1.

THE ‘BEAT GENERATION’

‘As a vast, solid phalanx the generations come

on, they have the same features and their pattern
is new in the world. All wear the same expres-
sion, but it is this which they do not detect in
each other. It is the one life which ponders in
the philosophers, which drudges in the laborers,
which basks in the poets, which dilates in the
love of the women.’
―Ralph Waldo Emerson, Notebooks

In his biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James admitted that ‘the best things
come, as a general thing, from the talents that are members of a group; every man works better
when he has companions working in the same line, and yielding the stimulus of suggestion,
comparison, emulation.’ (James, Henry, The Portable Henry James, 2004, p.417)

‘The Beat Generation’ is a literary movement started by a group of writers whose

literature explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-World War II era.
Their works were published and popularized in the 1950s. Rejection of standard narratives
values and materialism, spiritual quest, exploration of American and Eastern religions, explicit
portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation
and exploration are the central elements of the ‘Beat Generation’.

In Early Tudor Poetry, Berdan declared that “the unplumbed, salt, estranging sea, is the
basic philosophy that underlies their national life, the unwritten assumptions that, like axioms in
geometry, are accepted without the need of proof.”( Berdan, John M., Early Tudor Poetry, 1920,
p.1). This belief justifies the genesis of the ‘Beat Generation’, of this group of people that are
connected together, and is isolated by our mass culture by their beliefs and attitudes that it
supports. However the group may be seen as an evolution of the American way of life.

The ‘Beat Generation’ has been often identified with the ‘Lost Generation’, a group of
american writers who were expatriated from their country, out of a sense of exile, that came of
age during the World War Ⅰ and created a new literature. Of course, there is a difference between
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the two groups. John Clellon Holmes made a distinction between the two generation and he
wrote:

“The repeated inventory of shattered ideals, and the laments about the mud in moral
currents, which so obsessed the Lost Generation, does not concern our young people today /the
Beat Generation/, for they were brought up in these ruins. Their excursions take place out of
curiosity rather than disillusionment.

The absence of personal and social values is to them, not a revolution shaking the ground
beneath them, but a problem demanding a day to day solution. How to live seems to them more
crucial than why. Unlike the Lost Generation, which was occupied with the loss of faith, the Beat
Generation is becoming more and more occupied with the need for it. As such, it is a disturbing
illustration of Voltaire's old joke: ‘If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent Him.’
Not content to bemoan His absence, they are busily and haphazardly investing totems for Him on
all sides!” (John Clellon Holmes, This is the Beat Generation, New York Times Magazine,
November 16, 1953, p. 19. )

Both generations had its origins in America. During the post-war years of 1920s,
America endured a transformation that destroyed the norms and beliefs that was as a stabilizing
force for youth. On the other hand, during the Beat Generation time, America had undergone no
immediate change, but one which depicted many pseudo-standards and beliefs.

The Beats are portrayed as intellectual or moral delinquents as Chandler Brossard noted
in his article: “the natural product of an unborn middle class that has lost its nerve, its sense of
reality, its creative strength, its belief in the future", a group of people who are slowly replacing
“automation for participation, symbols for meaning". (Brossard, Chandler, The Dead Beat
Generation, The Dude, XI, No. 1, July, 1958, p.7)

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 1.1.Origins and historical context

The Post-war era changed the identity and the concept of America. Although ‘The Great
Depression’ in 1930s had affected the nation’s economy, the World-War II managed to
resuscitate the economy of America. Thereby, America became the most powerful nation and
people won their individual freedom. Also, the theories of Freudian psychology emphasized the
individual’s origin of mind and gender issues were an important social matter. ‘Beat Generation’
contributed to changing the concept of identity and the phrase ‘to be on your own’ helps us to
understand the aspect of the language that this literary movement had formed.

The historic events that start with the America’s throwing the bomb on Japan to end the
World War Ⅱ, the political consequences of the following Cold War and the crowd of anti-
Communist that happened in the late 1940s and the 1950s in United States were important
changes in beat writer’s time and their experience is based on these. (Charters, Ann, The
Portable Beat Reader, 1992, Introduction)

This generation fought to escape the cultural improves of the New Criticism, the cultural
politics of restriction and the commercializing tendencies of contemporary mass culture.
Initially, it was a small group of writers. Gary Snyder made a joke and he said that four people
don’t make a generation. At the beginning were Ginsberg and Lucien Carr, who were both
Columbia students in 1944 and they wanted to find a “New Vision” in literature. In short time
William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac joined the group.

Kerouac himself divided the ‘Beat’ history in two moments: the first one was “a handful
of really hip swinging cats” in the late 1940s, “talking madly about that holy new feeling out
there in the streets”, whose succinct point “vanished mighty swiftly during the Korean War...into
jails and madhouses, or were shamed into silent conformity”; and the second one was “the
Korean post-war youth [that] emerged cool and beat, had picked up the gestures and the style,
soon it was everywhere.” The period between the publication of his first novel, The Town and
the City (1950) and after, On the Road (1957), marks the first and the second ‘Beat’ periods.
(Gair, Christopher, The Beat Generation: A beginner’s Guide, 2008, Introduction)

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s definition regarding the term ‘generation’ is helpful to analyze the
qualities of the poets and novelists of the ‘Beat Generation’ who came out after the World War
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Ⅱ in the American literature. In the late 1930s, Fitzgerald said: “by a generation I mean that
reaction against the fathers which seems to occur about three times in a century. It is
distinguished by a set of ideas inherited in modified form from the madmen and the outlaws of
the generation before; if it is a real generation it has its own leaders and spokesmen, and it draws
into its orbit those born just before it and just after, whose ideas are less clear-cut and defiant.”
(Cowley, Malcom, And I Worked at the Writer's Trade: Chapters of Literary History 1918-1978,
1979, p.9). Of course, in that time there has been confusion about the meaning of the term and
also of the word ‘beat’, but it is true that it was a phenomenon who changed the entire American
literature.

The spokesmen or the leaders of the ‘Beat Generation’ were the early members of the
group, like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, William Burroughs, and Gary
Snyder. They all have what Cowley named “new standards of conduct, a distinctive life style that
was soon adopted by others of the group.” He also asserted that its members share their “own
sense of life, something that might be defined as an intricate web of perceptions, judgments,
feelings, and aspirations”.( Cowley, Malcom, And I Worked at the Writer's Trade: Chapters of
Literary History 1918-1978, 1979, pp.10-12)

According to Ann Charters, jazz musicians and hustlers used for the first time the word
“beat” after the World War Ⅱ meaning down and out or exhausted and poor. The term was
combined with other words like “dead beat” or “beat-up” by musician Mezz Mezzrow in his
book Really the Blues in 1946: “Things went from bad to worse, and kept right on travelling. I
was dead beat, troubled with the shorts; not penny one did I have, and I prowled around town in
the only suit I had to my name, a beat-up old tuxedo with holes in the pants where I sat, and my
hair so long that Louis Armstrong got the impression I was a violin player.” (Charters, Ann, The
Portable Beat Reader, 1992, Introduction, xvii)

Also, the term “beat” was presented to the members of the “Beat Generation” by a Times
Square hustler named Herbert Huncke in 1944 and after that, Kerouac spread the meaning of the
term. “Beat” came from the world of hustlers, drug addicts and thieves where Kerouac and Allen
Ginsberg searched inspiration for their works. Also, the “original street usage” of the “beat” in
the Huncke’s talk meant “exhausted, at the bottom of the world, looking up or not, sleepless,
wide-eyed, perceptive, rejected by society, on your own, streetwise.” (Charters, 1992,

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Introduction). Over time, Kerouac brought in another meanings of the term and added some
paradoxical connotations of “up-beat”, “beatific” or being “on the beat”, the musical association.
Kerouac and Holmes also used adjectives like “found” and “furtive”.

The phrase “Beat Generation” was introduced by Kerouac after he had finished his first
novel, The Town and the City (1950), to characterize the underground, ant conformist youth
gathering in New York at that time. The writer met John Clellon Holmes, who also loved bop
music and published an early ‘Beat Generation’ novel, entitled Go (1952) throughout with a
manifesto in The New York Times Magazine: “This is the Beat Generation”. In that night, in
November 1948, drinking beer and talking in Holmes’s apartment, Holmes was fascinated by
Kerouac’s stories about bop musicians, Time Square junkies and the “wild kids” he had met on
the road to Denver when he visited his friend Neal Cassady.( Charters, Ann, The Portable Beat
Reader, 1992, Introduction, p. xix-xx ).

Holmes agreed that Kerouac’s stories “ seemed to be describing a new sort of stance
toward reality, behind which a new sort of consciousness lay” and realized that the term “Beat
Generation” was “ a vision, not an idea”. (Bierowski, Thomas R., Kerouac in Ecstasy: Shamanic
Expression in the Writing, 2011, p.14)

Kerouac tried to define the new attitude: “It’s a kind of furtiveness... Like we were a
generation of furtives. You know, with an inner knowledge there’s no use flaunting on that level,
the level of the “public”, a kind of beatness―I mean, being right down to it, to ourselves,
because we all really know where we are―and a weariness with all the forms, all the
conventions of the world...So I guess you might say we’re a beat generation.” ( Charters, Ann,
Brother-Souls: John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and the Beat Generation, 2010, p. 98).

In December, Holmes met Neal Cassady, who became the central figure in his novel Go,
a novel about Kerouac, Ginsberg and others in the New York group, because Cassady was that
type of person who embodied the spirit of the “beat”. Also, the name of the novel is after one of
Cassady’s beloved expressions. Likewise, he inserted a part of his conversation with Kerouac in
the novel: “You know, everyone I know is a kind of furtive, kind of beat... a sort of revolution of
the soul, I guess you’d call it.” ( Holmes, John Clellon, Go: A Novel, 1997, p.36)

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 In his article “ This is the Beat Generation”, he depicted the ‘Beat Generation’ as “a
cultural revolution in progress, made by a post-World War Ⅱ generation of disaffiliated people
coming of age into a Cold War world without spiritual values they could honor.” (Charters, Ann,
The Portable Beat Reader, 1992, Introduction)

He also wrote in his article that: “The origins of the word ’beat’ are obscure, but the
meaning is only too clear to most Americans. More than a mere weariness, it implies the feeling
of having been used, of being raw. It involves a sort of nakedness of mind, and, ultimately, of
soul; a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness. In short, it means being
undramatically pushed up against the wall of oneself. A man is beat whenever he goes for broke
and wagers the sum of his resources on a single number; and the young generation has done that
continually from early youth.” (18)

Kerouac wrote in March 1958 for Esquire magazine “The Philosophy of the Beat
Generation” to clarify that the group of the ‘Beat Generation’ was made of a few friends in
1940s: Ginsberg, Carr, Burroughs, Huncke and Holmes. In this article, Kerouac said that after
the Korean War (in the early 1950s), “ soon it was everywhere, the new look... the bop visions
became common property of the commercial, popular cultural world... The ingestion of drugs
became official (tranquilizers and the rest); and even the clothes style of the beat hipsters carried
over to the new rock’n’roll youth... and the Beat Generation, though dead, was resurrected and
justified.” (Kerouac, Jack, Aftermath: The Philosophy of the Beat Generation, March 1958, p.24)

Therefore, in “Aftermath: The Philosophy of the Beat Generation”, he analyzed the

distortion of his spiritual ideas: “The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John
Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late Forties, of a
generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, curious,
bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way—
a vision gleaned from the way we had heard the word ‘beat’ spoken on street corners on Times
Square and in the Village, in other cities in the downtown-city-night of postwar America—beat,
meaning down and out but full of intense conviction. We'd even heard old 1910 Daddy Hipsters
of the streets speak the word that way, with a melancholy sneer. It never meant juvenile
delinquents, it meant characters of a special spirituality who didn't gang up but were solitary

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Bartlebies staring out the dead wall window of our civilization...” (Kerouac, Jack, Aftermath:
The Philosophy of the Beat Generation, March 1958, p.24)

In the late 1950s, the word “beat” lost its specific reference, and Kerouac called the
young people “hipsters or beaters”. The term “hipster” was used for those who were interested in
bepop and jazz music. Charters stated in his book that the word “beat” “became a synonym for
anyone living as a bohemian or acting rebelliously or appearing to advocate a revolution in
manners”. Other terms for the “Beat Generation” were: “Hip Generation” used by Mailer,
Kerouac talking about “Bop Generation” and Ginsberg about “The Subterraneans”. (Charters,
Ann, The Portable Beat Reader, 1992, Introduction, p. xxi-xxii )

Herb Caen, the San Francisco Chronicle editor, coined the term “beatnik” on April 2.
1958, after the Soviet Union’s recent space launch Sputnik. He wrote: “ Look Magazine,
preparing a picture spread on San Francisco’s Beat Generation (oh, no, not AGAIN!), hosted a
party in North Beach house for 50 Beatniks, and by the time word got around the sour grapevine,
over 250 bearded cats and kits were on hand, slopping up Mike Cowles’s free booze. They’re
only Beat, y’know, when it comes to work. . . . “ (Ewell, Kenn, The Private Investigator,2014,
p.7)

In June 1959 Kerouac published another significant article for Playboy, called “The
Origins of the Beat Generation” and described the generation as “a swinging group of new
American men” who had an intention of joy because the Second World War ended and they had
“wild self-believing individuality”. He also remembered that he talked with Holmes about the
‘Lost Generation’ : “were sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the Lost Generation
and the subsequent Existentialism and I said, ‘You know, this is really a Beat Generation’, and
he leapt up and said, ‘That’s it, that’s right!’”. The ‘Lost Generation’ was also an important
period between the two world wars and the term was coined by Gertrude Stein after World War
Ⅰ. When the term of the ‘Lost Generation’ came to Gertrude’s mind and the ‘Beat Generation’
to Kerouac’s mind, they revealed a personal vision of the world. (Charters, Ann, Beat Down to
Your Soul, 2001, Introduction)

