Review: Beat Generation Literary Criticism

Reviewed Work(s): The Beat Generation: Critical Essays by Kostas Myrsiades:

Reconstructing the Beats by Jennie Skerl
Review by: Matt Theado
Source: Contemporary Literature , Winter, 2004, Vol. 45, No. 4 (Winter, 2004), pp. 747-
761
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3593550

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

University of Wisconsin Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to Contemporary Literature

This content downloaded from

170.178.162.100 on Wed, 21 Jun 2023 06:00:34 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 MATT THEADO

Beat Generation Literary Cri

Kostas Myrsiades, ed., The Beat Generation: Critical

Lang, 2002. x + 352 pp. $29.95.

Jennie Skerl, ed., Reconstructing the Beats. New York

241 pp. $24.95.

_T -he Beat generation of writers soug

ment, but contemporary fashion, ent
opinion columnists granted them mu
than did literary critics. When Jack K
On the Road (1957) and the unwitting Daddy of
1969 with only one of his twenty-some books
eration seemed destined to fade away, may
primarily as precursors to the politically e
ment. Time has proven otherwise. In the th
Kerouac's death, more than a dozen biograp
life, replacing the popular press's snapshots
tomes that depict a serious and dedicated wri
major Beat writers-Allen Ginsberg, Gregor
Burroughs, who all died in the past decade-h
lives recorded by biographers. References to th
ular songs, movies, and television shows consti
to their cultural relevance and to the popu
with the public at large. As distance from t
the 1960s counterculture bore fruit with so
in the 1970s and beyond, many social critic
dismissals of the Beats' significance. It is no

Contemporary Literature XLV, 4 0010-7484/04/0004

? 2004 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wi

This content downloaded from

170.178.162.100 on Wed, 21 Jun 2023 06:00:34 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 748 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

heralded a refreshing new age of social

was taken up by the next generation
Solidifying their literary standing, the B
appeared in reprints even as new an
works have come out. Conferences on the Beats held at universities
have focused increasingly on the literary value as well as social
influence of these writers. Generally, the key Beat writers are now
seen as serious literary artists who produced important and semi-
nal work. The Beat Generation: Critical Essays, edited by Kostas
Myrsiades, and Reconstructing the Beats, edited by Jennie Skerl,
contribute significantly to a body of criticism and literary analysis
of Beat writing that has developed over the last decade. The essays
in these books enlarge and complicate our conceptions of the Beat
generation and bring serious critical acumen to bear on the topic.
Numerous full-volume studies have been written on the works of
Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Corso, and poets Gary Snyder and
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, substantiating the Beat writers' claims to lit-
erary respectability. Furthermore, dozens of critical studies have
demarcated new directions in Beat studies, notably feminist criti-
cism and cultural studies. Some of these works include Ann
Charters's anthology Beat Down to Your Soul: What Was the
Generation? (2001); Richard Peabody's A Different Beat: Writings
Women of the Beat Generation (1997); Brenda Knight's Women of
Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists, and Muses at the Heart
Revolution (1998); Ronna C. Johnson and Nancy M. Grace's G
Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation (2002)
Breaking the Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Women Beat Writ
(2004); and Beat Writers at Work: The Paris Review (1999). The pu
cation of these academic treatments of the Beat writers and their
coterie creates a potential paradox for the one-of-the-roughs Beat
ethos, the Beat reputation, the whole Beat rap, so to speak. Orig-
inally, the Beats confronted the status quo in literary art. Their
works were branded "rebellious" and "obscene" in both their sub-
ject matter and their form (or what their contemporary critics saw
as lack of form). Their rejection was predictable. Numerous times,
Kerouac, Ginsberg, and City Lights Bookshop owner Ferlinghetti
claimed that their goal was to take poetry out of the classrooms and
bring it back to the streets. Their popular (and therefore derided)

