Beat Generation Literary Criticism

Theado, Matt, 1959Contemporary Literature, Volume 45, Number 4, Winter 2004,

pp. 747-761 (Review)
Published by University of Wisconsin Press
DOI: 10.1353/cli.2005.0010

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cli/summary/v045/45.4theado.html

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Beat Generation Literary Criticism

Kostas Myrsiades, ed., The Beat Generation: Critical Essays. New York: Peter
Lang, 2002. x + 352 pp. $29.95.
Jennie Skerl, ed., Reconstructing the Beats. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004.
241 pp. $24.95.

he Beat generation of writers sought literary achievement, but contemporary fashion, entertainment, and
opinion columnists granted them much more notice
than did literary critics. When Jack Kerouac, author of
On the Road (1957) and the unwitting Daddy of the Beatniks, died in
1969 with only one of his twenty-some books in print, the Beat generation seemed destined to fade away, maybe to be remembered
primarily as precursors to the politically engaged hippie movement. Time has proven otherwise. In the thirty years following
Kerouacs death, more than a dozen biographers have covered his
life, replacing the popular presss snapshots with deeply researched
tomes that depict a serious and dedicated writer at work. The other
major Beat writersAllen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and William
Burroughs, who all died in the past decadehave likewise had their
lives recorded by biographers. References to the Beat writers in popular songs, movies, and television shows constitute a further tribute
to their cultural relevance and to the popularity they maintain
with the public at large. As distance from the 1950s increased and
the 1960s counterculture bore fruit with solid social developments
in the 1970s and beyond, many social critics overhauled earlier
dismissals of the Beats significance. It is now clear that the Beats
Contemporary Literature XLV, 4
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heralded a refreshing new age of social and literary freedoms that

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appeared in reprints even as new and previously unpublished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

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explorations of live poetry readings, spontaneous raps, and poetry

with jazz accompaniment announced a fresh kind of writing for a
new and unsophisticated audience. Although they were generally
appreciative of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, the Beats loathed the
ivory-tower entrapment of poetry. Battles raged between the academic stewards of verse well-crafted in New Critical methodologies in New York publishing offices and the rowdy folks out
there on the West Coast who were brashly sounding their barbaric
yawps. Even though Burroughs was a Harvard graduate and
Ginsberg and Snyder attended graduate school at Berkeley, they
were not welcomed by the academic community during their glory
days. No members of the Columbia University English department
attended Ginsbergs homecoming poetry reading in 1959. Kerouac
did not graduate from college and was in fact ridiculed by some
reviewers because he attended Columbia on a football scholarship.
Everything about the Beat generation, from its writers breaking out
of traditional modes of literary acceptability to its beatnik hangerson wallowing in decadence and nonconformity, declared independence from the academy and its high priests, the academics. The
Beats were nothing if not un- (Norman Podhoretz charged them
with being anti-) academic.
Now the academics are producing complex, theory-driven, and
at times jargon-cluttered essays whose existence may seem to contradict the original Beat impulses. Does this critical activity undermine the impulsive freedoms upon which Beat literature is
founded? The scholarly language inherent in most of the essays in
these two collections illuminates the difficulty in the effects of these
books. The spiritually driven, experience-hungry teenager will not
respond to phrases such as panopticism inculcates in the individual himself the surveillance that impels his conformity (from
Ronna C. Johnsons essay in The Beat Generation [46]). This is the language of a scholar writing to other scholars. One might wonder
whether the Beats are not being taken from the streets where they
deliberately established themselves and are having their poetics
drawn back into the tower. It is far likelier, of course, that in the
twenty-first century, academia has loosened up, not in its perhaps
necessarily exclusive language, the language of the MLA, but in its
willingness to open up to a whole range of new literatures, subjects,

