In the Fifties, the Beat Generation held up the poetic mirror to modern society, or at least as modern as the space age Fifties could be with it’s finger poppin' Sal Mimeo Bongo Beat Babes and cranial coffeehouses gangs were getting stoked and folked on poetry in a petri dish of beat lit and music and babes in berets & turtleneck sweaters with Keely Smith vacant looks and Maynard G. Krebs look a likes carrying around Sartre on a dented tray by a dented waitress and they begin the seasonal holidays howling like a ginsu Ginsberg laying low for Lao Tse and Bhikkus with a yin for zen and the peaks of Wu Tai Shan where yin meets yang and the North Beach Bitch is already in hyper heat as the gen of post-war pre-fab Levittowns travel the beat street where sputniks sputter and beatniks litter the downtown walls with ghetto manifesto's looking back they see kerouac sailing along the narrows of Burroughs setting a Corso course like Hopalong Neal Cassidy riding the range of old beat Denver on Colfax Ave where no buffalo roam but winos fill the flophouse landscape with stained mattresses and teh broken dream glass of a life missed by a mile downhill from now on, now off, on again until the light fails and the filament fails and breaks leaving the light of blind darkness to lead the blind seeing eye dogs....the beat...it goes on..and on..om and om… as a generation of Americans were "beat" as far down as society could push them and emerging from the rubble of the Cold War, folk music blended with poetry in the coffeehouse circuit of the East Village in New York to North Beach in San Francisco where Allen Ginsberg was howling his ass off as the voice of a new generation, Kerouac documented it with a typewriter, and folk music was making statements with music and lyrics as the Fifties fornicated with the emerging Sixties.
The term “Beat Generation” was first used by Jack Kerouac in 1948. In 1952 John Clellon Holmes introduced the phrase to the masses in an article in the New York Times Magazine..called “This Is The Beat Generation.” In 1958, Mr. San Francisco, Herb Caen coined the term Beatnik!! San Francisco...the Bet Gen and old beat North Beach.. an enclave of thinkers..poets..wino's and spirituality, it was a neighborhood that was a melting pot of sweet jazz and the smell of marijuana drifting into the fog nights of the city.
In 1957, Jacks book, “ON THE ROAD” was released by his publisher and has since influenced the asphalt and inner search in generations of Dharma Bums. Allen Ginsberg’s poem “HOWL” pierced the Beat night skies like the cry of a wolf in the forest. It was a rallying cry that was heard by a whole generation...a cry that brought maturity to a movement then in its infancy. Revolutionary for its time, it defined The Search...and brought all the elements into alignment. Beat planets orbiting around a poetic sun...complete with meteoric ideas that raced through the minds eye-sky on a collision course with the Establishment. As Jack passed around the wine jug, Allen’s sweet voice rang out and HOWL could be heard across the universe. If Kerouac gave a generation its beat words, Allen Ginsberg gave it the beat voice.
The literary movement needed a guardian. Founded in 1953 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, it is the Fort Knox of Beat prose and poetry, and the repository of revolutionary ideas and artistic expression. In 1955 City Lights began publishing the works on an eclectic range of cutting edge writers, thinkers, sinners and saints...yes, HOWL was published by this premier vanguard of avant guarde publishing houses.
One can only imagine the after hours port, prose and poetry conversations that were held there lasting long past the night and into the morning...record players scratching out a jazz beat...voices flowing with a symphony of ideas..drifting out into the ultra cool San Francisco nights...Ghost Voices...now long gone.
The Beats had their writers and their dark poetry, but they also had socially critical comedians who illuminated the American beat experience with their black humour, held up to the face like a mirror to expose the social hypocrisy of the times. Mort Sahl, a sophisticated political satirist slicing through the American political landscape like a Ginsu knife through butter...Woody Allen...East Coast personified who made neurosis cool...and the caustic acid bath humour of Lenny Bruce who taught a whole generation how to talk dirty and influence people.