This content downloaded from

170.178.162.100 on Wed, 21 Jun 2023 06:00:34 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 T H E A D 0 * 749

explorations of live poetry readings, spontaneous raps

with jazz accompaniment announced a fresh kind of w
new and unsophisticated audience. Although they we
appreciative of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, the Beats
ivory-tower entrapment of poetry. Battles raged betw
demic stewards of verse well-crafted in New Critical method-
ologies in New York publishing offices and the rowdy folks o
there on the West Coast who were brashly sounding their barba
yawps. Even though Burroughs was a Harvard graduate an
Ginsberg and Snyder attended graduate school at Berkeley, th
were not welcomed by the academic community during their glo
days. No members of the Columbia University English departme
attended Ginsberg's homecoming poetry reading in 1959. Kerou
did not graduate from college and was in fact ridiculed by som
reviewers because he attended Columbia on a football scholarshi
Everything about the Beat generation, from its writers breaking ou
of traditional modes of literary acceptability to its beatnik hangers
on wallowing in decadence and nonconformity, declared ind
pendence from the academy and its high priests, the academics. The
Beats were nothing if not un- (Norman Podhoretz charged the
with being anti-) academic.
Now the academics are producing complex, theory-driven, an
at times jargon-cluttered essays whose existence may seem to co
tradict the original Beat impulses. Does this critical activity un
dermine the impulsive freedoms upon which Beat literature
founded? The scholarly language inherent in most of the essays
these two collections illuminates the difficulty in the effects of th
books. The spiritually driven, experience-hungry teenager will n
respond to phrases such as "panopticism inculcates in the indivi
ual himself the surveillance that impels his conformity" (from
Ronna C. Johnson's essay in The Beat Generation [46]). This is the la
guage of a scholar writing to other scholars. One might wonde
whether the Beats are not being taken from the streets where they
deliberately established themselves and are having their poetic
drawn back into the tower. It is far likelier, of course, that in t
twenty-first century, academia has loosened up, not in its perh
necessarily exclusive language, the language of the MLA, but in
willingness to open up to a whole range of new literatures, subjects

This content downloaded from

170.178.162.100 on Wed, 21 Jun 2023 06:00:34 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 750 CO N T E M PORARY L IT E RAT U R E

and perspectives. Johnson quotes Kerouac in a su

"the cops stopped me in the Arizona desert that
hiking under a full moon at 2 A.M. to go spread
the sand outside Tucson-" (47). Kerouac's own la
trast famously loose and free-flowing, easily read b
eration who responded strongly to his voice. Clea
presume that today's literary scholars are th
Kerouac's freedom. Instead, they may be seen a
a sort, pointing the way for teachers and stude
explore sophisticated foundational and cultural
Beat-generation literature, even as the language
differs vastly.
Myrsiades's 2002 The Beat Generation: Critical Essays brings tight
focus from various critical approaches to specific works, authors,
and issues. The book constitutes a compendium volume for inter-
ested readers-a useful overview of current critical approaches to
selected works. The collection provides an opportunity for Robert
Bennett, then a graduate student at the University of California,
Santa Barbara, to present a fine essay that complicates what he
sees as the too-simplistic understanding many readers have of the
relationship of the Beats to the "squares" of the 1950s, a beneficial
new perspective now available in part because Beat-era New
Critical assumptions have given way to "multiple waves of post-
structuralism, deconstructionism, New Historicism, feminism,
multiculturalism, and other forms of critical theory and cultural
studies" (4). Six of the essays in Myrsiades's volume consider vari-
ous approaches to Kerouac's work; two each the work of Ginsberg
and Burroughs; and one Gary Snyder's lifetime accomplishment,
Mountains and Rivers without End. Myrsiades's most unusual inclu-
sions are the last three essays, which open the door to much broader
possibilities in Beat studies ("Beat studies" now constituting an
accepted topic that continues to grow and garner respect). These
last essays explore new territory by tracing Beat connections to
William Kotzwinkle, Chicano writer Oscar Zeta Acosta, and
German writers Wolf Wondratscheck, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, and
Jorg Fauser. Simon Vinkenoog and other Dutch poets are also dis-
cussed, and thus the collection expands to present a surprising and
fresh Euro-Beat flavor.