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and perspectives. Johnson quotes Kerouac in a subsequent passage:

the cops stopped me in the Arizona desert that night when I was
hiking under a full moon at 2 A.M. to go spread my sleepingbag in
the sand outside Tucson (47). Kerouacs own language is by contrast famously loose and free-flowing, easily read by a younger generation who responded strongly to his voice. Clearly one should not
presume that todays literary scholars are the cops who limit
Kerouacs freedom. Instead, they may be seen as tour guides of
a sort, pointing the way for teachers and students who wish to
explore sophisticated foundational and cultural issues by way of
Beat-generation literature, even as the language of their telling
differs vastly.
Myrsiadess 2002 The Beat Generation: Critical Essays brings tight
focus from various critical approaches to specific works, authors,
and issues. The book constitutes a compendium volume for interested readersa useful overview of current critical approaches to
selected works. The collection provides an opportunity for Robert
Bennett, then a graduate student at the University of California,
Santa Barbara, to present a fine essay that complicates what he
sees as the too-simplistic understanding many readers have of the
relationship of the Beats to the squares of the 1950s, a beneficial
new perspective now available in part because Beat-era New
Critical assumptions have given way to multiple waves of poststructuralism, deconstructionism, New Historicism, feminism,
multiculturalism, and other forms of critical theory and cultural
studies (4). Six of the essays in Myrsiadess volume consider various approaches to Kerouacs work; two each the work of Ginsberg
and Burroughs; and one Gary Snyders lifetime accomplishment,
Mountains and Rivers without End. Myrsiadess most unusual inclusions are the last three essays, which open the door to much broader
possibilities in Beat studies (Beat studies now constituting an
accepted topic that continues to grow and garner respect). These
last essays explore new territory by tracing Beat connections to
William Kotzwinkle, Chicano writer Oscar Zeta Acosta, and
German writers Wolf Wondratscheck, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, and
Jrg Fauser. Simon Vinkenoog and other Dutch poets are also discussed, and thus the collection expands to present a surprising and
fresh Euro-Beat flavor.

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Myrsiadess The Beat Generation: Critical Essays comes six years

after A. Robert Lees The Beat Generation Writers, a similar collection
of critical essays with which it must be compared, if for no other
reason than that Lee contributes essays to both the Myrsiades and
Skerl collections, thus pulling off the Beat studies hat trick. Lees
collection consists of ten essays by British scholars that demonstrate
the literary impact of the Beats on British writers and academics. In
fact, Carolyn Cassady (Off the Road: My Years with Cassady, Kerouac,
and Ginsberg [1990]), who lives in England, contends that through
most of the 1980s and 1990s the Beats were more popular in
England than they were in America. In contrast to the Myrsiades
volume, the British volume contains only one essay on Kerouacs
work while featuring two on the larger concerns of women of the
Beat generation and one on black Beat writers. The Myrsiades volume does deal with these issues but in the context of articles on
individual writers, most notably in Nancy M. Graces study of
Kerouacs love stories. The Beat Generation: Critical Essays is a natural counterpart and complement to the British volume, for it presents alternative views, American perspectives, and newer and
more sophisticated critical approaches.
Bennetts useful opening essay, Teaching the Beat Generation to
Generation X, presents a challenge to both readers and teachers
(half of the essays here appeared originally in a special issue of
College Literature dedicated to teaching Beat literature [Winter
2000]). This essay is a good leadoff for a volume that emphasizes
bringing cultural and historical background to bear on students
preconceived notions of the Beats and whatand howthey
mean. Sufficiently comprehensive in scope to encompass the whole
perception of Beat studies, Bennetts essay successfully complicates the generally misunderstood contrast between the Beats and
conventional fifties American social norms. Bennett warns against
accepting a version of history based on simplistic assumptions:
educators must directly confront this task of deconstructing the
binary opposition between the Beats and the Squares if they want
to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the Beat
Generation which goes beyond superficial stereotypes and partisan
sloganeering (3). This thesis serves as a basis of critical reasoning
to which many of the other essayists adhere. For example, Fiona

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Paton (Reconceiving Kerouac: Why We Should Teach Doctor Sax)