The Beats were on the road from coast to coast…
Part Two
Beats and Bongos: The Village and the Outlaw Poets
Beats and bards were perfecting an imperfect alignment as black holes in the impermanent firmament of inner and outer space with spoken word performances marking the Mason-Dixon lines between hipster cool and ungroovy squares where the unbeat ‘burbs flock to the scene to enjoy the obscene they hope will inject them with hep cat cool but leave them out in the uncool cold of mad, mad, mad Mad Ave Maria Avenue on grey Bleeker street where Nancy danced on Delancey and the population stopped dead in it’s tracks of copulation mortified by Sahl the Mort, the rabble rousing Rabelais of the atomic revolution while a gen goes spinning way out, far out of groovy kerouac control plowing furrows of burroughs to plant the seeds of literary dissent to combat the dysentry of conformity while forging plowshares into swords of Toledo steel for the Literary Escadrille as black vinyl gives up the wisdom of Rusty Warren allowing the nightlight to illuminate those dark wino alley corners hiding hi-fidelity infidelity while the magnificent Magnavox looks for a fix of RCA plugs to input-output and out-put again as the writer writes and the RCA plug provides the input of words to the page until the reader reads the words and the RCA plug now becomes the output once againThe Beat Gen is usually associated with a Left Coast tint to it’s aura that includes the cheap screw top wine and lanquid marijuana aroma that enveloped San Francisco, a fog cloud shroud of social disaffection that permeated the sub-soil sub-culture. In fact the Beat Journey which parked it’s beret and bongos in Ess Eff, originated in the East, the far-out east of New York City, in Greenwich Village and specifically was launched from the campus of Columbia University, much as the Berkeley Campus would soon in time launch the Free Speech Movement as the Dawn of Hippie began its ascent above the horizon.
Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg and many others were the creators of the East Coast lit scene that eventually blazed a pioneering trail westward setting a Corso course setting sail on the ocean of tall grass prarie on revved up modern machine in creative Conestoga wagon trains loaded down with provisions of prose and poetry tied until they came to the end of the Beat Santa Fe Trail ready to unload their booze and typewriters in the new lands at the edge of the American Continent.
New York was the breeding ground for these apolitical pioneers, who unlike their spawn, the Hippie Gen who would soon emerge, were more concerned with the temporal aspects of life and not the future of society as a whole. Artistic expression, freedom of speech, and the winds of change were fueling their need to change art, especially the written and spoken word of American literature to reflect their beatific philosophy of outlaw sainthood. Go go bongo beat gothic...been done Gen X..before your time!
The media image still prevails of Dali bohemian be-bop hipsters. New York - Flashback William Burroughs was dabbling in the art of fencing stolen goods and adulating opiates thanks to the galaxy known as Times Square and an addict known as Herbert Huncke who shows up time and again in the pages of Beat lit. Hell he even got the Jew Ginsberg arrested with a carload of stolen merchandise ready to be fenced. Gins crashed the car in a police chase and hoofed it to elude capture. Unfortunately Gins kept copious notes on his criminal activities that led to his eventual capture. He plead insanity and spent 90 days in the cuckoos nest known as Bellevue Hospital. New York, New York...It was in the Village with it’s cheap rents that the writers and artists gravitated to create their own solar system. Burroughs, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Jackson Pollock and other abstract obstructionists created a sociological psychopathic scene fresh from the wet paint torn canvas of Hello, Dali himself. It was coffeehouse chic tongue in hipster cheek joints where pretentious convo mixed with legit lit, spoken words, poetry and social comedy fornicated with jazz improv as background for the experimental mental misfits as they were viewed by “straight” society as they dwelled in their underground below street level dens of beat sin and holy degradation where booze and drugs were the conversational fuels of choice.
Coffeehouse acted as magnets and attracted suburban youth who wanted a taste of the Bohemian apple and brush with “degeneracy” with real live degenerates degenerating before their very eyes. The coffeehouse as watering hole and holy enclave had been around since the first beats left the garden of straight Eden in the late 40’s for the loin lusting gardens of Hedon that would define them in the 1950’s. All in all the Beat Gen and beat hangouts were mere mirror images of the Lost Gen in Paris during the Hemingway-Gertrude Stein 1920’s. These new gathering places were not restaurants by any stretch of the imagination unless cheesecake and sandwiches are your idea of dinner at the Waldorf..ah..but the establishments had exotic names that today are legendary. the Hungry i and the Purple Onion on San Fran and in Detroit, it was the Cup of Socrates or as Bill and Ted would say...So-Crates. Along with the beat poets and spoken word prosers and a few illit posers the gen was not quite yet in the vanguard of social protest that was the evolution towards revolution for the Hippie Gen to take to the next level!
The Beats: Sex, Drugs and Cinema (Part Three) By Mike Marino
The media creation and cremation of the Beat Gen was a creative cornucopia of sexual copulation with obscured and blurred lines that would be crossed time again in erotic experimentation with tits and ass as the perfect aperitif to go with your heroin and grass. It was a lubricated lubricious era of libidinous lust fueled by the loin hungry lions of literature.
Bi-sexuality and open homosexuality were not hidden cloistered closets of the Beat contemporaries. Ginsberg flaunted flamboyantly while Burroughs beat a junky’s path to same sex liasons with the speed of a Burroughs bullet from a loaded .38.