In his essay, from Playboy magazine, Kerouac divided the hipsters or beatsters into “cool
and hot” and he wanted to make a distinction between their styles. He wrote: “ ...the hipsters or

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beatsters, were divided into cool and hot. Much of the misunderstanding about hipsters and the
Beat Generation in general today derives from the fact that there are two distinct styles of
hipsterism: the cool today is your bearded laconic sage, or schlerm, before a hardly touched beer
in a beatnik dive, whose girls say nothing and wear black the "hot" today is the crazy talk active
shining eyed (often innocent and open-hearted) nut who runs from bar to bar, pad to pad looking
for everybody, shouting, restless, lushly, trying to ‘make it’ with the subterranean beatniks who
ignore him.”(Kerouac, Jack, Origins of the Beat Generation, Playboy, VI, No., 6 June, 1959, p.
42 ). He depicted himself as a “hot hipster” who “cooled it in Buddhist meditation”. He also
believed that jazz musicians such as Lennie Tristano and Miles Davis were beat. ( Charters Ann,
Beat Down to Your Soul, 2001, Introduction)

Besides this, the writer marked the sudden interest in the beat phenomenon: “People
began to call themselves beatniks, beats, jazzniks, bopniks, bugniks and finally I was called the
‘avatar’ of all this. Yet it was as a Catholic.” He continued with: “ it was not at the insistence of
any of these ‘niks’ and certainly not with their approval either, that I went one afternoon to the
church of my childhood…, and suddenly with tears in my eyes and had a vision of what I must
have really meant with ‘Beat’ anyhow when I heard the holy silence in the church…the vision of
the word Beat as being to mean beatific.” (Fisher, James. The Catholic Counterculture in
America, 1933-1962, 1989, p.237 )

1.2. Significant places

1.2.1. Columbia University

The birth of the ‘Beat Generation’ happened at Columbia University. This was the place
where the “Beat” circle of friends such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs,
Lucien Carr, Joan Vollmer, Edie Parker and Céline Young met for the first time in spring 1944.
The beats were regarded as anti-academic writers as Lee Hudson wrote in Poetics in
Performance: The Beat Generation collected in Studies in Interpretation: “In this essay ‘Beat’
includes those American poets considered avant-garde or anti-academic from ca. 1955-1965.”,

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even though the campus life at Columbia University was rough with law and custom and many
of their ideas were made during the conversations with their professors such as Lionel Trilling
and Mark Van Doren. It is the same place where Ginsberg and Carr talked for the first time about
the ‘New Vision’, a term borrowed from Arthur Rimbaud. (Campbell, James, The Beat
Generation: San Francisco-New York-Paris, 1999, p.11)

Lucien Car was an important figure in the earliest days of the Beat Generation because
the first members of the group met each other through the agency of him such as Kerouac,
Ginsberg and Burroughs. He spent his childhood in St. Louis where he met David Kammerer and
William Burroughs and soon they became friends. He was expelled from several schools and
after a suicide attempt with a gas oven during his studies at the University of Chicago, his family
moved him in spring 1943 to Columbia University in New York and his friends, Kammerer and
Burroughs, shortly followed him. (Fritz, James, The Real On the Road: A History of Writers of
the Beats Movement, 2012, p. 1)

Kerouac was the first of them who came to Columbia University in September 1940. He
attended Columbia into a football scholarship but he broke his leg and his career ended.
According to James Fritz, after that he spend his time reading the novels of Thomas Wolfe, who
inspired him in some works and listening to classical music. He wanted to become an artist and
he left his classes and the football scholarship behind. (Fritz, James, The Real On the Road: A
History of Writers of the Beats Movement, 2012, pp. 1-2). As he declared much later, he was
‘independent, nutty with independence’ and he didn’t need to go on with his studies at the
college because he ‘had his own mind’(Kerouac, Jack, On the Road, 1976, Introduction by
Charters Ann ). He then decided to enroll in the Navy but this was also short-lived. He had an
“indifferent character” as the Navy psychiatrist said. Christopher Gair also wrote in his book,
The Beat Generation: A Beginner’s Guide (2012), that Kerouac “had no time for boot camp and
one morning he simply laid down his rifle and walked away from drill.”(p.31) Therefore, the
end of Kerouac’s Columbia career can be seen as an early pattern of his pathological incapacity
to accept discipline and order. Working later as a merchant seaman during World War Ⅱ,
Kerouac was inspired by these research trips and began a novel called The Sea is My Brother
(2011).

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 When Kerouac returned to New York, near Columbia and moved with his girlfriend, Edie
Parker, a woman studying art at Columbia, and Joan Volmer in an apartment in 1943, Ginsberg,
an eighteen-year-old freshman, arrived at Columbia and he wanted to become a lawyer.
According to James Campbell, he first met Lucien Carr, just before Christmas 1943 at Union
Theological Seminary, the resident hall. He walked through the hallway of boarding school when
he heard “Brahms Trio No.1” drifting from one door. He was curious and he wanted to know
who shared his taste in music. Thereby, he knocked on the door and Carr opened. (Campbell,
James, The Beat Generation: San Francisco-New York-Paris, 1999, p.22). Also, Kerouac met
Carr through Edie Parker and then, as Jamie Russell wrote is his book, Carr introduced Ginsberg
to Kerouac and shortly he presented Kerouac and Ginsberg to his friends, Burroughs and
Kammerer. (Russell, Jamie, The Beat Generation, 2002, p.14 ). This group of friends set up the
nucleus of what would later be named ‘Beat Generation’ and some of them would appear as
characters in Kerouac’s On the Road.

As claimed by Ann Charters in her introduction to On the Road, Lucien Carr thought of
that his group of friends in that time, in the mid-1940s, were ‘a rebellious group’ who were
‘trying to look at the world in a way that gave it some [new] meaning. Trying to find
values…that were valid. And it was through literature that all this was supposed to be done.’ The
idea of a ‘New Vision’ came to Carr’s mind while he was reading French Symbolist poetry and
Ginsberg also wrote that the members of the group used drugs because these, they thought, could
help them to discover a new way of life, of thinking, and that would allow them to become
famous writers: ‘The poet becomes a seer through a long, immense, and reasoned derangement
of all the senses. All shapes of love, suffering, madness. He searches himself, he exhausts all
poisons in himself, to keep only the quintessences...’. (Kerouac, Jack, On the Road, 1976,
Introduction by Ann Charters). According to James Fritz, Carr was a well-read student and he
shared to Ginsberg the work of Rimbaud, which inspired him and used it in his own work. Carr’s
charisma and his ideas amazed Kerouac and Ginsberg, but David Kammerer was more than
impressed by him, he made an obsession for Carr. In his journal, Ginsberg also said that Carr
was a “sweet vision”. (Fritz, James, The Real on the Road: A History of Writers of the Beats
Movement, 2012, p. 3)

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 Burroughs, Harvard graduate and several years older that Carr and Ginsberg, was also
cynical of their effort to create a new philosophy, what Carr called a ‘New Vision’. He was seen
as an ironic guide insisting on that they read The Decline of the West, by Oswald Spengler to
counterbalance their obsession with the French poet Arthur Rimbaud. Kerouac was impressed by
the “terrible intelligence and style” of his friends and he mentions in Vanity of Duluoz that this
“clique was the most evil and intelligent buncha bastards and shits in America but had to admire
[them] in my admiring youth.” (Kerouac, Jack, On the Road, 1976, Introduction by Ann
Charters)

Kerouac began to lead a kind of double life between his group of friends and his family.
His time was divided between wild experiences with his Columbia group trying a variety of
drugs such as morphine, Benzedrine, marijuana, alcohol and a right life in his parents’ working-
class household. He was involved later in a manslaughter case after Carr killed David Kammerer
in self-defense.

In the summer of 1944, Kammerer’s obsession with Carr had intensified. He was 33
years old then, but his infatuation began when he was an English professor at Washington
University and he even wrote desperately love letters to him, who was only a teenage boy. He
even followed Carr to Columbia. In August 13, Kammerer was looking for Carr through
Columbia’s Campus but he met Kerouac who told him where Carr had been. In Vanity of
Duluoz, Kerouac wrote later that Kammerer “rush off to his death”. He finally found Carr at the
West End and they stayed out, heading for Riverside Park, but no one knew what would happen
next. (Fritz, James, The Real on the Road: A History of Writers of the Beats Movement, 2012,
p.4)

He was afraid that Carr would leave him, he threatened Celine, Carr’s girlfriend and he
said that he would kill himself if Carr didn’t share same feelings for him. As stated by Steve
Turner, in that night when they were talking on a bench, Kammerer came out of control, he
became hysterical and he intended to rape Carr. They began to fight, and Carr stabbed him with a
Boy Scout knife. He panicked and didn’t realize what he had done. He took the body and threw it
into the water and after that he contacted Burroughs and Kerouac to told them what he had done.
(Turner, Steve, Jack Kerouac: Angelheaded Hipster, 1996, p.71)

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 Burroughs was the first who find out what’s happened, he gave him 5$ and advised him
to get a good lawyer, hand himself in to the police and to say that it was self-defense against a
sexual deviant in the park. Burroughs threw Kammerer’ s pack of Lucky Strikes into the toilet
and Kerouac helped him to dispose of crime weapon and to burn Kammerer’s glasses in
Morningside Park and these made them material witnesses. (Fritz, James, The Real on the Road:
A History of Writers of the Beats Movement, 2012, p.5)

Carr turned himself over to the police after two days. He was arrested and held without
bail and on October 9, 1944 was sentenced to the Elmira Reformatory. Burroughs was bailed out
by his family while Kerouac was trying to obtain money for his bail because his father, Leo,
refused to pay for this telling him that he’d disgraced the family name and he was bad
influenced by his group of friends . Edie Parker came with the money and helped him on the
condition that Jack fist marry her in City Hall. He was released from jail, but they broke up
afterward and Jack worked as an inspector in a trailer factory to return the bail money. Kerouac
was seen as a bad influence on Columbia’s students and Ginsberg “had been suspended for
writing obscenities on the window of his room” and “was now subject to psychological
testing.”( Turner, Steve, Jack Kerouac: Angelheaded Hipster, 1996, p.73)

The old gang, without the imprisoned Carr, regrouped in a five bedroom apartment taken
by Joan Vollmer Adams in 419 W. Street. Burroughs, who was homosexual, began an affair with
Joan Vollmer Adams. Edie Parker was also invited by Kerouac to join them in the new
apartment even though their marriage was over and Ginsberg also took a room in the apartment.
Vickie Russell and Hal Chase were new figures that moved with them. (Turner, Steve, Jack
Kerouac: Angelheaded Hipster, 1996, p.73). Meanwhile, Burroughs and Kerouac tried to write
together about the Kammerer’s murder and the book was titled “And the Hippos Were Boiled in
Their Tanks” but it was published in 2009.

In December 1946, shortly after Kerouac began his novel The Town and the City, Neal
Cassady ‒the model for the well-known character Dean Moriarty from On the Road‒ arrived in
New York riding in a Greyhound bus with LuAnne Henderson, his teenage wife, in order to see
his friend, Hal Chase. (Christopher, Gair, The Beat Generation: A beginner’s Guide, 2008, p.25)
.Before Kerouac met Neal, he had been reading Cassady’s letters to Hall Chase and he was very
curious about him.

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 Cassady grew up in Denver and after his mother’s death he lived with his alcoholic father
in rooming houses and residential hotels. After he spent a time as a teenager in the reformatory
school for stealing cars, he decided to attend the Columbia University but he gave up soon his
plans after he met Ginsberg and Kerouac through his friend, Hal Chase. This is the time when he
decided to become a writer like his new friends. (Kerouac, Jack, On the Road, 1976, Introduction
by Ann Charters)

He was a very exotic figure and he spent much of his time in Denver Public Library
reading and playing pool in the evenings. He stole over 500 cars by the age of nineteen. Her only
sixteen year old wife, LuAnne claimed that: “ He wanted to know everything, do everything and
know everyone. You never saw him without three or four books under his arm. He’d be talking
and reading and playing pool and making eyes at the women, all at the same time! He just swept
every one of their feet.” Chase thought that Cassady is the right person for Jack because they had
a lot of things in common ‒ they were both heterosexual, working-class men, sports-loving and
they both had an infatuation for literature. ( Turner, Steve, Jack Kerouac: Angelheaded Hipster,
1996, p.79)

The arrival of Neal Cassady had a big influence on the beat group of friends and he was a
main source of inspiration for them. They were really impressed by his energy and charisma who
had a wild lifestyle. Even Kerouac’ s life changed completely after he met Cassady as he wrote
in the beginning of The Original Scroll On the Road: “ I first met Neal not long after my father
died...I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about except that it really
had something to do with my father’s death and my awful feeling that everything was dead. With
the coming of Neal there really began for me that part of my life that you could call my life on
the road.”( Campbell, James, This is the Beat Generation: New York, San Francisco, Paris,
1999, p.107)

In Kerouac’s vision, Cassady was looking like a cowboy hero of Western movies called
Gene Autry, but also like “certain French Canadians I use to know in my boyhood in Lowell,
Mass., who were real tough.’ While Cassady was in Denver he began sending Kerouac letters
and shortly Kerouac decided to go in Denver, in his first cross-country trip. This first trip would
appear in Part One of On the Road. He wrote: “Filled with dreams of what [he’d] do in Chicago,

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in Denver, and then finally in San Fran’, he started hitch-hiking, his first destination a
rendezvous with Cassady in Denver.”( Kerouac, Jack, On the Road, 1976, Introduction, p. xiii)

1.2.2.Times Square “Underworld”

In the 1940s Times Square was a mercantile intersection which became the scene of the
early Beat group. As Ginsberg noticed, “The new social center has been established on Times
Square―a huge room lit in brilliant fashion by neon glare and filled with slot machines, open
day and night. There all the apocalyptic hipsters in New York eventually stopped, fascinated by
the timeless room”. According to James Traub, this was the place where the Beat mood, culture
and language was formed from 1945 to 1948. Brickford’s cafeteria, the Angel Bar, the Pokerino
arcade and 42nd and Eighth were some of the place where the beat friends gathered. Kerouac
remarked that this place was the home “both to the gentlemen in Di Pinna suit and the drunk in
the gutter.” (Traub, James, The Devil’s Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times
Square, 2004, p. 114)

Burroughs became interested in criminal behavior, he entered in the criminal

underground of New York and got involved in stolen goods and narcotics. Just before moving in
Vollmer’s apartment he discovered morphine and how to score heroin and shortly became
entirely involved in the drug lifestyle. The group of friends from Vollmer’s apartment broke up.
Burroughs was arrested after he wrote a prescription for narcotics and Kerouac returned home
because his father was dying. Ginsberg also went to New Jersey and Vollmer was the only one
who stayed in apartment. ( Fritz, James, The Real on the Road: A History of Writers of the Beats
Movement, 2012, p.7)

As Steve Turner wrote in his book, Burroughs ’guide to criminal underworld was Herbert
Huncke, a thirty-year-old bisexual, small-time criminal, drug addict and thief. He said that
“Burroughs had a submachine gun and a box of morphine syrettes which had been passed to him
by some hustler. He didn’t know what to do with them, and Bob Brandenberg had suggested that
I might be a good person to get in touch with.” The kind of life that Huncke and his friend, Phill
White, were living excited and interested Burroughs. He used for the first time morphine with
them and he spend his time with hookers, junkies, pimps and small-time gangsters.

