The Beat Goes On

“Kerouac opened a million coffee bars,” quipped Beat novelist William Burroughs about the so-called King of the Beat Generation, “and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes.” The first draft of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road”--a 119-foot scroll of teletype paper--was sold at auction in 2001 for $2.4 million. And yet, as Kerouac lay dying in 1969, he was tormented by the fact that his books were being remaindered by his American publishers.

“I’m an author!” he raged. “By your works ye shall be known!”

Ironically, Kerouac and the Beats are the subject of an ever-growing library of history, memoir and biography that surely surpasses in sheer quantity the poetry and prose that they actually produced. Among the latest titles, the most sentimental effort is “Offbeat,” an autobiography by composer David Amram, who befriended Kerouac during the mid-1950s, when the Beat myth was still in the making.

“Each day was a struggle for survival,” Amram writes of the early days, when he and Kerouac collaborated on the now-legendary performances of improvisational jazz and poetry that were the purest expression of the Beats. “Each day was a celebration of life, and a new day in school as prize students in our own homemade University of Hang-out-ology.”

“Offbeat” is filled with intimate anecdotes and reconstructed conversations that feature some of the most famous Beats, principally Kerouac but also Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The death of Kerouac is the central point of the narrative, and Amram devotes the second half of the book to a memoir of his own career as a composer of movie scores (“The Manchurian Candidate”) and orchestral works (“Autobiography for Strings”) as well as, not incidentally, to his efforts to keep the memory of the Beats alive.

Amram decries “the plague of the Beatnik Myth [that] tarred and feathered so many of us,” and he seeks to reclaim the purity of aspiration that he recalls from the dues-paying years with Kerouac. “Don’t let what we started die, Davey,” a failing Kerouac says to Amram shortly before his death, and Amram replies with a vow: “I won’t, Jack. No way.”

On the day of Kerouac’s death, Amram reveals, he “prayed for his soul and said a Kaddish and kissed an old Mass card that he had given me in 1957.” Much of the same piety can be discerned in “Offbeat,” which is less about telling hard truths than a way of honoring his promise to his dear old friend.

To call Charles Bukowski a “post-Beat” is not only a matter of strict chronology, according to Jean-Francois Duval in “Bukowski and the Beats,” but also a description of his poetic stance. The Beats may have prepared a readership that was ready to embrace the in-your-face poetry and gut-punching fiction of Bukowski in the late 1960s and after, but Buk, as Bukowski is called in this admiring and well-informed appreciation of his life and work, insisted that he “felt closer to the punks than the Beatniks.”

“I don’t care if you are a fake,” Bukowski once told Ginsberg. “Everybody knows that after ‘Howl’ you never wrote anything worth a ----.”

But Bukowski was a beneficiary of the Beats in more than one sense, as Duval points out. Bukowski may have lampooned Ginsberg and other Beats in “Notes of a Dirty Old Man,” but the work came to be published by Ferlinghetti, the original publisher of Ginsberg’s epochal poem and one of the last surviving Beats. And Bukowski basked in the reflected light of the Beats when he joined a 1974 tour that featured Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti and Gary Snyder; Bukowski marveled that the Santa Cruz outing “drew 1,600 at 3 bucks.”

Still, Duval argues that Bukowski came from (and stayed in) a darker place than the Beats and that stakes were higher for Bukowski than for Ginsberg or Ferlinghetti: “While the Beats danced along the road composing a hymn to their freedom from social proprieties,” Duval explains, “Buk put in forty years to free himself from the shackles which alcohol and poetry alone helped him to forget at times.”

Kerouac’s credo held that “the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk,” and Bukowski’s was superficially similar: “Thank the gods that the first 50 years of my life were spent with the Blue Collars and the truly mad, the truly beaten.” But Duval allows us to see that Kerouac was waxing poetic while Bukowski was speaking literally: “Kerouac had his face constantly turned toward God, toward an assumed paradise,” insists Duval. “Bukowski considered himself a painter of hell and the grotesque.”

“Bukowski and the Beats” is full of affection and admiration for Bukowski, but Duval brings a sharp edge and a smart take to his work, which is composed of biography, literary criticism and cultural history in equal measure, plus the transcript of a 1986 interview with Bukowski titled “An Evening at Buk’s Place.” And the Who’s Who of Beat and post-Beat personalities that appears as an appendix to Duval’s book is a useful companion to all of the titles reviewed here.

For those who know the names of the Beats better than the works that made them famous in the first place, an essential volume is Carmela Ciuraru’s “Beat Poets,” a title in the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets series.

All of the Beats who figure so prominently in “Offbeat” and “Bukowski and the Beats” appear in these pages--we get short excerpts from Kerouac’s “Mexico City Blues,” Ginsberg’s “Howl” and “Kaddish,” Ferlinghetti’s “#22” (“crazy to be alive in such a strange world”)--and many others besides, ranging from Ray Bremser’s “City Madness” to John Wieners’ “A Poem for the Insane.”

“[A] rebellious, taunting cry against bourgeois intellectualism and repression” is how Ciuraru sums up the Beat movement. But she bluntly concedes that some of the poems in the collection are “self-indulgent, sloppy and even at times incoherent.” And she reminds us that “Beat writings were often ridiculously misogynistic,” a theme that interests Duval far more than Amram.

As a kind of counterweight to the poetry itself, Ciuraru closes out the collection with excerpts from the letters and other writings of Donald Allen, Burroughs, Corso, Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg and Kerouac, including their pronouncements on the subject of “poetics.” Kerouac, for example, validates much of what we read in Amram’s and Duval’s books when he advises the aspiring poet to “be crazy dumbsaint of the mind” and insists that “[m]y love of poetry is love of joy.”