This content downloaded from

170.178.162.100 on Wed, 21 Jun 2023 06:00:34 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 T H E A D 0 751

Myrsiades's The Beat Generation: Critical Essays

after A. Robert Lee's The Beat Generation Writers, a
of critical essays with which it must be compared
reason than that Lee contributes essays to both t
Skerl collections, thus pulling off the Beat studie
collection consists of ten essays by British scholars
the literary impact of the Beats on British writers
fact, Carolyn Cassady (Off the Road: My Years with
and Ginsberg [1990]), who lives in England, conte
most of the 1980s and 1990s the Beats were
England than they were in America. In contrast
volume, the British volume contains only one es
work while featuring two on the larger concerns
Beat generation and one on black Beat writers. Th
ume does deal with these issues but in the context of articles on

individual writers, most notably in Nancy M. Grace's study

Kerouac's love stories. The Beat Generation: Critical Essays is a natu-
ral counterpart and complement to the British volume, for it pr
sents alternative views, American perspectives, and newer an
more sophisticated critical approaches.
Bennett's useful opening essay, "Teaching the Beat Generation t
Generation X," presents a challenge to both readers and teacher
(half of the essays here appeared originally in a special issue of
College Literature dedicated to teaching Beat literature [Winter
2000]). This essay is a good leadoff for a volume that emphasize
bringing cultural and historical background to bear on student
preconceived notions of the Beats and what-and how-they
mean. Sufficiently comprehensive in scope to encompass the who
perception of Beat studies, Bennett's essay successfully "compli
cates" the generally misunderstood contrast between the Beats an
conventional fifties American social norms. Bennett warns agains
accepting a version of history based on simplistic assumptions:
"educators must directly confront this task of deconstructing th
binary opposition between the Beats and the Squares if they wan
to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the Be
Generation which goes beyond superficial stereotypes and partisa
sloganeering" (3). This thesis serves as a basis of critical reasonin
to which many of the other essayists adhere. For example, Fion

This content downloaded from

170.178.162.100 on Wed, 21 Jun 2023 06:00:34 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 752 C ONTEMPORARY LIT E RATURE

Paton ("Reconceiving Kerouac: Why We

suggests asking students to list their preco
Beat ethos before they read Kerouac's ex
the Beat Generation," in order to contrast Kerouac's notion with the
popular reception. Both Bennett and Paton urge teachers to compli-
cate students' acceptance of information and literature by leading
them to see beyond simplistic notions of difference, a task that the
popular press in the fifties failed to perform. Bennett points to the
1959 Life magazine article "Squaresville U.S.A. vs. Beatsville," in
which the heartland of American life is contrasted with the far-out
world of the beatniks, and insists that successful classroom dis-
cussions must deconstruct simplistic categorizing. Bennett further
complicates the issue of academic acceptance of Beat sociology by
noting that some current disapproval of Beat studies surely arises
from "the Beat Generation's sexism, racism, and apoliticism as
much as it emerges from a vestigial New Critical veneration of
canonical orthodoxy" (4). Thus Bennett both complicates and
reevaluates the reasons for academic resistance to Beat literature.

Ann Douglas, the author of The Feminization of American Culture

(1977), also advocates unsimplifying Beat texts in her essay
"Telepathic Shock and Meaning Excitement: Kerouac's Poetics of
Intimacy," suggesting that Kerouac's readers work through the
"culture of intimacy" that his writing creates to see the world in
which and of which Kerouac wrote. Douglas offers a reception
study by way of a personal reader-response analysis, remembering
that in 1959, On the Road told her and her young women friends, all
comfortably upper-middle-class, that they "were a part of a conti-
nent rather than a country" (23), and that there was a much greater
divergency of people than they had imagined. Though Douglas
wanders widely along the shore, she rarely wades into deep wa-
ters, offering instead a broadly based argument on the efficacy of
Kerouac's intimacy in his work and how he countered the prevail-
ing cultural milieu of the 1950s. She declares, "Kerouac's ethos of
openness, his insistence that he comes before us totally unarmed,
unprepared, and unguarded, ready to keep absolutely nothing
back, makes the most sense when we realize that he was writing at
a time when national preparedness, particularly military prepared-
ness, took on proportions unprecedented in Western history" (27).