14
 He was so amazed by Huncke and White that he moved down to the Lower East Side and
began to steal money by drunks on the subway with White. He invited Kerouac one day to
Washington Square to meet Huncke. “At that time, Jack still looked like a real all-American
boy... He was a little suspicious of me that day, but soon loosened up...”, said Huncke. Shortly he
met Ginsberg and Hal Chase and he confessed: “ I guess I was unusual to them. They never ever
met anyone quite like me, and they didn’t understand a lot of things that were going on. It was a
new ball game.” That was the time when they first heard the word ‘beat’, from Huncke. He
admitted: “ I used this expression which was, ‘Man, I’m beat!’, which meant that I was tired.”
But the meaning of the word for Kerouac was different: “To me, it meant being poor ‒ like
sleeping in subways, like Huncke used to do ‒ and yet being illuminated and having illuminated
ideas about apocalypse and all that.”( Turner, Steve, Jack Kerouac: Angelheaded Hipster, 1996,
pp. 75-76)

Huncke was clearly a bad influence to the group but the beats saw him as a fascinating
person. As a result, the company of him, got Ginsberg in trouble with the law in 1949. While he
was driving with Huncke and his car was filled with stolen goods, the police attempted to pull
him over. Ginsberg managed to escape on foot but he left some incriminating notebooks in the
car. He pleaded insanity to avoid jail and was sent to Bellevue Hospital, the place where he met
Carl Solomon. (Morgan, Ted, Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs,
1988, pp. 163-165)

When he was committed to Bellevue Hospital, Carl was not psychotic, he was really
eccentric. He was not crazy when he was admitted, but Carl was driven mad by the shocks
treatments applied at Bellevue. Also “Howl” was dedicated to Carl Solomon and this is one of
the main themes that appears in it. Solomon later agreed to publish Burroughs’s first novel,
Junky, because he became the publishing contact.( Morgan, Ted, Literary Outlaw: The Life and
Times of William S. Burroughs, 1988, pp. 205-206)

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 1.2.3.Greenwich Village

Greenwich Village in New York City was the best place for the Beats artists and writers
because of its low rent and the ‘small town’ element of the scene. They flocked here in the late
1950s. In Washington Square Park frequently occurred folksongs, readings and discussions.
(McDarrah, Fred W. and Gloria S. McDarrah, Beat Generation: Glory Days in Greenwich
Village, 1996 )

Allen Ginsberg and Burroughs were important figures of the scene in the Village. The
three friends Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs spent their time in many bars such as the San
Remo at 93 MacDougal Street on the northwest corner of Bleeker, Chumley’s and Minetta
Tavern.( Beard, Rick and Berlowitz, Leslie, Greenwich Village: “ The Beat Generation in the
Village”, 1993, pp. 165-198). According to Beard and Berlowitz, later, many critics wrote that
the Beat culture in the Village changed into the Bohemian hippie culture of the 1960s.( Beard,
Rick and Berlowitz, Leslie, Greenwich Village: “ The Beat Generation in the Village”, 1993, p.
178)

1.2.4.San Francisco and The Six Gallery reading

“ Let’s shout our poems in San Francisco Streets ‒ Predict Earthquakes!”, said Kerouac
to Ginsberg. Bill Morgan mentioned that San Francisco deserves the title of home of the ‘Beat
Generation’ even though New York was the birthplace of the Beats. Here the literary group of
friends came to maturity and national prominence. During the conservative postwar years many
creative writers and artists were attracted by this town in the 1950s. The publication of
Ginsberg’s “Howl” developed intellectual freedom and as a result San Francisco became “a
destination of choice for a new generation of radical innovators". ( Morgan, Bill, The Beat
Generation in San Francisco: A Literary Tour, 2003, Introduction )

When Allen Ginsberg arrived in San Francisco from New York, there was a well-known
poetry community. During the World War Ⅱ, a literary community set up in Waldport, Oregon.
This supported “ Creation, Experiment, and Revolution to build warless, free society” by
publishing a militant resistance magazine named The Illiterati. Meanwhile, in San Francisco was

16
another literary group and the poet Kenneth Rexroth was its spokesman that met every week in
Rexroth’s apartment. Gorge Leite’s Circle and the Anarchist Circle’s publication Ark were the
magazines published by this group of writers. According to Ann Charters, after reading Circle
and Ark, Ginsberg understood that “San Francisco’s community of writers was supported and
encouraged by an ongoing tradition of experimental poetry, radical politics, and little magazines
and small presses, including a more open and tolerant acceptance of homosexuality.” (Charters,
Ann, The Portable Beat Reader, 1992, Introduction, p. xxv)

After enrolling in 1955 in the graduate English program at the University of California in
Berkeley, Ginsberg began to write “Howl” in August, a poem about his life and Rexroth’s
conversation and poetry had an influence on it. On October 7, 1955, he organized a poetry
reading at the Six Gallery, in San Francisco. Here, performed also the West Coasts poets Michael
McClure, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Philip Lamantia. The reconstruction of the famous
poetry reading scene appears in Kerouac’s novel, The Dharma Bums (1958), and is “one of the
best known passages” of the novel, as Christopher Gair wrote. (Christopher, Gair, The Beat
Generation: A beginner’s Guide,2008, p.65)

This event was planned to promote the local poetry scene and Ginsberg made up an
announcement, and to advertise the event it was distributed on postcards in the region. As Barry
Miles indicates in his biography of Ginsberg, the advertisement sounded like: “Six poets at the
Six Gallery. Kenneth Rexroth, M.C. Remarkable collection of angels, all gathered at once in the
same spot. Wine, music, dancing girls, serious poetry, free satori. Small collection for wine and
postcards. Charming event.” ( Miles, Barry, Allen Ginsberg: A Biography, 2000, p.192 )

In addition, Barry Miles, summarized the reading scene at the Six Gallery: “The Six
Gallery was a converted auto-repair shop at Union and Fillmore. At one end was a small stage,
on which [were] arranged six large chairs in a semicircle. Jack and Allen arrived with Lawrence
Ferlinghetti and his wife, Kirby, to find over a hundred people squeezed into the small space.
The whole bohemian poetry intelligentsia of the Bay area appeared to be gathered together in
one room for the first time, and there was an atmosphere of great gaiety and excitement. For
most of the poets, including Allen, it was their first public reading “. (Miles, Barry, Allen
Ginsberg: A Biography, 2000, p.192 )

17
 Later “ The Six Poets at the Six Gallery” reading was “natural affinity of modes of
thought or literary style or planetary perspective” between the East Coast writers and the West
Coasts poets, as Ginsberg called. The atmosphere that night was also described by Michael
McClure: “ We were locked in the Cold War and the first Asian debacle―the Korean War. . . .
We hated the war and the inhumanity and the coldness. The country had the feeling of martial
law. An undeclared military state had leapt out of Daddy Warbucks’ tanks and sprawled over the
landscape. As artists we were oppressed and indeed the people of the nation were oppressed. . . .
We knew we were poets and we had to speak out as poets. We saw that the art of poetry was
essentially dead―killed by war, by academies, by neglect, by lack of love, and by disinterest.
We knew we could bring it back to life. . . .We wanted voice and we wanted vision.” (Farrell J.,
James, The Spirit of the Sixties: The Making of Postwar Radicalism, 2013, p.52 )

From that night, the ‘Beat Generation’ became as Cristopher Gair said in his book “an
internationally recognizable generation”. The speakers were introduced by Rexroth and San
Francisco local Philip Lamantia (1927-2005) was the first of the group who began by reading
some collections from John Hoffman’s poetry. The following speaker was Michael McClure
who “combined his interests in poetry with a love of nature and the study of anthropology” but
he became more confident in developing his own style of writing just after he met Allen
Ginsberg.( Gair, Christopher, The Beat Generation: A beginner’s Guide, 2008, pp.66-67)

When Ginsberg entered the scene to read the first two sections of the ‘Howl’, McClure
remembered that it was ‘like a hot bop scene. Ginsberg was real drunk and he swayed back and
forth. You could feel the momentum building up and some of the people began to shout “Go!
Go!”’( Campbell James, This Is the Beat Generation: New York, San Francisco, Paris, 1999, p.
181). Likewise, in Kerouac’s novel The Dharma Bums, the interpretation of Gooldbook’s
(Ginsberg’s) “Wail” (Howl) looked like a “hot jam session” and was different from the works of
the other poets, who were either inhabitants on the West Coast or native westerns. Also, Charters
claimed that the essential ‘voice’ and ‘vision’ was given by this poem with its legendary
opening: “ I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical
naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix. . . .”(
Ginsberg, Allen, Howl, in Howl and other Poems, 1956, p.9 ).

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 The people in audience were filled with wonder and cheered Ginsberg on to the poem’s
conclusion. In his memoir, Scratching the Beat Surface (1994), McClure recalls that everyone
knew “ at the deepest level that a barrier had been broken, that a human voice and body had been
hurled against the harsh wall of America and its supporting armies and navies and academies and
institutions and ownership systems and power-support bases.” (Allison, Raphael, Bodies on the
Line: Performance and the Sixties Poetry Reading, 2014, p.3)

He also claimed that Ginsberg’s “metamorphosis from a quiet brilliant burning Bohemian
scholar, trapped by his flames and repressions, to epic vocal bard”, happened from that night.
This is how San Francisco Poetry Renaissance began. (Torgoff, Martin, Can’t Find My Way
Home, 2001, p.63)

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet, publisher and the owner of the City Lights book-store,
was a spectator in the Six Gallery that night. He later sent a telegram to Ginsberg offering to
publish “Howl” as a volume in the Pocket Poets Series. The telegram imitated Ralph Waldo
Emerson’s greeting to Walt Whitman on his poem Leaves of Grass: “I greet you at the beginning
of a great career. When do I get the manuscript?” (Torgoff, Martin, Can’t Find My Way Home,
2001, p.63)

According to Martin Torgoff, after the publication of Howl and Other Poems, which was
in October 1956, the San Francisco office of U.S. Customs, declared the book obscene and
Ferlinghetti with his employee, Shigeyoshi Murao, were charged with publishing and selling an
obscene book. Ginsberg confessed: “ I may have conjured the pleasure of a ‘teahead joyride’, but
what really summoned down the fury of Moloch was writing about the ‘cocks of the grandfathers
of Kansas’”. Ferlinghetti strongly defended Howl and argued that Ginsberg wasn’t obscene, but
he had another point of view contrary to the philosophy of that times. “It is not the poet but what
he observes which is revealed as obscene. The great obscene wastes of Howl are the sad wastes
of the mechanized world, lost among atom bombs and insane nationalisms.”, wrote him in San
Francisco Chronicle. (Torgoff, Martin, Can’t Find My Way Home, 2001, pp. 63-64)

It’s true that Ginsberg wrote in Howl twelve references to the use of illicit drugs and
called them holy. One day standing in a San Francisco bus, he wrote the final part of the poem,
the ‘Footnote’. He also declared that everything was holy―”friends, lovers, jazz bands,

19
instruments, every private part of the body, every conceivable sex act, the middle class, cities,
visions, time, eternity, the soul...”―Everyman was holy, holy in the “bop apocalypse”.( Torgoff,
Martin, Can’t Find My Way Home, 2001, pp. 64-65)

Ginsberg claimed: “Virtually from that moment on, I knew that the fundamental issues of
drug use in America in our time were going to become inextricable from issues of free speech
and First Amendment rights and obscenity laws” and he continued with: ”The scenario would
soon enough repeat itself with Burroughs and Naked Lunch ... In the end, I knew you couldn’t
have it both ways. You couldn’t have a society that allowed free and unfettered creative
expression, which also might incorporate material about the use of consciousness-altering
substances, without a significant segment of the population becoming interested in their use as
well. The use of drugs was going to be a cutting-edge issue‒one of the fundamental ways we
would define ourselves as a people in the second half of the twentieth century.” (Torgoff, Martin,
Can’t Find My Way Home, 2001, p.65)

The “Howl” trial in San Francisco brought national attention to Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti
and after Judge Clayton Horn removed it of the charge of being an obscene literature, the poem
began to be sold in thousands of copies. But this was only the beginning and “ the Beat
Generation cluster was ready to go into orbit.” (Charters, Ann, The Portable Beat Reader, 1991,
Introduction)

With “its Whitmanesque structure and resemblances to Kerouac’s The Subterraneans” ,

Howl is of course a product of New York, an urban poem but the other poets at The Six Gallery
wrote poems that described rural scenes. Beside this, Howl made the most profound impression
even though these other poets became important persons in Beat Literature. (Gair, Christopher,
The Beat Generation: A Beginner’s Guide, 2008, p.71)

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 2. THE MAIN FEATURES OF THE ‘BEAT GENERATION’

2.1. Experimental Writing Style

When the ‘Beats’ entered the scene and they found the possibilities to create a new
literature, the American background was dominated by modernist poets such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra
Pound, and E. E. Cummings. Whether they were influenced by William Blake or Walt Whitman,
“the modern style of writing helped them to break down the barriers in terms of expression and
fundamental rules.” (Chastain, the-artifice.com). Over time, the ‚beat’ poets managed to achieve
success by breaking down and refining a countless of aspects in the fine arts such as novels and
poetry but also music and art.

