Lunacy, enlightenment in Beat letters

The Complete Uncensored History
of the Beat Generation
By Bill Morgan

Free Press. 291 pp. $28

The Letters
Edited by Bill Morgan and David Stanford

Viking. 500 pp. $35

About a year later, in 1957, when Jack Kerouac's On the Road was published, Truman Capote offered his famous one-line dismissal of the Kerouac road novel:

"That's not writing, that's typing."

How one views the accomplishments of the Beat Generation and two of its central figures, Ginsberg and Kerouac, depends a lot on how one looks at "The New" whenever it appears in culture. It is rarely welcomed.

Capote, every bit as inventive as those he criticized, nonetheless preferred to extend traditions rather than leapfrog them. And when one looks at the inventions of the Beats, typing has a lot to do with their achievements.

What gets called the Beat Generation, a literary counterforce to the postwar Eisenhower 1950s, harks back in shape and frame to the "Lost Generation" of American writers in Paris in the 1920s, such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who came of age after World War I.

Then, Ezra Pound maintained that there is a 20-year lag between the pronouncement of fresh artistic ideas and their acceptance. When Picasso showed Gertrude Stein his portrait of her in Paris in 1906, she said, "It doesn't look like me." Picasso replied, "It will."

In 1946, she bequeathed it to the Metropolitan Museum, having long considered it her best likeness.

That year and the decade following saw the iconic emergence of the Bomb and the Cold War. Their power created institutionalized cultural anxieties, similar to ones contemporary readers have experienced post-9/11. The sheer weight of it all launched an understandable cultural depression, and for some, opened a raw spirit seeking something new.

Though Kerouac and Ginsberg each sought to elevate the term "Beat Generation" into something "beatific," John Clellon Holmes, who gave the term currency in a 1952 article, paraphrased Kerouac saying, "It involves a sort of nakedness of mind, and ultimately, of soul," a feeling of being beaten down to the bedrock of consciousness.