suggests asking students to list their preconceptions concerning the
Beat ethos before they read Kerouacs explanatory essay Origins of
the Beat Generation, in order to contrast Kerouacs notion with the
popular reception. Both Bennett and Paton urge teachers to complicate students acceptance of information and literature by leading
them to see beyond simplistic notions of difference, a task that the
popular press in the fifties failed to perform. Bennett points to the
1959 Life magazine article Squaresville U.S.A. vs. Beatsville, in
which the heartland of American life is contrasted with the far-out
world of the beatniks, and insists that successful classroom discussions must deconstruct simplistic categorizing. Bennett further
complicates the issue of academic acceptance of Beat sociology by
noting that some current disapproval of Beat studies surely arises
from the Beat Generations sexism, racism, and apoliticism as
much as it emerges from a vestigial New Critical veneration of
canonical orthodoxy (4). Thus Bennett both complicates and
reevaluates the reasons for academic resistance to Beat literature.
Ann Douglas, the author of The Feminization of American Culture
(1977), also advocates unsimplifying Beat texts in her essay
Telepathic Shock and Meaning Excitement: Kerouacs Poetics of
Intimacy, suggesting that Kerouacs readers work through the
culture of intimacy that his writing creates to see the world in
which and of which Kerouac wrote. Douglas offers a reception
study by way of a personal reader-response analysis, remembering
that in 1959, On the Road told her and her young women friends, all
comfortably upper-middle-class, that they were a part of a continent rather than a country (23), and that there was a much greater
divergency of people than they had imagined. Though Douglas
wanders widely along the shore, she rarely wades into deep waters, offering instead a broadly based argument on the efficacy of
Kerouacs intimacy in his work and how he countered the prevailing cultural milieu of the 1950s. She declares, Kerouacs ethos of
openness, his insistence that he comes before us totally unarmed,
unprepared, and unguarded, ready to keep absolutely nothing
back, makes the most sense when we realize that he was writing at
a time when national preparedness, particularly military preparedness, took on proportions unprecedented in Western history (27).

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Intimacy is gained primarily in terms of Kerouacs success in

pulling the reader inside the story as well (29).
The Beats are often considered a vocal culture, known for all-night
talkfests and for spoken-word poetry that relied on the openness of
breath rather than the constraints of the printed page. Ronna C.
Johnsons Youre Putting Me On: Jack Kerouac and the Postmodern Emergence breaks new ground by analyzing Kerouacs
well-known 1959 appearance on The Steve Allen Show. Johnson positions Kerouac as an antecedent to postmodernism by showing
that in his responses to Allens questions, Kerouac resisted commodification into a mass-media product for public consumption by
the dominant commercial culture. She supports her assertions with
textual evidence from Kerouacs own writing in Desolation Angels
and Vanity of Duluoz, where he disavows and deconstructs the
iconicand thus falsestatus to which the media had hoisted him.
Johnson compellingly argues that Kerouacs longtime general dismissal as a writer resulted partly from his appropriation into a
palatable image (simulacra) and from chronology; he preceded
theories that name and define postmodernism. Johnsons scrutiny of
Kerouacs interview with Allen veers occasionally into the overly
clever. For example, Allen predicates his request that Kerouac define
the word Beat by noting that Kerouac might be tired of the question,
since everybody always puts it to you, and Johnson writes, The
locution everybody always puts it to you operates in a different
register to signify or suggest a different colloquialism, to be
shaftedboth valences of meaning suggest being tricked, cheated,
victimized (43). Ultimately, though, Johnson expertly ties Marxist
consumer theory with pre-postmodern analysis to show that
Kerouac successfully turned the media gaze back on itself in his art,
fending off both the negation and reconstruction of the self.
Erik R. Mortenson continues the Marxist critical approach in
Beating Time: Configurations of Temporality in Jack Kerouacs On
the Road by detailing the capitalist corruption of time and On the
Roads attack against this corruption. Mortenson clarifies distinctions among the concepts of American time, Mexican time, and
African American (jazz) time. Within these contexts, Mortenson
establishes a new distinction for Dean Moriartys explanation of
IT, the point at whichamong other mystical accomplishments

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time stands still. He sees Moriarty as a Marxist rebel who challenges