Kerouac said his own intentions: „I got sick and tired of the conventional English
sentence which seemed to me to be so ironbound in its rules, so inadmissible with reference to
the actual format of my mind as I learned to probe it in the modern spirit of Freud and Jung, that
I could’t express myself through that form anymore...Shame seems to be the key to repression in
writing as well as in psychological malady. If you don’t stick to what you first thought, and to
the words the thought brought, what’s the sense of foisting your little lies on others? What I find
to be really ‘stupefying in its unreadability’ in this laborious and dreary lying called craft and
revision by writers, and certainly recognized by sharpest psychologists as sheer blockage of the
mental spontaneous process known 2,500 years ago as ‘The Seven Streams of Swiftness’”.
(Kerouac, Jack, The Last Word, 1959, p. 72)

The Beats chose to follow the poetry of Whitman, Emerson and Dickinson, who were the
founders of distinctive poetry. Beat writers also changed the way in which poetry was seen by
the people and this was because their works were simple and often offered deeper meanings.
They usually wrote about strange topics and a good example is Ferlinghetti’s poem, called
Underwear: „Underwear with spots very suspicious/ Underwear with bulges very shocking/
Underwear on clothesline a great flag of freedom/ Someone has escaped his Underwear/ May be
naked somewhere/ Help!/ But don’t worry/ Everybody’s still hung up in it/ There won’t be no
real revolution/ And poetry still the underwear of the soul/ And underwear still covering/ a
multitude of faults.” Ferlinghetti wanted to show that poetry could be about anything not just
about nature or love. Another examples are On the Road and Howl which proved that “novels

21
and poetry could be just one long stream of consciousness.” Therefore, the works of Kerouac and
Ginsberg were seen as disputed ones and out of ordinary. (Chastain, the-artifice.com)

Experimental writing emphasizes innovation or change in literature, most especially in

technique. Thus ‘beat’ writers chose distinct techniques to make their own works original.
Firstly, Kerouac used the technique of ‘spontaneous prose’. It is similar to the improvisation in
jazz in the sense that the artist writes whatever comes to his own mind, “all first-person, fast,
mad, confessional”. This technique appears in On the Road and he claimed in an interview that: “
I got the idea for the spontaneous style of On the Road from seeing how good old Neal Cassady
wrote his letters to me, all first-person, fast, mad, confessional, completely serious, all detailed,
with real names in his case however (being letters).” (Hayes, J. Kevin, Conversations with
Kerouac, 2005, p. 54)

In Visions of Cody, his first experimental novel, he “typed up a segment of taped

conversation with Neal Cassady, or Cody, talking about his early adventures in L.A.” (Hayes, p.
55) and blended it with the stream-of-consciousness narrative. He affirmed: “By not revising
what you’ve already written, you simply give the reader the actual workings of your mind during
the writing itself: you confess your thoughts about events in your own unchangeable way.”
(Hayes, p. 53)

Kerouac was decided about his critical method and his descriptions were published in
Evergreen Review. He stated: “―no revisions (except obvious rational mistakes, such as names
of calculated insertions in act of not writing but inserting).” And, “Not ‘selectivity’ of expression
but following free deviation (association) of mind into limitless blow-on-subject seas of thought,
swimming in sea of English with no discipline other than the rhythms of rhetorical exhalation
and expostulate statement... Blow as deep as you want ‒ write as deeply, fish as far down as you
want, satisfy yourself first, then reader cannot fail to receive telepathic shock and meaning-
excitement by same laws operating in his own human mind.” (Kerouac, Jack, Essentials of
Spontaneous Prose, 1958, pp. 73-72). This fragment can be considered an advice that Kerouac
gave it to the writers. He said what a writer should do in his own work to attract the reader and
showed this in his famous works. In an ironic way, it is very well known that Kerouac carried his
notebooks and journals everywhere with him and he made careful revisions to his manuscript.

22
 Secondly, Allen Ginsberg was the most influenced by the poetry of William Blake, Walt
Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and last but not least by William Carlos Williams’s Paterson. He
used a technique called ‘free verse style’ that was the basis of Howl and many of his poems.
Here is the definition of ‘free verse style’ that I found it in A Study Guide for Allen Ginsberg's ‘A
Supermarket in California’: “Free verse is an open form of writing in which the rhythmic pattern
is not organized into meter ― that is , into units of stress and unstressed syllables ― but rather
follows more natural or organic pattern of compositions. Ginsberg treats his line as single breath
units, foregrounding the fact that his verse is meant to be read aloud.” (Gale, Cengage Learning,
A Study Guide for Allen Ginsberg's “A Supermarket in California”, 2016)

“Free verse style” is similar to jazz music which was characterized by breaking the
established rules of classical music and by improvisation. This technique allows writers to break
from the rigidness of traditional poetry and express themselves freely and in an authentic way.
The editor of Yale Review, J. D. McClatchy, called Ginsberg “a bard in the old manner ―
outsized, darkly prophetic, part exuberance, part prayer, part rant.” (Weidman, Rich, The Beat
Generation FAQ: All That's Left to Know About the Angelheaded Hipsters, 2015, p. 19)

Thirdly, the works of William S. Burroughs are based on ‘cut-up technique.’ In his
novels, Burroughs cut up some passages by himself and other writers and then pasted them back
together randomly. He was introduced to this technique by his friend, Brion Gysin, who was
experimenting with this method on his own works. Burroughs was very curious about that when
he realized that ‘the cutup method’ was almost identical with his ‘juxtaposition technique’ he had
used in Naked Lunch. However, the ‘cut-up technique’ is also present in the works of Tristan
Tzara, Gertrude Stein, and T. S. Eliot. (William S. Burroughs: Cut-up Technique,
languageisavirus.com)

Burroughs’s Nova trilogy (The Soft Machine, Nova Express, and The Ticked That
Exploded) is based on the ‘cut-up’ and the theory of language and art. He affirmed in a Paris
Review interview in 1965 : “It is unfortunately one of the great errors of Western thought, the
whole either/or proposition. You remember [Alfred] Korzybski and his idea of non-Aristotelian
logic. Either/or thinking is just not accurate thinking. That’s not the way things occur, and I feel
the Aristotelian construct is one of the great shackles of Western civilization. Cut-ups are a
movement toward breaking this down.” (Weidman, p. 19)

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 2.2. Autobiographical and Confessional Writing

Autobiographical writing is one of the most important features of the ‘Beat’ literature. It
is well-known that ‘beat’ poetry and prose was heavily autobiographical, blurring fiction, and
mythmaking, and memoir. This autobiographical and confessional style makes the works of the
‘beat’ writers originals. They distanced themselves from the rigid formalism of American
modernism poetry and began to wrote in an original and authentic way.

Nearly every work of Kerouac was autobiographical even if his writings has undergone
some revisions. In fact, Kerouac was constrained to make revisions but he only changed the
names of his characters “at the request of his publishers in order to avoid litigation” as Weidman
declared in his book. (Weidman, Rich, The Beat Generation FAQ: All That's Left to Know About
the Angelheaded Hipsters, 2015, p. 20)

He confessed in the author’s note to Big Sur (1962) : “My work comprises one vast book
like Proust’s except that my remembrances are written on the run instead of afterwards in a sick
bed. Because of the objections of my early publishers I was not allowed to use the same personae
names in each work: On the Road, The Subterraneans, The Dharma Bums, Doctor Sax, Maggie
Cassidy, Tristessa, Desolation Angels, Visions of Cody, and the other including this book Big Sur
are just chapters in the whole work which I call The Duluoz Legend. In my old age I intend to
collect all my work and re-insert my pantheon of uniform names, leave the long shelf full of
books there, and die happy. The whole thing forms one enormous comedy, seen through the eyes
of poor Ti Jean (me), otherwise known as Jack Duluoz, the world of raging action and folly and
also of gentle sweetness seen through the keyhole of his eye.”

Ginsberg’s Howl is also autobiographical and highlights many real incidents from his life
and his friend’s life. For example in the first section of the poem many incidents refers to his
own experiences “such as his travels, his expulsion from Columbia University, his vision of
Blake, his studies of mystical writers and Cezanne's paintings, his time in jail and in the asylum.”
(Stephenson, english.illinois.edu)

The following lines talk about his experiences at Columbia University: “who passed
through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,/ who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing
24
obscene odes on the windows of the skull” ( Ginsberg, Allen, Howl and Other Poems, 1956, p.
1), and in this line he refers to Herbert Huncke: “who walked all night with their shoes full of
blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of
steam-heat and opium” (Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems, 1956, p. 4). There are many others
references to his friends and acquaintances such as: William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Lucien
Carr, William Cannastra, and others. Also, Ginsberg recalls Neal: “the secret hero of these
poems”. (Weidman, p. 21)

Some works of Burroughs are semi-autobiographical and the best examples are his novels
Junky (1953) and Queer (1985) but neither his wife, Joan Vollmer, or his friends are mentioned
in his works. In many of his writings, he appears as ‘William Lee’, who inspired Kerouac to call
him ‘Old Bull Lee’ in On the Road.

2.3.Jazz of the ‘Beat Generation’

Music is an important element that is reflected in the literature of every period in

America’s history, but the heartbeat of the ‘Beat Generation’ was of course the modern jazz.
More specific, I talk about the vibrant and adventurous sound of ‘bebop’. Known as ‘bop’, it
became the continuer of ‘swing’ music and had expanded during the early and mid-1940s
acquiring the admiration and imagination of ‘beat’ writers and their successors. Usually, it was
played in more smaller groups with only 2 or 3 front soloists and a rhythm section. The form of
jazz that was predominant in 1930s was ‘swing’. Large bands were practicing ‘swing’ and
Christopher Gair mentioned some important figures in his book such as: Count Basie, Benny
Goodman, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway and Artie Shaw.( Gair, Christopher, The Beat
Generation: A Beginner’s Guide, 2008, p.16)

As I mentioned in the first subchapter Origins and Historical Context, jazz musicians
used for the first time the word ‘beat’ after World War Ⅱ. Kerouac claimed that: “Beat means
beatitude, not beat up. You feel this. You feel it in a beat, in jazz - real cool jazz, or a good gutty
rock number.” (Honan, Park, The Beats: An Anthology of 'Beat' Writing, 1987, p. 147)

25
 Also the term of ‘hipster’ was introduced in language in the early fifties along with
bebop, they were born together. “Both were war babies, and while the rest of the nation was
piling its hair in a munition worker’s bang on the brow and were shoulder-padding to the big
bland strains of Glenn Miller- the khaki mixing promiscuously on a pass with the utility
underwear and whistling ‘Happiness Is Just a Guy Called Joe’ ‒ bebop and hip were hopping
down the clubs along 52nd Street in New York and Central Avenue, LA. In the decade of
Digging For Victory, they were plain digging, period.” (Carr, Roy; Case, Brian; Deller, Fred,
The Hip : Hipsters, Jazz, and the Beat Generation, 1987, Introduction)

The initiator of this modern jazz was saxophonist Charlie Parker, known by his nickname
‘Bird’. He became a model and a central key to Kerouac’s ideas on improvisation and
spontaneity of work. In some works, he wrote like a saxophonist. More clearly, some of his long
sentences appear like they were flowing like a saxophone solo and the short ones like razor-sharp
little riffs. It is very clear why Kerouac called his style of writing spontaneous prose. It was
because between his stream-of-consciousness and his act of improvisation is an obvious
similarity.( Baekgaard, Jakob, allaboutjazz.com)

In Essentials of Spontaneous Prose, Kerouac wrote: "Method. No periods separating

sentence-structures already arbitrarily riddled by false colons and timid usually needless
commas―but the vigorous space dash separating rhetorical breathing (as jazz musician drawing
breath between outblown phrases)" (Kerouac, Jack, Essentials of Spontaneous Prose, 1958, p.
72). Ginsberg also said in an interview with Michael Aldrich (1968): “Yeah. Kerouac learned his
line from--directly from Charlie Parker, and Gillespie, and Monk. He was listening in '43 to
Symphony Sid and listening to "Night in Tunisia" and all the Bird-flight-noted things which he
then adapted to prose line.” (Janssen, Mike, Litkicks.com)

Other giants such as Max Roach, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk
became models for the lifestyle of the ‘beats’ who borrowed the ‘hep cat’ lingo of the musicians
and their taste for drugs such as heroin and Benzedrine. The ‘Beats’ saw in jazz music a new art
form born of innovation and freedom and this kind of music was performed by artists who were
considered to be living on the edge of society and who were frequently involved in crime and
drugs. The ‘beat’ friends enjoyed themselves much of their time in New York clubs such as

26
Minton’s, the Open Door and the Red Drum. Allen Ginsberg stated that jazz musicians like
Charlie Parker and Miles Davis became the ‘Secret Heroes’ to this group of beats.

