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Some books, and a video, about the Beat Generation

The Beats: A Graphic History (2009) is more or less what it says it is – a book in the style of a graphic novel, featuring long sections on the lives of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs – the Big Three of the Beats – and shorter pieces on minor poets and writers.  I was drawn to this book when I saw that much of the text was by Harvey Pekar, whose work (he was the comic book writer for the way cool American Splendor series) I admire.  But the text is uninspired, and Ed Piskor’s artwork for the sections on the Big Three is flat, clunky, badly drawn.  If anything, The Beats: A Graphic History reminds us how squalid the lives of Beat poets and writers could be, and if squalor is not that much fun to read about, it’s not necessarily a bad thing to remember, given that the Beat writers are too often romanticized.  The Beats is more successful when discussing some lesser characters, such as Kenneth Patchen and, especially, Tuli Kupferberg, the founder of the band The Fugs, the name a tip of the hat to Norman Mailer’s censored f-word in his first novel, The Naked and the Dead.  Kupferberg’s story is a cultural bridge from the 50s to the 60s, and was fascinating to read.  However, on the whole I can’t recommend The Beats.  There are much better books on the subject.

The key texts of the Beat writers are probably Kerouac’s On the Road, Ginsberg’s “Howl” and Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, in that order.  Despite its notoriety, I suspect not many people have made it all the way through “Howl,” and Naked Lunch can fairly be characterized as scabrous (some would say disgusting), though some people have certainly read it – for example, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker took the name Steely Dan from, uh, something in Naked Lunch that I won’t go into here.  That leaves Kerouac’s book, which I have read perhaps half a dozen times.  After finishing John Leland’s excellent Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of On the Road (They’re Not What You Think) (2007), the title of which is accurate, if an awful mouthful, I see that my own enjoyment and interpretation of the book fell prey to what Leland points out.  That is, the book in recollection always seems to be about Dean Moriarty (the fictionalized Neal Cassady), the crazy guy, the one in it for kicks and sensation and joyous adventure, but it’s equally, perhaps more, about Sal Paradise (the fictionalized Jack Kerouac), the mystic, the thinker, the brooder, the one who often seems like he simply is not having that much fun during Mr. Moriarty’s wild ride.  Viewed through Leland’s focused lens – he is clearly familiar with all of Kerouac’s letters and journals, as well as the infamous “scroll” version of On the Road – Kerouac’s book yields up some secrets:  it’s a book about how to live in the world, a book about the writer’s spiritual, mystical evolution.  Leland, a New York Times reporter, explains Kerouac in a way that makes sense of what so confused people as Kerouac got older − namely, what happened to the reveler we remember from On the Road?  Whence came this cranky, down on his luck right winger who disavowed the hippies, lived with his strange mother in a succession of crappy little houses, felt perfectly misunderstood and drank himself to death at age 47?  Leland shows us that it was not Kerouac who changed; his readers just got it wrong.  Why Kerouac Matters is a thoughtful, persuasive book, sometimes a little playful, best suited for readers who are reasonably familiar with Kerouac’s magnum opus.  Now I have to go back and read On the Road again.

If you’d rather watch the DVD, the best video I have ever seen about the Beats is The Source, a made-for-television documentary dating from 1999.  While it is a documentary, with lots of interviews and period photos, the highlight of the film is John Turturro’s roaming recitation from “Howl,” Dennis Hopper’s creepy readings from Naked Lunch, and Johnny Depp’s dark renditions from On the Road.  Depp, who allegedly once paid $25,000 for an old raincoat of Kerouac’s, sounds eerily like Jack himself.