Ginsberg howled in Howl about homosexuality while Burroughs enjoyed a Naked Lunch that also included pedophila that led authorities to prosecute the promiscuous promoters of same gender gratification for obscenity. The new American Literature was about to face the guillotine...loosing it’s head over giving head! Victory, however would belong to the victorious vicars of vice. Howl was now free to scream louder than ever and a naked lunch was feasted upon by the glitterati of literati.
Kerouac touches on homosexuality, bi-sesuality and (Gasp!) Interracial sex in “The Subterraneans” not to mention some rousing hetero group sex gropings in “Dharma Bums” (must be why that is my favorite Jack K. tome)
Drugs part and parcel of the pharmacological knapsack of the Beats. At first bennies, weed and morphine all taken with a beat booze chaser followed later by psychedelics. The Beat Burroughs is most connected with pharma concoctions and chemical cocktails that would boggle even me in those days. Visitors such as writer Terry Southern would arrive at Big Bad Bills with a prodigious beat bag of pharma samples...Bll would know them by name by the shape and colors and knew what effects various combo’s would give him!
The media played this undercurrent of the underground up in the popular culture and the Beats as Beasts were born. Movies such as “The Beatniks” tore the silver screen apart making the Beats into a cross between Jack the Ripper jacking off to Jekyll and Hyde playing Hyde and Seek lying in wait for unsuspecting virgins...male and female to defile and debauch.
It got to the point of ludicrous when North Beach the hip enclave hired beats with berets and beards to sit on their bar and restaurant windows to attract tourists and invite them to be seen in the scene. Soon by 1958 bus tours to North Beach were all the vogue, as they were similarly later during the hippie era of Haight Ashbury.
New York reached the apex of crass commercialism however when a company opened taht you could call and “rent-a-beatnik” for home parties to read poetry and, uh, act beautifully beat beatific. Ginsberg found it all amusing while Kerouac cracked that the beat message of his writings was now lost in space and beat behavior was being prostituted. He also distanced himself from his beat roots by the Sixties. The hippie gen made pilgrimages to Lowell, Mass where Kerouac was living and would show up in adoring adulation to the temple of Kerouac. He wrote of these instances in a magazine and told the hippies to “get lost and find your own heroes!”
The Beats beat a path to obscurity while the Haight got hip...until the Death of Hip..where the hell are all the hipsters today? The Beats may be gone..but they will always be literatures On Sweet Om!
Pat Four Herbert Hunke: The Beat Gen Junky
Poetry pouring from a fast flowing syringe in some dark beat zen corner of Times Square where only the hipsters dare go, ergo, go go go, while the junky Hunke inhales coke up his nose while writing his beat prose of criminal behaviour with a loaded .38 in his hip hipster pocket ready to explode, firing a cartridge of powder and lead aimed true and sure leaving a body cold in the alley face down, ass up while Burroughs tries to run down a cop and flees on foot while Kerouac hitches a ride with Cassidy for the County of Marin with a howling Ginsberg in tow...one more fix should do the trick to give that electric jolt stimuli to the nervous system erasing fear creating words making rhyme for no reason, the counter-balance to an unbalanced society’s sobriety with sobriquets like word bouquets ready to adorn the unborn prom queen before she starts menstruation and has to be home to engage in sexual activity with her brothers who work the high wire under the big top while clowns strip off in the center ring….this was the world of Herbert Hunke...the unknown soldier of the Beat Lit Gen. He along with Neal Cassidy were the “beats” while Kerouac et al wanted to be...the Colfax Ave Denver beat..the Thompkins Square needle jamming beats...while Jack K and Allen G were the luminous literary luminaria, the junky Huncke and the Cassidy of Neal were THE BEATS!
Herbert Edwin Huncke was born in Massachusetts as WWI was still raging in Europe in 1915. His family moved to Chicago where Huncke dropped out of school and began a life as a street hustler and began his life long love affair with hypodermic needles. Eventually he found city life too slow and began tramping and hob-nobbing with hobo’s while hopping hobo freight trains from the ass end of the country to the other. Vagrancy suited him well along with the hobo junkie lifestyle and it’s side order of sex and crime which were welcome additions to his transient nature and lifestyle. His vagrant ways also led to numerous arrests and jail time to mark off the calendar.