standard notions of time in his refusal to be employed by it. Seeing
time as fluid, rather than static, Moriarty defies the established
notions of capitalistic power (62). Moriartys continuum can only
be apprehended when one lives not in fragmented time, minute to
minute, but in one time, and that time is now (63). Like Johnson,
Mortenson takes seemingly toss-off utterances (as in the streets
were alive all night. . . . nothing ever ended [68]) and applies rigorous scrutiny to them in order to show that the Beats contended
with powerful dominant cultural forces. Mortenson concludes that
On the Road is an inconsistent though largely successful attack on
[the] constraining notions of temporality (73).
Steve Wilson answers the call in Bennetts opening essay for complicating the conditions of the Beats position in and against mainstream society, in this case by analyzing the effects of Kerouacs
status as an outsider. His essay, The Author as Spiritual Pilgrim:
The Search for Authenticity in Jack Kerouacs On the Road and The
Subterraneans, begins promisingly but is not sufficiently developed
into a compelling argument that one may achieve authenticity
(an undefined term) by suffering an outsiders life. Wilson centralizes the issue of cultural diversity when teaching the Beats
and admits that frequently Kerouacs views on women, African
Americans, and homosexuals are less open-minded than we might
imagine from the King of the Beats (77). Against this criticism,
Wilson positions Kerouac as a white writer who unflinchingly
explores his very American mind. Compared with most of the
other essays in this volume, Wilsons essay relies on simplistic
sources; whereas Johnson develops ideas gleaned from Michel
Foucault, Fredric Jameson, and Jean Baudrillard, for instance,
Wilson dips into Kerouacs biographies and a few general studies.
To be fair, Wilson is plowing different critical turf than Johnson;
still, Wilson might have delivered on the promise of his title by
drawing on studies of ethnicity and sexuality in mid-century
American society. He offers the observation that [o]ne could examine numerous instances reflecting Kerouacs equating of outsider
status with authenticity (82), but he does not deliver fully on this
claim, choosing instead to focus for the most part on Moriartys
character. One questionable conclusion Wilson draws from

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

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Fiona Patons Reconceiving Kerouac: Why We Should Teach

Doctor Sax also applies a multidisciplinary approach, emphasizing
a students need for knowledge of fifties culture and jazz patterns,
specifically those of bebop. Patons essay is a first-rate model of how
to teach Kerouac: she positions Doctor Sax as a more important work
than On the Road, outlining a clear progression that opens up the
value of Doctor Sax as an entry to the crossover between bebop jazz
and Kerouacs performance of spontaneous prose. Her essay finds a
natural complement in Richard Quinns Jack Kerouac, Charlie
Parker, and the Poetics of Improvisation in Skerls Reconstructing
the Beats (correlations among the numerous essays is just one reason
why interested scholars should avail themselves of both books).
Quinn attempts what must be the toughest challenge for a literary
critic, that of describing in prose the sounds of musicin his case,
Charlie Parkers first solo chorus from Koko, as recorded in 1945.
Quinn augments his description with the printed sheet-music transcription and then seeks to compare Parkers improvisational
method with Kerouacs. Quinns phrasing is occasionally elusive (in
one passage in Kerouacs Mexico City Blues, contrapuntal melodies
combine portrait realism [161]), and he also struggles with a difficult corollary argument: even though Parker never wrote a rationale for his method of improvisation, Quinn proposes that
Kerouacs writing reflects Parkers vision more than Parkers
improvisational methods (162). In spite of these minor problems,
Quinn succeeds in presenting a comprehensive distinction between
spontaneity and improvisation and along with Paton opens up the
study of Kerouacs spontaneous prose in complex ways.
Timothy S. Murphys Intersection Points: Teaching William
Burroughss Naked Lunch is another of the essays in Beat Generation: Critical Essays that offers astute guidance for bringing new
Beat works into the classroom, focusing on what is perhaps the
most difficult one to teach, Naked Lunch, the difficulties of which
Murphy succinctly describes as relentless scatology and . . . nonlinear structure (179). Murphy presents a clear nuts-and-bolts
approach for teachers that also works well to help readers comprehend this challenging book. Murphys five tables (contents, recurrence of characters, addiction of the body, politics of/as addiction,
refrains) are particularly helpful.

