Beat Soundtrack #2: Bob Lee
In which prominent Beat figures, writers and critics, historians and academics, fans and followers, talk about the relationship between that literary community and music
A. Robert ‘Bob’ Lee taught American Studies/Literature at the University of Kent (1967-1996) and Nihon University, Tokyo (1997-2014) before retirement to his present base in southeast Spain. Beat scholarship has much figured in his 40 or so book publications to include The Beat Generation Writers (ed.) (1996), Modern American Counter Writing (2010), The Routledge Handbook of International Beat Literature (ed.) (2018), The Beats: Authorships, Legacies (2019) and The Joan Anderson Letter (ed.) (2020).
What attracted you to the Beats? When did you encounter them? Do you have a favourite text?
A spot of context first. It was after taking an Eng. Lit. degree at UCL in the early 1960s that I swung into American Lit. with a thesis on Melville. University teaching followed and that required, as an “Americanist”, coverage of the whole literary waterfront from Puritans to Postmoderns. It also meant playing a part in the establishment of American Studies in the UK. So if I responded to the Beats it came as one shelf that includes, say, the 1840s-50s American renaissance, 1920s American modernism, or postwar authorship from Bellow to Morrison. The latter name also bears on the huge amount of time and energy I’ve given to multicultural writing (I had the good fortune to win an American Book Award in 2004 for ‘Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions’). So Beat takes its place in this overall roster. As to being attracted – initially I was and wasn’t – and I still have a fair measure of ambivalence.
It happens I was the at the ‘Wholly Communion’ bash in 1965, the same year I first crossed the Atlantic. Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs were of-the-time currency, so I was reading them at the same time but alongside a round that included writers as various as Chester Himes, Sylvia Plath or Robert Creeley. In 1960s London, too, I was in and out of Better Books; in New York in 1965-67 I was at readings by Ginsberg, Corso, Jones/Baraka; and in San Francisco it was City Lights and occasions with Ferlinghetti as compere and where I first heard ruth weiss.
In the decades since, as far as Beats are concerned it has been a whole panorama. To include, especially, Naropa when I was doing different visiting professorial years at the University of Colorado, and at Berkeley where among other classes I taught Beat writings.
The names and friendships have come thick and fast, not least among them Anne Waldman, Ted Joans and the late Ron Loewinsohn. A favourite? Beyond the usual suspects, I’d include selective poems by Bob Kaufman, Joanne Kyger, Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers without End, and the fun and Fugs of Tuli Kupferberg and Ed Sanders. During the fourteen years I had in Tokyo at Japan’s largest university I moved in literary circles that included one of the great Japanese poetry-and-jazz Beat names, Kazuko Shiraishi. I would also find myself writing on the “Beat” of another Japanese poet and friend of Ginsberg – Nanao Sakaki.
What is the relationship between the Beat writers and music? How do you think that the literary and musical sound connect?
One couldn’t do better than take bearings from Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues. Remember how he himself describes his ambition with the poem?
‘I want to be considered a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session of Sunday. I take 242 choruses; my ideas vary and sometimes roll from chorus to chorus or from halfway through a chorus to halfway into the next.’
Beat has long positioned itself as spoken, performative. Jazz relates not only on account of a given riff or rhythm but because it precisely allows for improvisation. Listen to Ginsberg in his reading of the whole of Mexico City Blues and you could have no doubt that the organising tempo is musical. ‘Words singing’ was a memorable formulation.
But if jazz and blues, sound and measure, runs throughout Beat the dues always and foremost have to be paid to Afro-America. You meet Bessie Smith, Parker, Coltrane, Ellington, Monk, Davis, Gillespie, Gordon in text upon text. Few black writers have more drawn on the legacy in his writings than Jones/Baraka. He has had coevals. Recently, as you know, I have written a piece on five key names that both honour and deploy jazz: Langston Hughes, Ted Joans, Bob Kaufman, Jayne Cortez and Yusuf Komunyakaa. For all of them jazz and word are joined at the hip. Does not On the Road pay homage? Along with, say, John Clellon Holmes’ The Horn.
Kerouac, of course, is but one voice, as early at 1957 to combine with David Amram. How, too, to forget his collaborations with Steve Allen at the piano? One can (and should) make the case that ‘Howl’ uses musical incantation (Ginsberg himself called it a ‘jazz mass’). It would be right also to recall Rexroth, Ferlinghetti and ruth weiss reading to jazz accompaniment at San Francisco’s The Cellar and a host of North Beach venues. Latterly an Anne Waldman CD can have you listening to her poetry with music by her son Ambrose Bye.
As a writer or poet have you been shaped or influenced by Beat experience? How do academic approaches find common ground with the anti-rational positions of Beat philosophy?
You have me slightly hobbled here. A lifelong academic with university bases in the UK, the USA and Japan, I can hardly claim to have had ‘Beat experience’. I’ve read them, taught them, met a number of key players but not too much more. As a writer or critic you keep your distance. I suspect I’m not the only one to watch out for cultism, Burroughs being a key example (and allowing that he fervently disavowed being Beat in any respect). ‘Academic’, of course, has long become a pejorative term, as though all arts academia remains sandbagged in American New Criticism. Disponibility is the key, whether you are reading Shakespeare, Melville, Keats, Charles Olson, Sylvia Plath or Louise Glück. Your job as a reader is to meet the imagination of the work not to especially agree with or argue with the ‘philosophy’ of the work. As a creative writer you have no real choice but to follow your own imperatives.
It may well seem that ‘open’ prosody and style trump the academy as dead hand. But in fact, most of the Beat players were highly well-read – Ginsberg, Kerouac with language access to Proust as to Melville, Burroughs especially, Ferlinghetti with his Sorbonne doctorate, Di Prima with her Greek and love of Keats, Sanders with his classical training, and even penitentiary educated Corso. Sure, the pitch was ‘first thought, best thought’ but in fact they all revised (including Kerouac). You can only gain by reading the prime works with an intertextual eye. They were neither anti-intellectual as often gets assumed nor were they hidebound by tradition, be it T.S. Eliot or the kind of authorship most celebrated by the New Criticism. These binaries, as always, take you only so far.
Which musical artists from whichever era appear to make links to the Beat Generation – and how?
Surely the presiding name has to be that of Bob Dylan (in the past I’ve argued for his novel Tarantula as a Beat text). ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ might almost be a Beat anthem. Two others come immediately to mind: Tom Waits and Lou Reed. You can make the case that if both are not paid-up Beats then their music and lyrics are nothing if not Beat-inflected. A name that does not sufficiently get recognized in this connection is the great sax virtuoso Archie Shepp, a published poet as well as hornman. I’d also again mention Jayne Cortez and her readings and recordings with her onetime husband Ornette Coleman. The various Burroughs-named punk groups obviously weigh and inevitably, one adds in the Stones and the Beatles.
Who are your own favourite singers, musicians and bands? Do they represent Beat ideas in their lives and art?
All the frontline jazz names I’ve mentioned have long held me. How not to listen in full ear and mind to Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, a Parker bebop classic like ‘Yardbird Suite’, Ellington’s ‘Take the A Train’, Miles Davis – early and ‘fusion’ (Round About Midnight a favourite), any number of Monk or Mingus compositions. I have an especial liking for Eric Dolphy’s album The Quest. When you ask if they, or others, ‘represent Beat ideas’, I’d say only by implication, and even venture that the influence is actually far more the other way round. Texts and music, in truth, have their own discrete ways of being – the overlaps, whatever they may be, a bonus.