beat celebration of homosexuality broke ideology and artistic barriers of the Left as well as the Right and fed currents that would culminate in the gay liberation movement. The anti-organizational bias of the Beats was reflected, for better and for worse, in radical groups such as Students for a Democratic Society, which rejected the discipline of Marxist-Leninism. Many New Left activists expressed mixed feelings when referring to the Beats, saying that they reacted as much against the Beats as with them, but acknowledging it had been the Beats who shattered the conformity of the Eisenhower era and dramatically rekindled vital themes in the broad tradition of American dissent.

Buhle, Paul, Jayne Cortez, Philip Lamantia, Franklin Rosemont, Penelope Rosemont, and Nancy Joyce Peters, (eds). Free Spirits: Annals of the Insurgent Imagination. San Francisco: City Lights, 1982.

Evergreen Review: San Francisco Scene, V. 1 #2, 1957.

Gitlin, Todd, ed. Campfires of the Resistance: Poetry from the Movement. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972.

Hemmer, Kur (ed). Encyclopedia of Beat Literature. New York: Facts on File. Infobase Publishing, 2006.

Herman, Jan, ed. Something Else Yearbook: 1974. West Glover, Vt.: Something Else Press, 1974.

Lewis, Roger. Outlaws of America: The Underground Press and Its Context; Notes on a Cultural Revolution. New York: Penguin, 1972.