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Douglas G. Baldwins Word Begets Image and Image Is Virus: Undermining Language and Film in the Works of William S.
Burroughs is impressively multidisciplinary in scope: with thirtytwo endnotes and fifty-three cited works, Baldwins apparatus
nearly equals the length of his article. The effort pays off, though, as
Baldwin details Burroughss ambivalent response to film and television and the postmodern influences in his work. Terence Diggory
continues his fine work on urban pastoral themes in Allen
Ginsbergs Urban Pastoral, conceiving Ginsberg as a city hermit.
Jaap van der Bent focuses on Ginsbergs 1957 visit to Amsterdam,
where the poet met Dutch writers Simon Vinkenoog and Adriaan
Morrin; van der Bent contends that Ginsberg influenced
Vinkenoogs work and Dutch literature in general. And he mentions German writer Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, who is dealt with in
more detail in Anthony Waine and Jonathan Wooleys essay. Waine
and Wooley examine the ways in which certain German writers
were influenced by father figures who acted like adolescents.
Jennie Skerl divides Reconstructing the Beats into three categories:
Re-historicizing, Recovering, and Re-visioning. This collection of essays examines Beat works from contemporary critical, theoretical, historical, and interdisciplinary perspectives. In a 2002
review of Beat studies, Nancy M. Grace speculates that easy sales of
Beat criticism can lure publishers into not bothering with polished
scholarship. She complains that while the common thread connecting [Beat] practitioners, the melding of life and art, calls for
interdisciplinary approaches, readers are too often given scholarship that suffers from lack of a sustained and genuine interdisciplinary method, that is, scholarship that combines both the perspectives
and methods of two or more disciplines to solve problems or answer
questions that are beyond the scope of a single discipline.1 The
essayists in Skerls collection generally apply such interdisciplinary
methods, as evidenced by the wide-ranging, eclectic list of cumulative works cited. While Myrsiadess collection concerns itself primarily with textual analysis, Skerls book investigates more deeply

1. Nancy M. Grace, Seeking the Spirit of Beat: The Call for Interdisciplinary
Scholarship, Contemporary Literature 43 (2002): 820.

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issues of race, class, and gender. In addition, Skerl, defining the

Beats as an avant-garde arts movement and bohemian subculture
(1), seeks to open up the field of Beat studies to include far more
than the three to six figures who generally have been thought of as
the Beat writers.
Robert Holtons The Sordid Hipsters of America: Beat Culture
and the Folds of Heterogeneity opens the collection with an analysis of the homogenization of American culture in the mid 1950s,
offering as evidence the legislation that curtailed dissent, the
Federal Highways Act, postwar suburbia, the consumer revolution,
and contemporary conformism. Holton contends that the Beats
explorations of the folds of heterogeneity provided both secular
and sacred havensalienation as a cultural position. He lists novels that reflected but did not transcend containment culture, such
as The Catcher in the Rye, Rabbit, Run, Revolutionary Road, One Flew
Over the Cuckoos Nest, Catch-22, and Dangling Man. Rather than
pointing toward habitable alternative spaces for the alienated, these
works reinforce the penalties for those who refuse to adjust.
Ginsbergs Howl seemed to offer the means to break out of the cultural enclosure and heralded the Beats creation of a new and
authentic space . . . an identity on the bedrock of the naked self, free
of compromising cultural and historical accretions that reflects the
definitions of Beat given later by John Clellon Holmes, Kerouac,
and Ginsberg (17). Holton deftly outlines the Beats affinity with
contemporary African Americans and the working class in general,
as well as women and the anomic, as natural inhabitants of cultural
subgroups cut off from middle-class identity, with their own language, dress, music, symbol systems, and behaviors. Holtons essay
finds a beneficial pairing with Clinton R. Starrs I Want To Be with
My Own Kind: Individual Resistance and Collective Action in the
Beat Counterculture. Following Kerouacs lead, many readers dismissed the bearded, bongo-tapping hangers-on of the fifties and
sixties as simple bohemian wannabes whose presence demeaned
the serious artistic work of the Beat writers. Rather than snubbing
the mostly nonwriting beatniks, Starr places them front and center
and achieves a surprisingly successful essay in which he substantiates a broad definitionthe Beat Generation was a vibrant counterculture that facilitated individual resistance and collective

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political activismwith a well-researched analysis of Beat public