This content downloaded from

170.178.162.100 on Wed, 21 Jun 2023 06:00:34 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 T H E A D 0 * 753

Intimacy is gained primarily in terms of Kerouac's

"pulling the reader inside the story as well" (29).
The Beats are often considered a vocal culture, known fo
talkfests and for spoken-word poetry that relied on the op
breath rather than the constraints of the printed page
Johnson's "'You're Putting Me On': Jack Kerouac and
modern Emergence" breaks new ground by analyzing
well-known 1959 appearance on The Steve Allen Show. J
sitions Kerouac as an antecedent to postmoderism b
that in his responses to Allen's questions, Kerouac resi
modification into a mass-media product for public consu
the dominant commercial culture. She supports her asse
textual evidence from Kerouac's own writing in Desolat
and Vanity of Duluoz, where he "disavows and deconst
iconic-and thus false-status to which the media had hoisted him.
Johnson compellingly argues that Kerouac's longtime general dis-
missal as a writer resulted partly from his appropriation into a
palatable image ("simulacra") and from chronology; he preceded
theories that name and define postmodernism. Johnson's scrutiny of
Kerouac's interview with Allen veers occasionally into the overly
clever. For example, Allen predicates his request that Kerouac define
the word Beat by noting that Kerouac might be tired of the question,
since "everybody always puts it to you," and Johnson writes, "The
locution 'everybody always puts it to you' operates in a different
register to signify or suggest a different colloquialism, to be
shafted-both valences of meaning suggest being tricked, cheated,
victimized" (43). Ultimately, though, Johnson expertly ties Marxist
consumer theory with pre-postmodern analysis to show that
Kerouac successfully turned the media gaze back on itself in his art,
fending off both the negation and reconstruction of the self.
Erik R. Mortenson continues the Marxist critical approach in
"Beating Time: Configurations of Temporality in Jack Kerouac's On
the Road" by detailing the capitalist corruption of time and On the
Road's attack against this corruption. Mortenson clarifies distinc-
tions among the concepts of American time, Mexican time, and
African American (jazz) time. Within these contexts, Mortenson
establishes a new distinction for Dean Moriarty's explanation of
"IT," the point at which-among other mystical accomplishments-

This content downloaded from

170.178.162.100 on Wed, 21 Jun 2023 06:00:34 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 754 CO N T E M PORARY LITERATURE

time stands still. He sees Moriarty as a Marxist

standard notions of time in his refusal to be e
time as fluid, rather than static, Moriarty d
notions of capitalistic power" (62). Moriarty
be apprehended when one lives not in fragm
minute, but in one time, "and that time is 'now
Mortenson takes seemingly toss-off utteran
were alive all night ... nothing ever ended"
orous scrutiny to them in order to show tha
with powerful dominant cultural forces. Mo
On the Road is an inconsistent though largel
[the] constraining notions of temporality" (73)
Steve Wilson answers the call in Bennett's ope
plicating the conditions of the Beats' positio
stream society, in this case by analyzing the
status as an outsider. His essay, "The Author
The Search for Authenticity in Jack Kerouac's
Subterraneans," begins promisingly but is not
into a compelling argument that one may a
(an undefined term) by suffering an outsid
tralizes the issue of cultural diversity when
and admits that frequently Kerouac's views
Americans, and homosexuals "are less open-m
imagine from the 'King of the Beats"' (77). A
Wilson positions Kerouac as a white write
explores "his very American mind." Compa
other essays in this volume, Wilson's essa
sources; whereas Johnson develops ideas
Foucault, Fredric Jameson, and Jean Baudr
Wilson dips into Kerouac's biographies and
To be fair, Wilson is plowing different criti
still, Wilson might have delivered on the p
drawing on studies of ethnicity and sexu
American society. He offers the observation th
ine numerous instances reflecting Kerouac's
status with authenticity" (82), but he does no
claim, choosing instead to focus for the mo
character. One questionable conclusion W

This content downloaded from

170.178.162.100 on Wed, 21 Jun 2023 06:00:34 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 T H E A D 0 * 755