If Burroughs was the logical pharmacological prodigious prodigal of Beat Lit, and Ginsberg wore the feather boa as the no-profit prophet of the Beats and later the hip gens acid “queen” then Hunke was the profligate purveyor of licentious literature that drove the Beat underground into uncharted territories that scared the hell out of society’s matrons on and overload of sex more than John Rechy’s 1963 “City of Night”
Eventually he found his Garden of Needle Eden as a denizen of New Yorks dark and sinister underworld. He had hitched to the Big Apple and found the Yellow Brick Road to the Times Square quadrant where he reveled in revelry with male and female prostitutes, sex seeking sailors and junkies with needle tracks that would turn a dark green not from envy and would eventually lead them to death by overdose when flying monkeys would fill the syringe with a hot shot.
During the 40’s Huncke shipped out as a Merchant Marine and made landfall in Africa and South America where he could maintain his drug habit with morphine supplied by friendly medics. Then the turning point arrived when he clicked his ruby red slippers and returned to New York where he met an unknown writer at the time, and heir to the Burroughs adding machine fortune by the name of Bill, once referred to by Kerouac in one of his books as Old Bull.
He met Burroughs not to discuss literature or philosophy but to purchase a sub-machine gun and syringes fully loaded with a full metal jacket of morphine Burroughs was selling. They immediately got jammed and spiked together and became a segment of Bill’s later book “Junkie” where he documented this first and fateful meet. Hunke also shared a relationship with Bill’s common law wife as well as her love for the use of amphetamines.
In of the more bizarre beat moments one of the original Beat Brat Pack, Lucien Carr murdered David Kemmerer who was making unwanted sexual advances towards Carr.
According to Allen Ginsberg in his autobio - “Carr then stabbed Kemmerer and tossed his body in the river. He then went for help from Hunke, Burroughs and Kerouac who helped him ditch the weapon that killed David. Two days later, Carr confessed to police. At first they didn’t believe the young man’s story but that same day the coast guard found Kammerer’s body floating off 108th Street. Kerouac and Burroughs were arrested as accessories and charged as material witnesses. Burroughs’ family bailed him out and forced him to return to St. Louis. Kerouac was less fortunate as his father refused to help him. Kerouac’s girlfriend, Edie Parker, was set to receive an inheritance from her grandfather and decided to use that money to bail out Kerouac. There was only one glitch...the two had to be married before the money would be released. They married August 22, 1944 at City Hall with Kerouac handcuffed to a detective.”
In the minefield of Beat Lit, Hunke, who had been writing since his days in Chicago, was still unpublished by the time he landed back in New York. He spent his free time hanging out with jazz musicians from Billie Holiday to Charlie Parker. It was at this same point in time when he met Ginsberg, Burroughs and Kerouac, all also unpublished. The Holy Trinity of the Beats were enamoured of Hunke and his stories of criminal life and degeneracy adn in fact ends up as a character in all of their writings, most notably in Kerouac’s “On the Road” where Huncke makes an appearance as Elmer Hassel.
In one of Ginsbergs rare existential criminal moments in the late 1940’s he and some friends tried to run down a motorcycle cop and in the process flipped the car over. According to Gins, Huncke wasn’t even in the car at the time but because of his past record and the fact taht he was living with Ginsberg he was arrested and the only one to get a jail sentence! As he said later in his writings..”Someone had to do the time.” Now dammit..that is friendship. I don’t think Ginsberg would have lasted a week in Rikers…
Hunkce who was depressed about not being published earlier mentioned to Kerouac that he was “beat down to his socks. Man, i’m beat” Kerouac later used the term to describe his gen. Huncke went on to get published by Diane DiPrima’s “Poet Press” with his writings that got them both busted for obscenity a rap which they “beat” so to speak.
Huncke’s autobio aptly titled “Guilty of Everything” about his life in the 1940’s - 1960’s was not published until 1987. To every student of the Beat Gen this book is must read from who I consider the real godfather of the Beat Generation who inspired the luminaries we all know about and have read...the man who told Jack to go “On The Road”, taught Ginsberg to “Howl” and turned Burroughs into not only a junky but in the words of Norman Mailer on the book jacket of “Exterminator” that I am reading again…”William Burroughs is the only American novelist who may conceivably be possessed by genius!” ..or was it the influence of Herbert Huncke..teh Beat Gen Junky?
Huncke died in 1996 at the ripe old age of 81. Not bad by junky standards. He was living broke and “beat down to his socks” in the Chelsea Hotel where his rent was paid anonymously by Jerry Garcia...whom he had never met. The Beat Head had met the Grateful Dead on his own terms...and while his legacy may well ahve been one of the most important and influential in the annals of Beatdom...he remains largely unknown to this day...his face hasn’t appeared on t-shirts...but will always be the hipster junky set the wheels in motion and was the nitroglycerine catalyst for the new American Literature of the Beat Generation.