Terms like ‘square’, ‘cats’, ‘dig’ and ‘nowhere’ are taken from jazz or hipster patter and
are introduced in ‘beat’ writers’ works. Of course, for the beats, jazz was a new way of life and it
didn’t mean just vocabulary. John Arthur Maynard wrote in his book: “Jazz served as the
ultimate point of reference, even though, or perhaps even because, few among them played it.
From it they adopted the mythos of the brooding, tortured, solitary artist, performing with others
but always alone. They talked the talk of jazz, built communal rites around using the jazzman's
drugs, and worshiped the dead jazz musicians most fervently. The musician whose music was
fatal represented pure spontaneity.” (Maynard, Arthur John, Venice West: The Beat Generation
in Southern California, 1991, p.48)

Even John Clellon Holmes wrote about jazz in his well-known book Go. He affirmed
that: “In this modern jazz, they heard something rebel and nameless that spoke for them, and
their lives knew a gospel for the first time. It was more than a music; it became an attitude
toward life, a way of walking, a language and a costume; and these introverted kids... now felt
somewhere at last.” (Holmes, Clellon John, Go: A Novel, 1997, p.161)

Also, the French poet Arthur Rimbaud (the late 19th-century) is the perfect model to
justify the aims or ideals of both ‘beat’ writers and jazz musicians. He had similar attitudes for
the artist’s task to compose like the beats and the jazz musicians. He used a lot of drugs, drank a
lot and composed poetry at a young age. He became also one of the ‘Secret Heroes’ along with
Parker and Davis. (Janssen, Mike, Litkicks.com)

Thereby the beats used the main ideas of ‘bebop’ in their prose and poetry writings
establishing a new style called ‘bop prosody’. The idea of Zen and presence at the moment was
fundamental for the philosophy of the Beat Generation and Ginsberg paraphrased an old Zen
Buddhist philosophy: “First thought, best thought.” This improvisational technique was called by
him ‘composing on the tongue’ that was used by a large number of ‘beat’ writers. (Janssen,
Mike, Litkicks.com)

Similar to jazz music were also the rhythm, meter, and length of verse that differ from
traditional European styles. The best example is ‘Howl’. “Ginsberg fancied himself a poet in the

27
style of a bebop musician because he lengthened the poetic line to fit the length of his own
breath, paused for air, and launched another line, sometimes starting with the same word as the
last line.” A friend of the ‘beats’, Ted Joans, claimed that: “I could see that [Ginsberg] was
picking up the language and rhythm of jazz, that he wasn't following the European tradition”.
(Janssen, Mike, Litkicks.com)

The technique used by Ginsberg in ‘Howl’ resembles with a Charlie Parker song named
Lester Leaps In, in which ‘Bird’ performs some phrases with the same theme, taking a breath and
begin another. He declared: “Lester Young, actually, is what I was thinking about... ‘Howl’ is all
‘Lester Leaps In.’ And I got that from Kerouac. Or paid attention to it on account of Kerouac,
surely--he made me listen to it”. ( Ginsberg, Allen; Donald, Allen, Composed on the Tongue,
2001, p. 43)

On the other hand, Kerouac was not interested in jazz only for his works. Jack Chambers
asserted in his book that: “Kerouac was even booked into the Village Vanguard to ‘play’ regular
sets, reading poetry with jazz accompaniment... on his better nights, he dispensed with the poetry
and took up scat singing, including a faithful rendering of a Miles Davis solo that... ‘was entirely
accurate and something more than a simple imitation’. (Chambers, Jack, Milestones: The Music
and Times of Miles Davis, 1989, p. 248)

As Ginsberg’s Howl resembles with Lester Leaps In, Kerouac’s On the Road was
influenced by Dexter Gordon's and Wendell Gray's The Hunt. In the book is written: “They ate
voraciously as Dean, sandwich in hand, stood bowed and jumping before the big phonograph,
listening to a wild bop record I had just bought called ‘The Hunt’, with Dexter Gordon and
Wardell Gray blowing their tops before a screaming audience that gave the record fantastic
frenzied volume.” (Kerouac, Jack, On the Road, 1976, p. 102)

Kerouac and Gregory Corso eulogized Charlie Parker upon his death in their works.
Kerouac wrote in his poem, Mexico City Blues: “Charlie Parker looked like Buddha/ Charlie
Parker, who recently died.../ "Wail, Wop" Charlie burst/ His lungs to reach the speed/ Of what
the speedsters wanted/ And what they wanted/ Was his eternal Slowdown”. (Charters, Ann, The
Portable Beat Reader, 1992, pp. 53-55). Choruses 239 to 241 are dedicated to Parker. On the

28
other hand, Gregory Corso wrote a poem entitled Requiem for 'Bird' Parker, Musician that was
published in his book The Vestal Lady on Brattle (1955).

John Clellon Holmes from all the ‘beat’ writers had an infatuation for jazz music and he
venerated jazz musician. Many religious imageries linked to jazz, words like ‘testament’,
‘sacrament’, ‘mystery’, ‘ritual’ and ‘holy’ appear in his famous novel, Go. Another book wrote
by him, entitled The Horn (1958), was dedicated entirely to the story of Edgar Pool, a sax player.
He also made a detailed research on Dexter Gordon’s The Hunt and said in a memoir of the
1940s : ‘listen there for the anthem in which we jettisoned the intellectual Dixieland of atheism,
rationalism, liberalism--and found our group's rebel streak at last”. (Janssen, Litkicks.com)

Even West Coast poets such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Kenneth Rexroth admired jazz
musicians and were inspired by them and their lifestyle. They tried “to liberate poetry from the
clutches of the academics” and they believed that reciting the poems with jazz accompaniment
would draw in a wider audience. (Janssen, Litkicks.com)

As ‘beat’ writers were inspired by jazz music that was more realistic and credible, so the
great American songwriters like Bob Dylan and Elvis Presley were inspired by the ‘beats’ mostly
by their lifestyle. Thus, these two singers began to write songs about corruption and sadness.
They tried to express their feelings, their emotions or their states through the music. In the same
time, many of the songs had promiscuous context. For example one of the main themes that the
‘beats’ explored was sexuality and this theme can be found in two of Elvis’ songs: Spinout and
Girls! Girls! Girls!. (Chastain, the-artifice.com)

2.4. Drug use

It is very well known that from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Hunter S. Thompson, drink
and the use of illegal substances were seen as sources for artistic enlightenment. Many of the
‘beat’ writers began to use different drugs similar to jazz musicians hoping that these drugs
would inspire them in their works like these inspired great musicians like Parker. They wanted to
find a ‘New Vision’ and they believed that the drugs will help them.

‘The libertine circle’ as Ginsberg called his group of friends in his journal (Lawlor,
William, Beat Culture: Lifestyles, Icons and Impact, 2005, p. 168), were interested in drugs as

29
marijuana, Benzedrine, heroin, or morphine. They later began to use psychedelic drugs such as
peyote, yage and LSD. Because the writers didn’t know the effects of these drugs, much of this
usage was called ‘experimental’.

So, this usage of drugs began at Columbia University. After Kerouac had split with
Parker, he moved with Vollmer, Burroughs and Ginsberg in an apartment on 115th Street at the
end of 1944. One day Kerouac and Burroughs were looking for drugs and Vickie Russell
introduced them to Benzedrine. At that times, Benzedrine could be found in the form of plastic
inhalers. Kerouac reminded that night: “I got so high, with her, on Benzedrine, that I didn’t know
where I was, and I said, ‘Are we in St. Petersburg, Russia?’ [...] She says: ‘You’re buzzing, ba-
by!’ We get in the [subway] train [...] and we’re all standing, holding onto the straps, talking and
you know we are all buzzing and she’s explaining to us what it is to be high and all the time we
are digging everybody in the car, with all those bright lights, and she’s telling us how to dig
them.” (Rasmussen, Nicolas, On Speed: The Many Lives of Amphetamine, 2008, p.94)

That night something changed in Kerouac’s life. He discovered a new way of experience
the world, a new way of living in that world and a new way to experience the friendship. He also
become closer to Burroughs and also spend his night in bed with Russell. Also, Joan Vollmer
became addicted to Benzedrine and this unconscious use of amphetamine destroyed her
mentality. She had moments when she didn’t recognize her friends or didn’t know where she
was.

Like jazz, Benzedrine was something vital, an indispensable thing in the life of the
‘beats’. “The drug became a sacrament, the inspiration of a new, spontaneous way of writing that
blasted the mind free of convention and communicated raw physical and emotional experience”,
wrote Rasmussen. It is also known that Kerouac lost much of his hair and his legs swelled up
with thrombophlebitis after taking a large amount of amphetamine. (Rasmussen, p.95)

Also Ginsberg used Benzedrine looking for “the ancient heavenly connection to the starry
dynamo in the machinery of night” and he would use it his poem Howl. Though, his inspiration,
his exceptional vision came from reading William Blake in 1948. (Rasmussen, p.95) He
experimented for the first time psychedelic drugs with Timothy Leary at Harvard University and
he also was a forthright supporter for the legalization of marijuana.(Weidman, Rich, The Beat

30
Generation FAQ: All That's Left to Know About the Angelheaded Hipsters, 2015, p. 35).
Ginsberg claimed: “I MUST begin by explaining something that I have already said in public for
many years: that I occasionally use marijuana in preference to alcohol, and have for several
decades. I say occasionally and mean it quite literally; I have spent about as many hours high as I
have spent in movie theaters -- sometimes three hours a week, sometimes twelve or twenty or
more, as at a film festival -- with about the same degree of alteration of my normal
awareness.”(Ginsberg, theatlantic.com)

Daniel Fromson wrote in the introduction of Time Travel: Allen Ginsberg on Marijuana
Tourism, (1966) that: “Ginsberg offers a portrait of America's pre-Summer of Love fear of
marijuana, dismisses images of crazed "dope fiends" as "palpable poppycock," and explains why
smoking weed in the U.S. often induces paranoia ("The anxiety was directly traceable to fear of
being apprehended and treated as a deviant criminal; put thru the hassle of social disapproval,
ignominious Kafkian tremblings in vast court buildings coming to be judged, the helplessness of
being overwhelmed by force or threat of deadly force and put in brick & iron cell")” (Fromson,
theatlantic.com)

Thereby, many of the ‘beat’ writers used marijuana instead of Benzedrine. In the famous
novel Go, by John Clellon Holmes, the character Hart Kennedy explained that he chose the
relaxing effects of marijuana: “When I was on benny…I got all mean and…compulsive, you
know? Always worried and hung up. Sure, I was a real big serious intellectual then, toting books
around all the time, thinking in all those big psycho-logical terms and everything.”(Holmes, John
Clellon, Go: A Novel, 1997, p. 143)

On the other hand, Kerouac used Benzedrine in an abusive way and it inspired him in
many of his works. It became “an essential component of creativity” as Rasmussen affirmed. He
also wrote in his book: “ He wrote on amphetamine to capture raw feelings and experience, the
spontaneous ‘fresh water’ welling up from his unconscious.” The letters received from his friend,
Neal Cassady and the autobiographical novel of Burroughs entitled Junky, impressed and
inspired him. Thereby he began to write on his best known novel On the Road, high on
BenzedrineHe also wrote The Subterraneans on Benzedrine and Tristessa on morphine.
(Weidman, p. 35)

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 Of course, even Burroughs got involved in the drug lifestyle and he spent many of his
years in the underworld of New York, New Orleans, and Mexico City. As I already mentioned,
Herbert Huncke, a drug-addict, was his mentor to the criminal underworld. Burroughs also take
his first shot of morphine with him. He used his dependency on heroin as an inspiration for his
novels Naked Lunch and Junkie. Naked Lunch investigates the horrors and the effects of drug
addiction. (Weidman, p.35). Heroin is the drug most used in this novel and it appears here as
‘junk’. Heroin is processed from morphine and it was seen as a substitute for this, considered to
be less addictive than morphine, but it wasn’t true. It could be smoked, snorted or injected.(
“Heroin Facts”, drugpolicy.org)

His wife, Joan Vollmer were the most affected by this abusive use of drugs. She even
began to have hallucinations. When Kerouac came to see Burroughs and his wife in 1949, they
discovered that Vollmer was using “three Benzedrine Inhaler tubes a day” which was
exaggerated. Kerouac talked about that scene in On the Road: „her face, once plump and
Germanic and pretty, had become stony and red and gaunt”. Two years later she was killed
accidentally by Burroughs in a drinking game in Mexico City. (Rasmussen, p. 99). That night, in
1951, he put a glass on his wife’s head saying that he will shoot it off with his gun but he missed
the target and he shot her in the head. He later claimed that: “I am forced to the appalling
conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death”, but this inner struggle
with guilt “fueled his creativity.” (Rosefield, dazeddigital.com)

Carolyn Cassady experienced with Benzedrine for the first time with her boyfriend, Neal,
in the summer of 1947. She took “an eighth of an inhaler with coffee” from Ginsberg and Neal
who assured her that “the high was worth the eight hours of depression that would likely follow.”
Then she recalled: “I suddenly became aware I was prattling, and Neal was smiling giggling,
because he knew that’s the drug did. I stopped talking, embarrassed again, but then had to laugh,
feeling freer than I ever could remember, less afraid each moment, but unable to control the push
of a million thoughts, all of which seemed so terribly necessary to communicate at once. Neal
urged me on, saying ‘You’re so expressive!’ because I made a lot of faces. [...] Oh, I was having
a fine time. I felt so vibrant, brilliant, witty. What fun it was to lie side by side on the cool sheet,
giggling, talking, singing and watching the play of neon lights outside the open window. [...] the
two of us entirely wrapped up in the world of each other.” (Rasmussen, pp. 96-97)

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 Personally, I don’t believe that something that destroys your mentality, your health and
that really can slowly kill you, can help you or give you inspiration. Maybe the drugs can give
you that euphoric state: you feel better, stronger and more confident in you but all these are
short-lived and what follows after is horrible. So, this is why the ‘beats’ started to use different
drugs. They wanted to break down the boundaries, they wanted freedom and they wanted to
express themselves freely and all these could be done under the influence of drugs.
Rasmussen wrote: “But Benzedrine was a powerful way of breaking down the barriers
between people, just as it broke the stereotypes of experience so as to make the familiar more
real and intense. The Beatniks were using Benzedrine Inhalers like modern-day hipsters, in the
1990s would come to use ecstasy as a ‘hug drug’. As a breaker of stereotypes, habitual
perceptions and rigid social roles, speed remained a key element of Beat sociability and
community through the 1950s.” (p. 97)

2.5. Spirituality and the ‘Beat Generation’

Allen Ginsberg wrote in the Footnote of Howl: “‘The world is holy! The soul is holy! The
skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole are holy!”.