Moriarty's actions is that "[w]e must focus our energie

ing our own kicks, and mustn't let any obligations to o
our way" (83). The connection of nihilism to authenticity
Nancy M. Grace's "A White Man in Love: A Stud
Gender, Class, and Ethnicity in Jack Kerouac's Maggie
Subterraneans, and Tristessa" completes the thorough text
sis that Wilson's essay points toward. Grace's essay, a
combination of biographical and literary analysis, ope
areas that will assuredly engage today's students. Dra
from Grace's ideas, I recently taught Maggie Cassidy t
class with excellent results. Grace considers Kerouac's contrasts of
the White American Woman, who embodies a wholesome, nonsex-
ual morality, the primitive "fellaheen" woman who, for Kerouac,
personifies earthiness and sexuality, and, finally, the grotesque,
identified with "the despised, exoticized, irregular, and incom-
plete" (96). As does Wilson, Grace contends that "it is simply too
easy to label [Kerouac] racist and misogynist" (97), and she seeks
to recover Kerouac's image by complicating the readings of what
she calls "ficto-autobiography," particularly the works in which
Kerouac dealt most directly with his relationships with women.
Grace's treatment of the high-school track-meet scene and the ensu-
ing scenes in Maggie Cassidy is the highlight of her essay and one of
the brightest moments in the volume. Grace's careful research,
including the Lowell Sun sports pages, and her close reading of the
text provide an insightful look into Kerouac's method of construct-
ing "ficto-autobiography." According to Grace, Kerouac did not
compete against a black athlete when he won the thirty-yard dash
against Worcester North in January 1939. Instead, a black runner
defeated Kerouac easily in an earlier meet; Kerouac conflated the
two events to "transform his defeat by an African-American into a
victory signifying personal and cultural aggrandizement" (101).
Grace goes on to explore the complications of masculine whiteness
that Kerouac critiques. Kerouac leaves the whiteness of Maggie's
hometown to pursue the dark woman of his dreams (Mardou in The
Subterraneans and Tristessa), someone who seems wholly other but
with whom he may bond and transform himself. Grace concludes
that although the narrators fail to find lasting love, they benefit by
the experience and are able to create literary art.

This content downloaded from

170.178.162.100 on Wed, 21 Jun 2023 06:00:34 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 756 CO N T E M PORARY LITERAT U R E

Fiona Paton's "Reconceiving Kerouac: Why

Doctor Sax" also applies a multidisciplinary ap
a student's need for knowledge of fifties cultu
specifically those of bebop. Paton's essay is a fir
to teach Kerouac: she positions Doctor Sax as a m
than On the Road, outlining a clear progressio
value of Doctor Sax as an entry to the crossov
and Kerouac's performance of spontaneous pro
natural complement in Richard Quinn's "Ja
Parker, and the Poetics of Improvisation" in S
the Beats (correlations among the numerous essa
why interested scholars should avail themsel
Quinn attempts what must be the toughest ch
critic, that of describing in prose the sounds
Charlie Parker's first solo chorus from "Koko,
Quinn augments his description with the print
scription and then seeks to compare Parke
method with Kerouac's. Quinn's phrasing is oc
one passage in Kerouac's Mexico City Blues, "c
combine portrait realism" [161]), and he also s
ficult corollary argument: even though Parke
tionale for his method of improvisation, Q
"Kerouac's writing reflects Parker's vision
improvisational methods" (162). In spite of th
Quinn succeeds in presenting a comprehensive
spontaneity and improvisation and along with
study of Kerouac's spontaneous prose in comp
Timothy S. Murphy's "Intersection Points
Burroughs's Naked Lunch" is another of the
eration: Critical Essays that offers astute guidan
Beat works into the classroom, focusing on w
most difficult one to teach, Naked Lunch, the di
Murphy succinctly describes as "relentless sca
linear structure" (179). Murphy presents a cl
approach for teachers that also works well to
hend this challenging book. Murphy's five tab
rence of characters, addiction of the body, po
refrains) are particularly helpful.

This content downloaded from

170.178.162.100 on Wed, 21 Jun 2023 06:00:34 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 T H E A D 0 757

