THE PULSE of the Beat Generation seems to permeate the decades. Perhaps it’s because I take a close interest in these matters: I’m always fascinated when the influence of that maverick gang of US writers from the 1950s continues to infiltrate music, movies and other media formats. Their impact almost 70 years since they made their premiere splash – whether on rock bands, on adverts, on fashion, in The Simpsons – is a source of enduring distraction.
You probably know that it was a poem by Allen Ginsberg entitled ‘Howl’ that would light the blue touch paper for the Beat clan: in 1955 a live reading of his long and declamatory verse in San Francisco’s Six Gallery – an artspace improvised from a car repair shop – brought attention to this small but active crowd of poets and writers who had been ruminating quite rowdily on the state of America since the war ended.
‘Howl’ was important because it was a cri de coeur presented in a feverish atmosphere by a homosexual man who was also Jewish, a second-generation Russian immigrant and the son of parents with left-wing affiliations. There were then many reasons for Ginsberg to express his unexploded feelings in this oral fashion, even though the nation was caught in the state of paranoia with the Cold War still burning bright.
If the poem touched those in the cramped space on that legendary October night, within a couple of years it had become entangled in the judicial process as the courts considered claims that this work of literature was actually obscene. It would propel the story onto the pages of newspapers globally and, in the wake of the judge’s decision in favour of the piece, make Ginsberg the most famous poet in his homeland.
Around this time, too, a little-known novelist called Jack Kerouac – one of those friends whom Ginsberg had included in his dedication of the head of ‘Howl’ – would publish a book that would forge his reputation. On the Road, actually Kerouac’s second full length work in print, would appear in early autumn 1957, garner a rousing review from the New York Times and find its place in the bestseller lists not long after.
There are other Beats we could mention, but, to return to that idea that the pulse of this generation continues to throb, I was thrilled this week with the attention paid to the 50th anniversary of Joni Mitchell’s premier work Blue, which first emerged in 1971. The coverage by respected British rock magazine Mojo (see the cover of the July 2021 edition below) was a good example. It is a record I have loved virtually from day one and continue to venerate.
Mitchell seems to bring so much of that earlier Beat world to her own creative life – an interest in poetry expressed in the lyrical form, an affinity with the visual arts, an attraction to jazz, a link obviously to folk music (a movement that seemed to be an almost logical extension of the spirit of the Greenwich Village poets) and a strong draw to travel as both a personal impulse and aesthetic inspiration – that it has always surprised me how she has tended to distance herself from that previous milieu.
In 2018, I was the co-editor of a book called Kerouac on Record: A Literary Soundtrack and a fine writer and academic called Nancy M. Grace pursued the topic of Mitchell’s relationship to the Beats in one of the chapters. Her forensic investigation was fascinating and she came to the intriguing conclusion that while there were indeed traces of connectivity between the earlier literary community and her own work, the singer was resistant to acknowledge that impact.
In fact, most interestingly, Grace came across that argument expressed by Harold Bloom, that great, if somewhat conservative, commentator on the American arts, that there is a tendency among the best of creators to deliberately avoid identifying predecessors who have had significant effect on them, a kind of protection of their own individual reputation and authentic practice.
What Grace identified and what Bloom dubbed ‘the anxiety of influence’ does not detract from the value of Mitchell’s output and certainly not from her landmark record, which also displayed the kind of honest testimony – we can hardly see this as other than autobiographical – which also permeates so much of the Beat writers’ fiction and verse. In short, I remain convinced that there are lines of genealogy that run from the heartfelt poetic stirrings of one decade to the intense folk-rock confessions of the next, and thus from Ginsberg and Kerouac to Mitchell.