spaces and concludes with an overview of resistance as manifested
in homosexuality, racial intermixing, and political activism (42).
Daniel Belgrads The Transnational Counterculture: BeatMexican Intersections, follows the spirit of the essayists in
Myrsiadess collection who trace international connections and
influences. Belgrad compares the Beats and the magical realists, primarily Octavio Paz, who reacted against the emerging corporatecapitalist postwar order. Belgrad seeks to correct the idea that the
Beats simply used Mexico as a respite, a convenient getaway where
rooms, wine, and sex could be had cheaplyin short, the idea that
the Beats were colonialists taking advantage of a primitive culture.
Instead, Belgrad shows that the Beats benefited artistically by interacting with magical realist notions of art and literature.
The middle section of Skerls collection, Recovering, emerges
as the most significant. The five essays here promote the work of
writers who have been largely left behind in the last thirty years
of Beat studies: Ruth Weiss, Joanne Kyger, Lenore Kandel, Bob
Kaufman, and Ted Joans. Nancy M. Grace establishes the general
impetus for these essays by acknowledging that although she
remains relatively unknown, [f]ew poetsmale or femalecan be
said to embody Beat to the extent of the San Francisco jazz performance poet ruth weiss (57). Weisss spontaneous method of free
association demands a sympathetic reader, one who is likewise
willing to free associate and to swing with both meaning and message, and Grace is such a reader. At times one wonders whether
Grace tries too hard to establish Weiss as an important multidimensional artist (I am constantly exploding into any media, [weiss]
has said [58]), but there can be no doubt that she presents Weiss in
a way that will win her new readers, particularly for her poem-cycle
Desert Journal. Amy L. Friedman similarly positions Joanne Kyger
as an important common link between various poetic and artistic
circles. Friedman has been an early endorser of the work of women
Beats, particularly in her essay I Say My New Name: Women
Writers of the Beat Generation, in Lees The Beat Generation Writers
anthology. Here Friedman relies strongly on Kygers journals to
recover her position as a contemporary of the Beats and to explicate
her absence from the Beat canon, ably explaining the ways women

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Beats coped with male dominance of the movement while producing their own literature. Kygers journals reveal how her husband,
Gary Snyder, and Allen Ginsberg soaked up the adoration of their
audiences while Kyger herself pursued a less ego-centered trajectory. Ronna C. Johnson discusses the work of Lenore Kandel,
a poet who achieved notoriety for her 1966 publication of The Love
Book and was the only woman to speak from the Be-In stage in 1967,
with Ginsberg, Snyder, and Michael McClure. Johnson explores the
difficulties faced by women who were treated differently and
whose works were received differently from those of the male Beat
writers. Kandel herself, who once disavowed connection with the
Beats, further complicates the situation. She told Bruce Cook,
I think the idea of a community of artists is appalling. You dont
have communities of plumbers or painters, so why should you
have a community of poets?2 The definition of Beat generation
has always been hazy and unstable, yet as these scholars show, one
does not have to be a bona fide member of a group to respond to the
same cultural pressures or share a common poetics. As Friedman
states, and as these essays prove, The women writers of the Beat
Generation have moved beyond existing as a subset within Beat
Generation studies (87). This contention is reinforced by the recent
publication of Breaking the Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading
Women Beat Writers, edited by Grace and Johnson. One question
invariably pops up in each of the interviews: how do you define the
Beat generation? The various answers are enlightening for their
scope and insight into each womans particular perspective. The
Beat generation has long been seen as a boy gang, adventurous,
romantic types who see women as sex objects, or sullen homosexuals who abhor women generally. In fact, most of the groundbreaking work in Beat studies has been done by women, and gradually
the women Beats themselves are being treated to full critical
scrutiny.
Skerls final section, Re-visioning, contains essays that in one
way or another seek to reconfigure aspects of the heretofore best
known Beat writers, Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs. Despite

2. Qtd. in Bruce Cook, The Beat Generation (New York: Scribner, 1971) 210.

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these writers having been examined endlessly, the essayists here

manage to bring new perspectives to their work. Terence Diggory
applies a multidisciplinary approach in his description of the New
York art world of the 1950s and the ways that experimental film and
literature interact in the pursuit of abstraction in his essay What
Abstract Art Means in Pull My Daisy. Deshae E. Lott analyzes how
Buddhism influenced Kerouacs nature writinginterestingly,
Kerouacs nature writing has escaped prolonged, focused study
and provides a satisfying overview from various perspectives. Tony
Trigilio treats another unexamined area, Ginsbergs later poetic
work. Oliver Harris ends the collection with a brilliant examination of Kerouacs fictionalization of Burroughs as various characters in his work and the influence of these characterizations on
Burroughss reception, but alsofascinatinglyon Burroughss
own production and self-imaging.
All in all, these two collections are invaluable in the ongoing
exploration of the Beats and of mid-century American literature
and culture. Both books serve to historicize and contextualize what
many readers have accepted as the Beat legend, and in this way are
highly valuable to understanding what transpired in the bohemian
arts world in the 1950s and beyond.
Gardner Webb University