Douglas G. Baldwin's "Word Begets Image an

rus: Undermining Language and Film in the Wo
Burroughs" is impressively multidisciplinary in s
two endnotes and fifty-three cited works, Bald
nearly equals the length of his article. The effort pa
Baldwin details Burroughs's ambivalent response
vision and the postmodern influences in his work
continues his fine work on urban pastoral t
Ginsberg's Urban Pastoral," conceiving Ginsberg a
Jaap van der Bent focuses on Ginsberg's 1957 vis
where the poet met Dutch writers Simon Vinke
Morrien; van der Bent contends that Ginsbe
Vinkenoog's work and Dutch literature in gener
tions German writer Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, wh
more detail in Anthony Waine and Jonathan Woo
and Wooley examine the ways in which certain
were influenced by "father figures who acted lik
Jennie Skerl divides Reconstructing the Beats into
"Re-historicizing," "Recovering," and "Re-vision
tion of essays examines Beat works from contempor
oretical, historical, and interdisciplinary perspe
review of Beat studies, Nancy M. Grace speculates
Beat criticism can lure publishers into not bother
scholarship. She complains that while "the comm
necting [Beat] practitioners, the melding of life
interdisciplinary approaches," readers are "too of
ship that suffers from lack of a sustained and genu
nary method, that is, scholarship that combines bot
and methods of two or more disciplines to solve pro
questions that are beyond the scope of a single
essayists in Skerl's collection generally apply such
methods, as evidenced by the wide-ranging, eclec
tive works cited. While Myrsiades's collection co
marily with textual analysis, Skerl's book investi

1. Nancy M. Grace, "Seeking the Spirit of Beat: The Call f

Scholarship," Contemporary Literature 43 (2002): 820.

This content downloaded from

170.178.162.100 on Wed, 21 Jun 2023 06:00:34 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 758 C O N T E M PORARY LITERATURE

issues of race, class, and gender. In additi

Beats as "an avant-garde arts movement an
(1), seeks to open up the field of Beat stud
than the three to six figures who generally h
the Beat writers.

Robert Holton's "'The Sordid Hipsters of America': Beat Culture

and the Folds of Heterogeneity" opens the collection with an analy-
sis of the homogenization of American culture in the mid 1950s,
offering as evidence the legislation that curtailed dissent, the
Federal Highways Act, postwar suburbia, the consumer revolution,
and contemporary conformism. Holton contends that the Beats'
explorations of the "folds of heterogeneity" provided both secular
and sacred havens-alienation as a cultural position. He lists nov-
els that reflected but did not transcend "containment culture," such
as The Catcher in the Rye, Rabbit, Run, Revolutionary Road, One Flew
Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Catch-22, and Dangling Man. Rather than
pointing toward habitable alternative spaces for the alienated, these
works reinforce the penalties for those who refuse to adjust.
Ginsberg's Howl "seemed to offer the means to break out of the cul-
tural enclosure" and heralded the Beats' creation of "a new and

authentic space ... an identity on the bedrock of the naked self, f

of compromising cultural and historical accretions" that reflects t
definitions of "Beat" given later by John Clellon Holmes, Kero
and Ginsberg (17). Holton deftly outlines the Beats' affinity w
contemporary African Americans and the working class in gen
as well as women and the anomic, as natural inhabitants of cultur
subgroups cut off from middle-class identity, with their own
guage, dress, music, symbol systems, and behaviors. Holton's e
finds a beneficial pairing with Clinton R. Starr's "'I Want To Be w
My Own Kind': Individual Resistance and Collective Action in
Beat Counterculture." Following Kerouac's lead, many readers
missed the bearded, bongo-tapping hangers-on of the fifties
sixties as simple bohemian wannabes whose presence deme
the serious artistic work of the Beat writers. Rather than snubbin
the mostly nonwriting beatniks, Starr places them front and cen
and achieves a surprisingly successful essay in which he substa
ates a broad definition-"the Beat Generation was a vibrant coun-
terculture that facilitated individual resistance and collective

This content downloaded from

170.178.162.100 on Wed, 21 Jun 2023 06:00:34 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 T H E A D 0 * 759