With their opposition to the materialism, the beats moved away from the clinical and they
found in spirituality and transcendentalism inspiration to their writings. The also looked for
religious meanings in “in popular culture, in sexual ecstasy, on the open road, in drugs, and
among marginalized members of society’ claimed William T. Lawlor in his book. They serached
religious understanding in the works of Wilhelm Reich, Oswald Spengler, William Carlos
Williams, William Blake and Arthur Rimbaud, but also in the jazz music of Charlie Parker.
(Lawlor, T. William, Beat Culture: Icons, Lifestyles, and Impact, 2005, p. 299)

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 They reveal a strong connection to their traditional beliefs and they also were curious
about the Eastern Religion. Even they were Protestant ( William S. Burroughs), Catholic ( Jack
Kerouac), or Jew ( Allen Ginsberg), these religions were the basis of their works. Mainly, for
Kerouac, his boyhood Catholicism had a great impact on his writings such as Visions of Gerard
written in memory of his older brother, and On the Road, his famous novel based on his trips
across the country with his friend Neal Cassady, who were also a Catholic. He also believed that
the term ‘beat’ was about being optimistic and taking all the benefits that life offers ‒ actually
‘beatific’. Kerouac himself coined the term ‘beat’, after hearing Herbert Huncke, using the term
and meaning exhausted. As a Catholic, Kerouac saw more than that. As I mentioned in the first
chapter, he got the inspiration for this phrase when he made a visit to his boyhood church where
he stated to have had a vision: “I went one afternoon to the church of my childhood…, and
suddenly with tears in my eyes and had a vision of what I must have really meant with ‘Beat’
anyhow when I heard the holy silence in the church…the vision of the word Beat as being to
mean beatific.”( Fisher, James. The Catholic Counterculture in America, 1933-1962, 1989, p.237
). He also recalled “And I suddenly realized, Beat means Beatitude! Beatific!”.(Hayes, J. Kevin,
Conversations with Kerouac, 2005, p. 31) He would go on to explain later that: “Because I am
Beat, I believe in Beatitude and that God so loved the world He gave His only begotten son to
it.” (Kerouac, Jack; Charters, Ann, The Portable Jack Kerouac, 1995, p. 566)

Kerouac was raised in Lowell, Massachusetts, in a family of two French-Canadian

Catholics. He learned from his mother “ to see the world as a place of grace, touched everywhere
by God”. He attended Catholic schools and he tried to see the world as his mother taught him, his
whole life. He even drew a sketch of a crucifix or prayers for mercy on every page on his diary.
He was “Christ-haunted” but people didn’t know very much about his faith. Thus, a reporter
asked once why he never wrote about Jesus, and he, very surprised about his question, replied: “
I’ve never written about Jesus? You are an insane phony. All I ever write about is Jesus.” (
Burch, Brian; Stimpson, Emily, The American Catholic Almanac, 2014, p. 67)

Unfortunately, these prayers could not save him from his addiction to alcohol and he
went to pieces far too fast, dying from cirrhosis of the liver at only 47. Before the end of his life,
he said: “I don’t want to be known as a beat poet anymore; I want to be known as a Catholic.”
(Burch, Brian; Stimpson, Emily, The American Catholic Almanac, 2014, p. 66)

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 2.5.1.The interest in Eastern Religion

The ‘beats’, mainly Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, Michael
McClure but also Diane di Prima were interested in and highly influenced by the study of
Buddhism. (Weidman, ). They found in Buddhism “an antidote to the paranoia and conformity
that were at the heart of fifties culture”, wrote Carole Tomkinson in editor’s preface to her book.
Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, Zen master, said: „When everything exists within your big mind, all
dualistic relationships drop away. There is no distinction between heaven and earth, man and
woman, teacher and disciple. . . . In your big mind, everything has the same value.” (Tonkinson,
Carole, Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and the Beat Generation, 2015). Through Buddhism each
writer could reconnect to the lost sense of the spiritual nourishment as their traditions and culture
could not offer that.

The ‘beat’ writers explored the Buddhist philosophy and each of them arrived in a
distinct place. They contributed to the evolution of American Buddhism, and they spread it
through literary and poetic works. They incorporated Buddhist philosophy in their personal lives
as a spiritual practice but, this was also used as a stylistic element, to improve their writing.
(Negus, emptymirrorbooks.com)

Kerouac’s life and writing took a turn in 1953 when he began to read about Buddhism.
He became so involved on this that he began to practice the religion he was reading about. He
was even called by Allen Ginsberg in the dedication to Howl as the “new Buddha of American
prose”: “Jack Kerouac, new Buddha of American prose, who spit forth intelligence ...creating a
spontaneous bop prosody and original classic literature” ( Charters, Ann, Kerouac: A Biography,
2015, p. 245). He was looking for information on the Hindu faith but only after reading Henry
David Thoreau’s book entitled Walden, he was inspired. In his book, Thoreau, a nineteenth
century transcendentalist, expounds how the key to the spiritual enlightenment is ‘Simple
Living’.

His novel, The Dharma Bums (1958) is the best example in which the main character,
‘Ray Smith’ (Kerouac’s alter ego) is searching for enlightenment with his Zen Buddhist friend,
Japhy Ryder (Gary Snyder). Before writing the novel, that was entirely devoted to Buddhism, he
was writing letters to his friends about the dharma, Thus he started with a passion to Buddhism

35
and ended with a Buddhist text. This novel was so important to Kerouac as he began to consider
it sacred. He wrote to Ginsberg: “I haven’t sent you the Notes on Dharma because I keep reading
it myself, have but one copy, valuable, sacred to me ...Besides it is not finished, I keep adding
every day ...” ( Kerouac, Jack, Some of the Dharma, 1997, Introduction)

Although captivated by Buddhism he remained faithful to his Catholic roots as he

claimed in Satori in Paris (1966): “I’m not a Buddhist, I’m a Catholic revisiting the ancestral
land that fought for Catholicism against impossible odds yet won in the end.” ( Kerouac, Jack;
Charters, Ann, The Portable Jack Kerouac, 1995, p. 582)

The ‘Beats’ were concerned by the teachings from various areas, involving Zen,
Mahayana and Tantric practices. Zen gave them freedom in their spontaneous writing, something
called free-thinking while Tantric practices offered them sexual independence. (McRae,
beatdom.com). Besides Kerouac, who was mainly fascinated by Buddhism teachings, Snyder
studied Zen Buddhism in Japan and was inspired by the Zen scientist D. T. Suzuki and also by
Allan Watts, an Easten philosopher. On the other hand, Wahlen may have been the first member
of the ‘Beat Generation’ to read about Buddhism, and in the 1970 he became a Zen Buddhist
monk. (Weidman, Rich, The Beat Generation FAQ: All That's Left to Know About the
Angelheaded Hipsters, 2015, p.37).

Another important figure is also the German philosopher Oswald Spengler, who
assembled a two volume doctrine headed The Decline of the West. This doctrine debated the rise
and fall of civilizations. He also stated that “those who are downtrodden and downbeat, will
prevail when social structures collapse”. He used the term ‘fellaheen’ for those ones, a term
assigned to an Arabian peasant. The ‘Beats’ believed that the ‘fellaheen’ were everywhere in
America. Also the underclass, the racially marginalized were called by Kerouac ‘the
Subterraneans’ while Ginsberg used the term ‘desolation angels’. (McRae, beatdom.com)

In his article, On the Holy Road, Stephen Prothero, links the notion of the ‘fellaheen’ to
Neal Cassady and Herbert Huncke. Huncke was called the ‘holy Creephood’ and he was the pure
embodiment of the ‘fellaheen’. But his instability could have affected the ‘Beats’ spiritually
venture and turned it into an ‘amoral, nihilistic apocalypticism’. The ‘Beats’ saw in Cassady the
self-indulgence and some kind of voyeuristic stability and these made them to move forward in

36
their determination of a ‘New Vision’. The criminal behavior distinguished Huncke from
Cassady. Thus, Cassady was worshiped as a free-thinking Beat contemporary and also Ginsberg
wrote in Howl that he was: “secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver – Joy
to the memory of his innumerable lays of girl”. (McRae, beatdom.com)

Although, many of the ‘Beat Generation’ were interested in Buddhism, William S.

Burroughs, had very little faith in Buddhism religion. Ted Morgan speaks in his biography of
the writer of a meeting that Burroughs had in 1975 at the Naropa Institute, Colorado. In that time
he watched very carefully the Tibetan monk, Trungpa. Morgan wrote: “Trungpa did not appear
to be a model of ascetic behavior, with his drinking, his chain-smoking, and his habit of asking
his female devotees to become his concubines.” This made Burroughs to doubt the Buddhism
awakenings. (McRae, beatdom.com)

2.6.Sexual Liberation

I have already mentioned that the ‘Beats’ didn’t accept the atmosphere of fear and
commonness made by the Cold War. They were against to the standards set by the government.
Thus the sexual liberation was another value exposed by the members of the ‘Beat Generation’
that was contrary to these norms. As William T. Lawlor wrote in his book, the sexual freedom
was “in the Beat Lifestyle a central factor leading to uninhibited personal fulfillment; also a
legendary part of Beat culture sensationalized in media coverage but not consistently revealed in
the actual behavior of the Beats.” ( William, T. Lawlor, Beat Culture: Icons, Lifestyles, and
Impact, 2005, p. 327)

The ‘Beats’ were agree with heterosexuality, homosexuality and also bisexuality. They
used mainly the theme of homosexuality in their writings, for example Allen Ginsberg openly
mentioned homosexuality in his poems. On the other hand, they approved homosexual
experience in the form of action. Thus Allen Ginsberg, an active member of the ‘Beat
Generation’ fought for sexual rights. The bars in San Francisco and New York, where the ‘beats’
spent their time, were the perfect places for the sexual rights movements.

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 Diane di Prima, one of the women on the ‘Beat Generation’, brings to light both the
sexual freedom and the myth of this kind of freedom in his book entitled Memoirs of a Beatnik
(1969). This contrast between reality and myth appears here in two chapters. In the first one, “A
Night by the Fire: What You Would Like to Hear”, she depicts a group of people who spend the
night in bed, what would later become an erotic scene. In spite of that, in the next chapter, “A
Night By the Fire: What Actually Happened”, she tells what really happened that night between
those people, she divulges the real version, a harmless one. (William, T. Lawlor, Beat Culture:
Icons, Lifestyles, and Impact, 2005, p. 327)

Kerouac, on the other hand, talks deliberately about sexuality in his novels. The Dharma
Bums and On the Road are the best examples. In Dharma Bums he presents a scene between
Japhy and Princess who practice ‘yabyum’ sitting naked and cross-legged on the floor. She sits
on him and put her arms around him. Later, Alvah and Ray join the naked union, but Ray refuses
to undress because he feels uncomfortable being naked around more people. Lastly everyone is
naked. Here, Japhy express his disjunction from the inhibitions of American culture. After the
leaving of Princess and Japhy, Ray reflect on what has happened and “assures himself that the
pleasures of the flesh have not overtaken the pleasures of his soul’s purification, and in this
conclusion he finds sexual freedom.” (William, T. Lawlor, Beat Culture: Icons, Lifestyles, and
Impact, 2005, p. 327)

In many of his poems, collected in Howls and Other Poems, he supports the sexual
freedom and “questions the society that withholds the freedom.” For example in America he asks
when America will get undressed. Even in A Supermarket in California, he sustains homosexuals
such as Walt Whitman and Federico Garcia Lorca, who are rejected by society that refuses to
tolerate their sexual inclination.( William, T. Lawlor, Beat Culture: Icons, Lifestyles, and Impact,
2005, p. 328)

Now I will focus on homosexuality of the “Beat Generation” and its influence on the
‘beats’ lifestyle and writings. The majority of the beat writers were identified as homosexual or
bisexual. It is known that their literary works were auto-biographical and confessional and they
also confess that this practice of homosexuality was ordinary in the midst of those writers.

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 Allen Ginsberg is with no doubt, the most widely known homosexual of the ‘Beat
Generation’. He was only a teenager when he got admitted to Columbia University and he had
no idea of what literary style he would use for his poetry, nor he did realize his hidden
homosexuality. Thus, through the company of his friends such as Lucien Carr and Kerouac he
examined for the first time his homosexuality. Of course, the era of 1950s, was not of sexual
freedom and liberation. Thereby, homosexuality was seen as an “abomination by the civilized
‘square’ society”. He proceeded to hide his homosexuality because this was considered as
murder. This fact made homosexuals to build their own society in underground, a secret society,
where they could communicate, in bars and coffee shops. (Mehrotra and Mishra, beatdom.com)

In his book American Scream, Jonah Raskin, wrote about Ginsberg’s sexuality and his
fascination for sex and Kerouac: “Sex and sexuality became the subtext of his fiction and poetry;
almost all his symbols were sexual symbols, he explained to Kerouac. At eighteen Ginsberg fell
in love with Kerouac and wrote love poems and love stories about him.” (p. 57) He also confess
in an interview that he realized he was in love with Kerouac and one night he told him: “Jack,
you know I love you, and I want to sleep with you, and I really like men.” (Mehrotra and Mishra,
beatdom.com)

However, his affair with Neal Cassady absolutely changed the course of his writing.
When Ginsberg met Cassady, he instantly felt in love with him because Cassady was: “The
Mover, compulsive, dedicated, ready to sacrifice family, friends, even his very car itself to the
necessity of moving from one place to another.” (Raskin, p. 71) As he was a sadist, he found
pleasure in abusing Allen physically, but also emotionally. Despite that, Ginsberg “turned the
agony of their relationship into the ecstasy of art. If he was sexually abused he would be inspired
to write poetry”. (Raskin, p. 72)

In Howl, Cassady is the sexual hero of the poem and is seen as the ‘Adonis of Denver’,
“Adonis being a Greek mythological figure associated with male youth and beauty”. In poem,
Cassady is depicted as: “flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake” who “went out
whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems,
cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty
lots & diner backyards, moviehouses’ rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt
waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station

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solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too…”. However, the poem Please Master describes the
relationship between Ginsberg and Cassady. (Mehrotra and Mishra, beatdom.com)

William S. Burroughs was also declared bisexual and published a novel which was based
on his sexual experiences on Mexico. Even though he confessed that he was involved in
homosexual encounters, he stated: “I have never been gay a day in my life and I’m sure as hell
not a part of any movement”. Although he admitted his homosexual experiences, he never called
himself homosexual. He wrote a novel, Queer, as a continuation of Junky, but it was only
published in 1985 because its obscenity. In his novel, he also wrote about his time spent in
Mexico City, before the trial for accidental homicide of his wife. The novel is about the main
character named Lee, and his quest for homosexual experience in South Africa who is ending up
in a relationship with Allerton. Lee is an alter ego of Burroughs and the model for Allerton is
Adelbert Lewis Marker, a friend of Burroughs during his residence in Mexico. Burroughs
illustrates the concept of the homosexuality without aesthetics: “A curse. Been in our family for
generations. The Lees have always been perverts. I shall never forget the unspeakable horror that
froze the lymph in my glands–the lymph glands that is, of course–when the baneful word seared
my reeling brain: I was a homosexual. I thought of the painted, simpering female impersonators
I’d seen in a Baltimore nightclub. Could it be possible I was one of those subhuman things? I
walked the streets in a daze like a man with a slight concussion–just a minute, Doctor Kildare,
this isn’t your script. I might well destroyed myself, ending an existence which seemed to offer
nothing but grotesque misery and humiliation. Nobler, I thought, to die a man than live on, a sex
monster.” (Marler, Regina, Queer Beats: How the Beats Turned America On to Sex, 2004, p. 17)

On the other hand, Jack Kerouac, was never labeled as homosexual. He was in favor of
heterosexual relationships and he had 3 wives. However he was engaged in some homosexual
encounters but these were casually. He questioned his sexual identity in his letters exchanged
with Ginsberg, but he wasn’t in favor of homosexuality. In spite of that, he was somehow
attracted by Neal, and in On the Road, Kerouac describes some bisexual experiences of Neal (
Dean Moriarty). However, the main characters, Sal Paradise (Jack Kerouac) and Dean Moriarty
(Neal Cassady) don’t appear as having a homosexual relationship. Their relationship can be seen
as ‘Bromance’, which is “a non-sexual homosocial intimacy”. (Lee, qssfc.wordpress.com)

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 Thus, homosexuality between the ‘Beats’ was definitely a big issue, since they involved
in the homosexual culture across America, also changing the homosexual facet of San Francisco
Poetry Renaissance. This also led to the political movement of sexual rights. However, for the
‘Beat’ writers, homosexuality was a great way to develop their senses to acquire the vision that
the typical people cannot have. They were convinced that the vision will help them to reach
different levels in terms of literary aspect.

2.7. Women and the Beat Generation

The ‘Beat Generation’ was created by Allen Ginsberg and his friends, so they were a
group of men. This explains why so few women writers are identified with this generation, Diane
Di Prima being the exception. Their presence is unknown to most ordinary readers and
considered to be insignificant. There was a rough era for the women, an era with and about men.
In that time the men were the ones who did significant things while the women were expected to
assist and support them on those struggles.

The ‘Beats’ undervalued the women and they were convinced that they could not write
as well as the male writers. Women were mostly seen only as “sex objects, providers and
mothers”. (Morgan, Bill: The Typewriter is Holy. The Complete Uncensored History of the Beat
Generation, 2010, p. 155). Brenda Knight claimed in her book: “The women of the Beat
Generation, with rare exception, escaped the eye of the camera; they stayed underground,
writing. They were instrumental in the literary legacy of the Beat Generation, however, and
continue to be some ofits most prolific writers.” (Knight, Brenda, Women of the Beat
Generation, 1996, p. 1)

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 Very important is here the concept of the “Male Gaze”. The term is took from media
theory and it is generally applied on gender studies of advertisements. It was coined for the first
time by Laura Mulvey, a feminist film theorist, in her 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema. In the opinion of feminists, the term implies that man is the active subject while woman
is seen as the passive object. Women are not displaying their real features, and they are described
as men want them to be. Thus, women are split into ‘good girls’ and ‘bad girls’. So, women are
categorized from a masculine point of view, instead taking into account their character, and their
own actions. In literature, the ‘male gaze’ happens when a story is told from the perspective of a
heterosexual man. The author will focus only on woman physical appearance: “women are
simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic
impact” (Mulvey 11).

Of course, the ‘Beat’ women had the same lifestyle as the ‘Beat’ men, in the sense that
they were also interested in heavy drinking, having sex and taking drugs, and that’s not a great
aspect worth highlighting when questing integration in society. The sexism that exists in all
aspects of life, definitely might be a good reason for all these. While the males of the ‘Beat
Generation’ were treated with superiority, arrested or scoffed during the years, the females were
treated much worse. The 1940s and 50s were times very cruel for them, in which their freedom
was reduced or did not exist at all. Thereby, they were belonged first to their parents, and second
to their husband. If they misbehaved or humiliated their parents , they were punished roughly.
For men, this kind of behavior led to “being cut loose, thrown out of the family, forced to take
the Beatnik kick on the road’. On the other hand, the women were brought in mental hospitals,
suffered electro-shock treatment or being locked up at home. (Wills, beatdom.com)

Joyce Johnson wrote: “If you want to understand Beat women, call us transitional—a
bridge to the next generation, who in the 1960s, when a young woman’s right to leave home was
no longer an issue, would question every assumption that limited women’s lives and begin the
long, never-to-be-completed work of transforming relationships with men.” (Knight, Brenda,
Women of the Beat Generation, 1996, p. 1)

Of course, the men that were part of the generation were talented and their works were
dazzling. Also, the few women that were part of the ‘Beats, were “less successful in quality of
literary output”. Although there existed some remarkable poems written by women, and some

42
tremendous views revealed, their rejection from this literature “has less to do with the sexism of
today and more of a reflection of reality”. (Wills, beatdom.com)

Even Allen knew some women writers, he never thought that the works of these women
could be as brilliant as the works of his male friends. He had few female friends and he mostly
spent his time with his male friends. The strong and self-confident women, like Diane Di Prima,
were the ones who “could break out of the ‘little woman’ mold that Allen and others put them
into”. Thus the men of the ‘Beat Generation’, realized after many years that “the women they
had known were marvelous writers”. (Morgan, Bill: The Typewriter is Holy. The Complete
Uncensored History of the Beat Generation, 2010, p. 155)

William T. Lawlor affirmed: “The Beat Generation is often considered an “all boys
club,” and is often charged with being a sexist generation of misogynistic writers. The work of
the major Beat authors reflects attitudes that are, at times, sexist. Indeed, in many ways the male
writers of the Beat Generation held the same sexist attitudes toward women as did men in
mainstream postwar American culture”. However, the ‘beat’ lifestyle gave women more freedom
than did the ordinary lifestyle. Engaging themselves in relationships with ‘Beat’ men, “many
women writers of the day were exposed to a variety of liberating experiences and enjoyed some
of the same sexual freedom as the men.” ( William, T. Lawlor, Beat Culture: Icons, Lifestyles,
and Impact, 2005, p. 324)

The works of ‘Beat’ writers illustrate this series of attitudes about the women’s and
men’s roles and relationships. Thus, Kerouac’s novels contain many misogynistic beliefs which
denote a fear and disgust of women. For example, “the idea that attractive women stir men into
acts of procreation and thereby become pregnant and give birth to children who are doomed to
die.” However, his works presents some women that engage themselves in sexual relationships
with men and who are rejected after they have achieved their purpose. He also includes some
scenes in which the male characters realize that they don’t understand women and in the end
everything is men’s fault. (William, T. Lawlor, Beat Culture: Icons, Lifestyles, and Impact,
2005, p. 324)

So, the ‘Beats’ treated women badly, but Burroughs was probably the worst. Some of his
works include assertions that are hostile and misogynistic. For him women were “an alien virus

43
that needed to be segregated from men”, wrote Bill Morgan. (p. 156) A good example is his
novel The Job in which he indicates that “women were a fundamental miscalculation that led to
the problems of a twofold reality”. Ted Morgan enlightens: “Burroughs had several close female
friends, and was reportedly genuinely in love with his wife, Joan Vollmer, despite his
homosexual orientation. That Joan died from an errant gunshot from Burroughs’s own hand in an
ill-fated game of William Tell is sometimes used as evidence of Burroughs’s misogyny.”
(Lawlor, p. 324)

On the other hand, Ginsberg never hated women, but he simply ignored them without
realizing. Perhaps this was only because they both were gay, and they spent their time around
other men. They were somehow isolated from women, but also inspired by them. These women
served as muses to the men that wrote their famous book and many of them appears as characters
in their novels. For example, Ginsberg was heavily influenced by his mother, and Burroughs
took his writing in serious only after killing his wife, but also took some help from the men in his
life. However, Kerouac’s muse was all man.

3.THE INFLUENCE OF THE ‘BEAT GENERATION’ ON ON THE

ROAD

3.6.Sexual liberation

Sexual liberation and exploration is a key theme in On the Road. This is also a strong
reason why literary critics consider the novel an obscene book. In his essay entitled Fast This
Time: Jack Kerouac and the Writing of On the Road, Cunnell affirms that the original scroll was
edited and also revised repeatedly. Firstly, Kerouac changed the characters’ names. Thus, Jack
Kerouac became Sal Paradise, Neal Cassady became Dean Moriarty, and William S. Burroughs
became Old Bull Lee (Cunnell, 29). Besides that, “Kerouac usually erased male homosexuality
out of his books” (Stimpson, 385), which is most apparent in the relationships between Sal and
Dean, and Carlo and Dean.

Thereby, besides listing the instances of erotic intimacies and activities, the novel also
focusses on the hidden homosexual encounters. I might say that through this novel, Kerouac
appears as working on his struggle with his own sexuality. He never openly talked about his

44
sexuality, but he identified as bisexual. It is very clear that he is dealing with these feelings in the
attempting to hide them within his novel. What Kerouac does with this novel, is to redefine “the
norms of sexuality in 1950s America, reinventing a significant part of U.S. morality” (Swartz,
74).

Kerouac points out here “the conflict between sexual freedom and responsibility”. Dean
appears involved in many “relationships, marriages, divorces, reconciliations, and
transgressions”. He is the ‘sexual icon’ of the novel and he “delights in sex as a chief source of
satisfaction, and in the midst of involvement, his partners seem to find delight with him”
(Lawlor, 327). However women begin to attack him, and they try to open his eyes. For example
in part three, chapter two, Camille, becomes angry because Dean can’t take the responsibilities
of a family, his role of husband, and also of father is not taking in serious by him. Thus, one
morning she kicked him out. Sal was taking part of the fight scene, and he describes: “Then he
grabbed his seabag and threw things into that. I got my bag, stuffed it, and as Camille lay in bed
saying, ‘Liar! Liar! Liar!’ we leaped out of the house and struggled down the street to the nearest
cable car”. (OR, 171)

In part three, chapter three, Galatea Dunkel, scolds him because she was the only one
who wasn’t afraid of him. She reminds him that he has a child, but he leaves Camille alone to
take care of child and also to work: “Dean, why do you act so foolish? Camille called and said
you left her. Don’t you realize you have a daughter? […] Camille has to stay home and mind the
baby now you’re gone ‒ how can she keep her job? ‒ and she never wants to see you again and I
don’t blame her”(OR, 175-177). She goes on and accuses him of irresponsibility: “I think
Marylou was very, very wise leaving you, Dean… For years now you haven’t had any sense of
responsibility for anyone. You’ve done so many awful things I don’t know what to say to you”
(OR, 176). Selfishness is also one of Dean’s features, and Galatea tells him: “ You have
absolutely no regard for anybody but yourself and your damned kicks. All you think about is
what’s hanging between your legs and how much money or fun you can get out of people and
then you just throw them aside. Not only that but you’re silly about it. It never occurs to you that
life is serious and there are people trying to make something decent out of it instead of just
goofing all the time” (OR, 176). Sal defends Dean, and remarks that Dean’s critis are “anything
but a sewing circle”. In his vision, Dean is “a saint”, and the “HOLY GOOF” (OR, 176). Despite

45
of all these, Dean doesn’t seem very affected, and when Sal goes after him to have a ‘brief talk’
he replies: “Ah, man, don’t worry, everything is perfect and fine” (OR, 178).

However sex and life becomes in On the Road identical terms. As sex is a central element
in the ‘Beat’ lifestyle, here, Dean and Sal try to make this element spiritual and holy. Even from
the beginning of the novel, Sal says about Dean: “for him sex was the one and only holy and
important thing in life” (OR, 2). For Sal his numerous attempts to get sex aren’t properly
spiritual. He just want to have sex with many women, to be able to do it with Dean's experience.
Nevertheless, the novel is filled with Sal’s frustrations, mainly sexual frustration. For example in
their first night out, Sal and Dean wanted to meet two “colored girls”, who “didn’t show up”
(OR, 7). Another example is when Sal tries to have sex with Rita Betancourt, but in the end he
fails: “I got her into my bedroom after a long talk in the dark of the front room… she was…
simple and true and tremendously frightened of sex… I told her it was beautiful… she let me
prove it, but I was impatient and proved nothing…” (OR, 58)

Even from the first page of the novel, Sal begins to compare women and life. He says: “I
first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I
won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up
and my feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of
my life you could call my life on the road.” Here is an evident contrast, that Dean brings with
him women, sex, and a new life. Thus, the “new horizon” of their trip is focused on sex and
“visions”. Kerouac writes: “I could hear a new call a see a new horizon […] Somewhere along
the line I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be
handed to me” (OR, 10)

Of course, the relationship between Sal and Dean is at the heart of the novel. Stimpson
states: “Much of Beat writing — On the Road, for example,… is about brotherhood” (375). Thus,
Sal writes that Dean reminds him of “some long-lost brother”: “…somehow in spite of our
difference in character, he reminded me of some long-lost brother” (OR, 7). Aram Saroyan
claims: “They [the beats] had to love each other first, before and more importantly than
women” (19). “Unable to present homosexuality clearly,… Kerouac idealized and de-eroticized
a picture of Whitmanesque brotherhood [in Sal’s friendship] for Dean” (Stimpson, 386).

46
 On the other hand, the relationship between Dean and Carlo is entirely homosexual in the
original scroll ( Cunnell, 30). After the numerous revisions, homosexuality began to disappear.
The ‘beat’ writer “edited all references to the homosexuality of Carlo Marx and the relationship
between [Dean] Moriarty and [Carlo] Marx out of the final version of On the Road” (McDowell,
415). Thus, in the original draft Kerouac wrote: “Allen [Ginsberg] was queer in those days,
experimenting with himself to the hilt” ( Cunnell, 29). This passage also presents Ginsberg’s
attraction for Cassady, and their disappearance for 2 weeks. McDowell affirms that: “This
passage was rewritten and in the final version the explicit references to homosexuality were cut,
although its sexual ambivalence and indeed homoeroticism remains” (415). In the final version,
Kerouac writes that they spent these two weeks talking all day and all night. Meanwhile, Carlo is
excluded from Sal’s and Dean’s trips. Because of “his apparent exclusion from the
(hetero)sexual chase of his buddies” (McDowell, 415), he remains a minor character.

Thus, the sexual freedom is very well embodied in On the Road and “Dean is the
archetype of social deviance and sexuality” (Swartz, 81). Even the novel suffered numerous
revisions, Malcom Cowley, who worked at Viking Press, helped Kerouac to publish his novel.

3.7.Women in On the Road

Nowadays the readers of the novel are not shocked by its sexual content. Instead, they are
mad and provoked by the fact that On the Road highlights the inequality between the sexes. Of
course, the feminists will notice this aspect immediately. The women are described as
superficial, and they doesn’t play a great role in the book, while the men show depth in
temperament. Thus, this portrayal of women, and the way in which they are treated by the male
protagonists is clearly not a positive aspect.

As in Kerouac’s life, Sal appears as being part of a masculine ‘homosocial’ group. This
group is based on only ‘male friendship’; is like a ‘male bounding’ from which women are
totally excluded. Their traditionally activities such as heavy drinking, taking drugs, listening to
jazz music and driving cars, but also intellectual talks about philosophy and literature are not
included the women. Women are somehow left outside of this sphere, they are flat characters,
and although the ‘Beat’ writers don’t make difference between race and class. They are
discriminated an considered to be ‘unimportant’ housewives. This is well highlights in the

47
following sequence : “My first afternoon in Denver I slept in Chad King’s room while his mother
went on with her housework downstairs and Chad worked at the library”. (OR, 40)

The narrator’s focalization is on the male characters, and the female perspectives and
actions are silenced. Thus, the readers don’t receive very information about the women’s
thoughts and feelings. When Kerouac introduces a female character in the novel, he gives some
minor details about his appearance. For example, when he presents Babe, who is a friend of Sal
in Denver, he gives a short description about her, but he focuses on her relation to men : “One of
Ray’s sisters was a beautiful blonde called Babe – a tennis-playing, surf-riding doll of the west.
She was Tim Gray’s girl”. (OR, 42)

There are some few female characters that play an active role in the novel because they
exists in terms of girlfriends or relatives. These are Marylou (Dean’s first wife), Frankie (Sal’s
friend in Denver), Galatea (Ed Dunkel’s wife), but also Sal’s aunt.

This discrimination of women in On the Road, may be explained perhaps by Kerouac’s

problems with women. Robert Holton claimed in his article, “Kerouac Among the Fellahin”, that
this gender issue was too heavy for Kerouac, and this is why he left it untreated. He always had a
difficult relationship with women, and he was scared of gender and sexuality. Thus, he reduced
the characters to stereotypes, and expressed somehow a male cultural fancy. (275) Ideology may
be an another reason of marginalization of women. In the American society of the 1940s and
1950s, women has no power and no independence. These beliefs was deeply rooted in that
society and the ‘Beats’ writers took them for granted.

The values and conventions embodied by the society presented in the novel makes the
female characters very unhappy with their relationships with others. It is very clear that women
are unsatisfied with their love life and often very frustrated in their daily lives. These negative
feelings lead to tensions between the partners and to violent acts.

The relationship between Sal’s friend Remi Boncoeur, and his wife Lee Ann is described
by Sal as: “ She was a fetching hunk, a honey-colored creature, but there was hate in her eyes for
both of us. Her ambition was to marry a rich man. She came from a small town in Oregon. She
rued the day she ever took up with Remi. On one of his big showoff week-ends he spent a
hundred dollars on her and she thought she’d found an heir. Instead she was hung up in this

48
shack, and for the lack of anything else she had to stay there.” (OR 61) Here, Lee Ann is depicted
as a match between a beautiful exterior and an evil interior. Her beauty is not enough, and
doesn’t make her a right wife for Remi. She is described as a woman who uses men in order to
obtain money. When her wish of marrying rich men doesn’t come true, she becomes very
frustrated, and he shows her dissatisfaction for her husband.

3.7.1. The Objectification of women in On the Road

Through this procedure of objectification, the woman loses his human qualities and can
be compared to a lifeless object. This objectification can be seen through the act of gazing at a
woman, but also through the fact that women can be used to achieve sexual pleasure. For Sal and
his friends sexual pleasure is decisive. Women were seen as “replaceable” objects, and for the
male figures is important only the woman who is able to give them enjoyment, not the woman
herself.

In On the Road, this concept of objectification of women divides the women in two
groups: ‘the good girls’, and the bad girls’. The best example is the contrast between Marylou
(LuAnne Henderson) ‒ who will be discussed more detailed below ‒ is portrayed as a ‘whore’
(OR, 163), a ‘bad girl’, while Laura (Joan Haverty) is a ‘good girl’ with “pure and innocent dear
eyes” (OR, 288).

Throughout the novel, it’s obvious that women are subjected to the ‘male gaze’. The
majority of female characters in the novel exist only for the male characters to have sex with, and
afterward to be forsaken. They aren’t seen as strong or intelligent, and they are reduced from
these qualities to “having only… sex functions, displayed by their bodies”. (McNeil 189) Some
of the female characters are mentioned by name, while most of them being referred to only as “a
beautiful young black chick” (Kerouac 206) and “a gorgeous country girl” (Kerouac 228); all
these descriptions highlights the idea of women as sex objects.

The first girl Sal meets while he is travelling, is Rita Bettencourt (Ruth Gullion), who is
introduced by Dean as “a nice little girl, simple and true, and tremendously frightened of sex”
(OR, 55). After a very short time, Sal takes her to his apartment to convince her that sex is
‘beautiful’ and she doesn’t need to be afraid of it. To get her in bed with him is all he wants,
because in his eyes she’s only good for sex. He fails to live up to his promises, but the night

49
continues with a small talk: “We lay on our backs, looking at the ceiling and wondering what
God had wrought when He made life so sad”. ( OR, 56)

A clear example of ‘male gaze’ is the scene in which Sal encounters Terry (Bea Franco),
on a bus to Los Angeles: “I saw the cutest little Mexican girl. [...] Her breasts stuck out straight
and true; her little flanks looked delicious; her hair was long and black’ and her eyes were great
big blue tings with a soul in it” (OR, 78). This description is from a heterosexual, a male point of
view. Meanwhile, the narrator focuses on his physical features, mainly on certain parts of the
female body such as: breasts, flanks, hair, and eyes. Thus, they decide to travel together for a
time: “for the next fifteen days we were together for better or for worse. When we woke up we
decided to hitch hike up to New York together; she was going to be my girl in town” (OR, 81-
82). Adding ‘in town’ means that Sal sees Terry as an replaceable object, and that he probably
has a distinct girl in every city. When Terry refuses to have sex with Sal, he gets very angry, he
states: “I got mad and realized I was pleading with a dumb little Mexican wench” (OR, 81). Of
course, when she decides not to sleep with him, Sal sees her as ‘dumb’ and ‘simple’: “she has a
simple and funny little mind” (OR, 81)

Laura (Joan Haverty), as I already said, is one of the ‘good girls’. The meeting between
Sal and she is unusual: “a pretty girl stuck her head out of the window and said ‘Yes? Who is it?’
‘Sal Paradise’, I said” (OR, 288). He also moves forward with: “there she was, the girl with the
pure and innocent dear eyes that I had always searched for and for so long” (OR, 288).

Until now I have talked of Sal’s women. Marylou (LuAnne Henderson), is Dean’s
sixteen years old wife, and plays an active role in the novel. Thus, she is the most affected by this
objectification. As usually she is only described by his physical features. For Dean, she is “his
beautiful little sharp chick” (OR, 3). Also, the use of pronoun ‘his’ implies ownership, which
forwards shows that she is regarded as an object. This becomes more evident when Kerouac
present a scene in Dean’s apartment, who very angry states: “the thing to do was to have
Marylou make breakfast and sweep the floor” (OR, 4).

Further in the novel, Kerouac gives some details about her character, and again some of
his physical features: “But, outside of being a sweet little girl, she was awfully dumb and capable
of doing horrible things” (OR, 4). These horrible things are highlights later in the novel when Sal

50
asks where’s Marylou “and Dean said she’d apparently whored a few dollars together and gone
back together ‒ ‘the whore!’”( OR, 5). Also, she is depicted as a ‘whore’ by Sal in several
circumstances. One of these is when Sal says: “I saw what a whore she was” (OR, 163). He later
writes that Dean “wanted absolute proof that she was a whore” (OR, 173). This is obvious that
Marylou becomes a ‘whore’ when Dean “no longer has control over her sexual activities”
(Birkin, blogs.millersville.edu). It’s interesting to see that Dean has no problem with that when
he offers Marylou to Sal, as Sal says: “Dean…wanted me to work Marylou.” (OR, 131).

Thus, in this novel the leitmotif of women as whores is emphasized when Sal, Dean, and
Stan spend the their day at the ‘whorehouse’ ( OR, 285) in Mexico. Here, Sal ignores the distress
and ‘awful grief’ (OR, 287) of hookers’ lives, instead seeing the moment as “a long, spectral
Arabian dream” (OR, 288). On the other hand, men are never accused of being too promiscuous
or called derogatory names, no matter how many women they slept with. (Birkin,
blogs.millersville.edu). For example, Sal doesn’t make any comments when Dean cheats on his
wife, and he only says : “Dean was making love to two girls at the same time” (OR, 41). Also
Dean doesn’t want to choose between Marylou, Camille, and Inez, and he want them all at the
same time: “Oh, I love, love, love women! I think women are wonderful! I love women!” (OR,
140)

Another victim of objectification is Dean’s second wife, Camille (Carolyn Cassady), who
is introduced by Sal as a “brunette on the bed, one beautiful creamy thigh covered with black
lace, look up with mild wonder” (OR, 44). This is happened also with Inez (Diana Hansen),
Dean’s third wife, who is described by Sal only on the basis of her body: “big sexy brunette […]
and generally like a Parisian coquette” (OR, 232). She is categorized as a ‘good girl’ (OR, 235)
opposed to Marylou, after the narrator gives some information about her habits. Thus, both of
them are a typical example of the ‘male gaze’.

Also women of the novel should perform domestic duties. These duties are very well
highlight when Dean decides that: “the thing to do was to have Marylou make breakfast and
sweep the floor” (OR, 4), or when “Babe cooks a big breakfast” (OR, 249) for all of the
men. The notion of ideal woman as domesticated and subject is illustrated when Dean and Sal
find “the sweetest woman in the world”. Sal remarks “she never asked Walter where he’d been,

51
what time it was, nothing. . . She never said a word” (OR, 204), and Dean comments that
“there’s a real woman for you. Never a harsh word, never a complaint” (OR, 204).

In On the Road, this idea that women should take care of household duties signifies that
women remain in “immobile place-bound domesticity” (Enevold 406) because “the road
narrative’s gendered past and pattern… mobilizes men and makes women stationary” (Enevold
405). Thus, women are left at home, which becomes for them a symbol of “containment and
control” (McNeil, 186). Marylou is the exception because she is the only one who dares to join
the men on a road trip. The road in the novel appears to be a male space, and this experience of
traveling “becomes a male identity project which engages in a culturally dependent spatial
othering of women” (Enevold 405).

Here, women are also depicted as dull, suffocating. Thereby, the female characters are “a
negative stability in terms of institutionalized commitment, dependence, and conditions, from
which ‘evolving men’ should attempt to escape” (Enevold 411). Also, they represent a negative
influence on the men. A good example is when Galatea (Helen Hinkle), Ed Dunkel’s wife, is
described as a woman who creates many trouble at their road trip and who “kept complaining
that she was tired and wanted to sleep in a motel” (OR, 111). Also, Dean makes comments about
Camille, who “is getting worse and worse, man, she cries and makes tantrums, won't let me out
to see Slim Gaillard, gets mad every time I'm late, then when I stay home she won't talk to me
and says I'm an utter beast.” (OR, 183)

It is obvious that the women presented in On the Road, are all subjected to the ‘male
gaze’, objectified and if they are not ‘pure’ or ‘domesticated’ are insulted and mistreated. The
physical appearance is more important than their inner thoughts and feelings.

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