The Beats, A to Z
In the summer of 1977, Allen Ginsberg was thinking a lot about death and the precious fragility of existence.
The poet, then just 51 years old, had plenty of good reasons for doing so. His father, Louis, a rhyming poet from New Jersey, had died the previous July, nursed through his final months by Ginsberg and his companion Peter Orlovsky. Four years earlier, Ginsberg had slipped in the snow and broken a bone while feeding his dogs; subsequent tests revealed that the author of “Howl” had chronic hepatitis — the first intimation of the liver cancer that would kill him 20 years later. And he had taken formal vows with a Buddhist teacher, a Tibetan lama named Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, whose sobering advice to the fame-hungry, workaholic poet-activist was, “Better prepare for death.”
At the same time, Ginsberg was in the midst of one of the most prolific periods of his life. His meditation practice with Trungpa inspired a fine collection of new poems called “Mind Breaths,” and the elegy he wrote in Louis’ memory, “Father Death Blues,” is considered one of his masterpieces.
That summer, Ginsberg commenced a series of lectures on the history of the Beat Generation — the lively and provocative group of poets and novelists that included Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso and others — at a Buddhist college called Naropa Institute (now Naropa University) founded by Trungpa in Colorado. This lecture series, which continued at Brooklyn College when Ginsberg took a distinguished professorship there in 1986, became the poet’s most sustained effort to come to grips with the legacy of the writers whom he, more than anyone else, helped launch to international fame.
Now Bill Morgan, Ginsberg’s former archivist and the author/editor of a couple of dozen books on the Beats, has collected these lectures in a volume called “The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats.” Scholarly, wideranging and full of penetrating insight and fascinating literary gossip, the book is a major contribution to the core Beat canon, and provides an astonishingly intimate view of a homegrown American literary movement that would have a generative influence worldwide, inspiring generations of writers, visual artists, filmmakers, musicians and political activists across the globe.
By exploring the seminal texts that informed the Beats’ own literary ambitions (ranging from Shakespeare, to Blake, to Keats, to Whitman and beyond), the book also permanently lays to rest the notion that the Beats were unschooled naifs, “know-nothing bohemians” in a drugfueled rebellion against traditional mores and propriety, as they were caricatured by critics when they first burst on the scene. Ginsberg’s talks also bring to light the profound influence of jazz innovators like Charlie Parker and Dexter Gordon on his friends’ work. By hearing the syncopated rhythms of black street talk in the imaginative flights of bebop, and echoing those rhythms in their writing, Ginsberg explains, the Beats extended the practice of poets like William Carlos Williams, who aimed to bring the arid, abstract language of academic poetry back to its vernacular roots.
A poignant foreword to “Best Minds” by poet Anne Waldman, who co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa with Ginsberg, emphasizes the continuing relevance of the Beats’ legacy of cross-cultural resistance to our contemporary moment. She also points out a major gap in Ginsberg’s overview: “The women are missing here.” The original Beat nucleus that coalesced at Columbia University in the late 1940s was most definitely a boys’ club.
An important truth often overlooked in appraisals of the period is how various — and even dissimilar — the Beat writers were in style, method and approach. Kerouac’s brokenhearted evocations of innocent prewar America in “On the Road” were the emotional opposite of William Burroughs’ exuberantly pornographic science-fiction panoramas in “Nova Express.” In Ginsberg’s view, the Beats were not mere rebels against the literary establishment, avatars of “hip” style, or even valiant culture warriors. The essence of Beatness to him was a commitment to the act of writing as precise examination of the boundary between reality and awareness — “inquisitiveness into the nature of consciousness, with literature as a ‘noble means,’ ” as Ginsberg put it to his students.
Some of the most memorable passages of “Best Minds” consist of close readings of texts that even Ginsberg dismissed as too personal or experimental when he first read them, notably Kerouac’s sprawling “Visions of Cody.” Considered unpublishable for two decades, the book contains some of Kerouac’s most rhapsodic transports of language, as when he describes the face of Cody Pomeray (in real life, Neal Cassady, also the “secret hero” of “Howl” and “On the Road”) as looking like “it’s been pressed against metal bars to get that dogged, rocky look of suffering, perseverance, finally when you look closest, happy prim self-belief, with Western sideburns and big blue flirtatious eyes of an old maid and fluttering lashes.”
“Best Minds” is not a perfect book: the chapter divisions seem nearly arbitrary, and there are egregious transcription errors that Morgan should have caught. But even with these minor glitches, “Best Minds” situates the Beats in cultural history in a way that no other exploration of their work does. The overarching lesson of Ginsberg’s lectures was that the best preparation for death is to honor life in its myriad and infinite particulars — by daring to make art that sees the world anew.
Steve Silberman is the author of “NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity” (Avery Books, 2015). Email: books@ sfchronicle.com