political activism"-with a well-researched analysis o

spaces" and concludes with an overview of resistance
in homosexuality, racial intermixing, and political ac
Daniel Belgrad's "The Transnational Countercu
Mexican Intersections," follows the spirit of the
Myrsiades's collection who trace international co
influences. Belgrad compares the Beats and the magical
marily Octavio Paz, who reacted against the emerg
capitalist postwar order. Belgrad seeks to correct the
Beats simply used Mexico as a respite, a convenient g
rooms, wine, and sex could be had cheaply-in short,
the Beats were colonialists taking advantage of a prim
Instead, Belgrad shows that the Beats benefited artistic
acting with magical realist notions of art and literature
The middle section of Skerl's collection, "Recoveri
as the most significant. The five essays here promot
writers who have been largely left behind in the las
of Beat studies: Ruth Weiss, Joanne Kyger, Lenore
Kaufman, and Ted Joans. Nancy M. Grace establish
impetus for these essays by acknowledging that
remains relatively unknown, "[f]ew poets-male or f
said to embody Beat to the extent of the San Franc
formance poet ruth weiss" (57). Weiss's spontaneous m
association demands a sympathetic reader, one w
willing to free associate and to swing with both mea
sage, and Grace is such a reader. At times one wond
Grace tries too hard to establish Weiss as an important
sional artist ("'I am constantly exploding into any m
has said" [58]), but there can be no doubt that she prese
a way that will win her new readers, particularly for h
Desert Journal. Amy L. Friedman similarly positions
as an important common link between various poet
circles. Friedman has been an early endorser of the wor
Beats, particularly in her essay "'I Say My New N
Writers of the Beat Generation," in Lee's The Beat Gene
anthology. Here Friedman relies strongly on Kyger
recover her position as a contemporary of the Beats and
her absence from the Beat canon, ably explaining th

This content downloaded from

170.178.162.100 on Wed, 21 Jun 2023 06:00:34 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 760 C O N T E M PORARY L IT E RAT U R E

Beats coped with male dominance of the movemen

ing their own literature. Kyger's journals reveal ho
Gary Snyder, and Allen Ginsberg soaked up the ad
audiences while Kyger herself pursued a "less ego-
tory." Ronna C. Johnson discusses the work of
a poet who achieved notoriety for her 1966 publica
Book and was the only woman to speak from the Be-I
with Ginsberg, Snyder, and Michael McClure. John
difficulties faced by women who were treated di
whose works were received differently from those of
writers. Kandel herself, who once disavowed connec
Beats, further complicates the situation. She to
"I think the idea of a community of artists is app
have communities of plumbers or painters, so w
have a community of poets?"2 The definition of "
has always been hazy and unstable, yet as these sch
does not have to be a bona fide member of a group to
same cultural pressures or share a common poetic
states, and as these essays prove, "The women writ
Generation have moved beyond existing as a subs
Generation studies" (87). This contention is reinforced
publication of Breaking the Rule of Cool: Interview
Women Beat Writers, edited by Grace and Johnso
invariably pops up in each of the interviews: how do
Beat generation? The various answers are enlighte
scope and insight into each woman's particular pe
Beat generation has long been seen as a boy gang,
romantic types who see women as sex objects, or su
als who abhor women generally. In fact, most of th
ing work in Beat studies has been done by women
the women Beats themselves are being treated
scrutiny.
Skerl's final section, "Re-visioning," contains essa
way or another seek to reconfigure aspects of the
known Beat writers, Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burr

2. Qtd. in Bruce Cook, The Beat Generation (New York: Scribner, 1

This content downloaded from

170.178.162.100 on Wed, 21 Jun 2023 06:00:34 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 T H E A D 0 761

these writers having been examined endlessly, th

manage to bring new perspectives to their work. T
applies a multidisciplinary approach in his descript
York art world of the 1950s and the ways that experi
literature interact in the pursuit of abstraction in
Abstract Art Means in Pull My Daisy." Deshae E. Lo
Buddhism influenced Kerouac's nature writing
Kerouac's nature writing has escaped prolonged, f
and provides a satisfying overview from various pe
Trigilio treats another unexamined area, Ginsberg
work. Oliver Harris ends the collection with a brilliant examina-
tion of Kerouac's fictionalization of Burroughs as various charac-
ters in his work and the influence of these characterizations on
Burroughs's reception, but also-fascinatingly-on Burroughs's
own production and self-imaging.
All in all, these two collections are invaluable in the ongoing
exploration of the Beats and of mid-century American literature
and culture. Both books serve to historicize and contextualize what
many readers have accepted as the Beat legend, and in this way are
highly valuable to understanding what transpired in the bohemian
arts world in the 1950s and beyond.
Gardner Webb University

This content downloaded from

170.178.162.100 on Wed, 21 Jun 2023 06:00:34 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms