Even More Books About Drinking, Fucking and Travelling (Special BEATNIK Edition)

So it seems like you don't hear too much about these guys anymore, but when I was in college they were the recommended reading list for every would-be bohemian hellraiser. (Although I'm sure far more copies of their books were bought than were actually read, and far more were read than were actually enjoyed.)

Basically I'm skeptical that anybody really gets "inspired" to do something by a book they read -- I think it's more along the lines of: you feel like doing something, find a book that talks about it, and then decide to do it, using the book as your justification.

So anyway, the BEATS certainly didn't set the bar too high in the hero department. The Big Three, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs were a pretty scabby bunch -- drunks and hard drug users, generally as confused about their sexuality as they were about their politics and philosophy, dependent on their parents well into adulthood, and opposed to even the most basic disciplines of writing like editing and proof-reading.

Never mind Albert Schweitzer or Winston Churchill! These were heroes that ANYBODY could be like! Hardly a wonder they became popular. Particularly in the stuffy 50s, and particularly with my generation, who were looking for some lazy shiftless eccentric heroes after the Reagan Years.

Jack Kerouac's ON THE ROAD, published in 1957, is the vaguely autobiographical tale of his aimless journeys around America with Neal Cassady. (Funny -- back in those days, people wrote about stuff that really happened and changed the names, these days people like James Frey and JT Leroy make stuff up and claim that it really happened.)

It was wildly popular, applauded as a tale of nonconformism and a search for meaning -- but really it's just kind of about a bunch of guys out fucking around and drinking and shit, going aimlessly between Denver, San Francisco and New York to hit some jazz clubs, hang out with equally shiftless friends, and hook up with babes, with interims of living with his mom (in Jack Kerouac's case) or pumping out illegitimate children with a couple of different women (in Neal Cassady's case.)

What it lacks in story and character arc it (generally) makes up for in energy and eccentric characters and incident, though, so you'll probably be able to finish it, at least.



It was written on one big roll of paper during an amphetamine binge, supposedly, although later it was actually edited a bit - given chapters and paragraphs and stuff -- but it still occasionally reads like a rambling speedfreak who won't shut up, and the run-on sentence is the norm rather than the exception in this book.

Kerouac's other books continue in this same vein -- they chronicle his journey into middle age, his increasing isolation and alcoholism, the relationship confusion arising from free love (everybody was fucking everybody, and their wife) and his disillusionment with his own line of BS and the media hype surrounding it. Occasionally there are some shallow dabblings in Eastern philosophy and religion -- as with most of life, the Beatniks kind of cherry-picked the easy, cool stuff and rejected hard stuff like chastity, sobriety, devout prayer, etc.

(Reading OFF THE ROAD, a book Neal Cassady's wife Carolyn wrote about those years, offers an interesting look at the same theme from the perspective of the wife and mother waiting at home for the drunks to arrive.)

Kerouac himself died rather a miserable broken-down drunk at age 47, espousing conservative views, on the outs with his friends, living with his third wife and his mother, not having dealt particularly well with fame.

Here he is shortly before his death:



Now Kerouac did make a few trips abroad -- he was in the Merchant Marine, and he wrote at least one story about a trip to Europe he didn't particularly enjoy -- but the guy who was very early to the party in the global "sexpat" and drugs scene was this innocuous-looking gentleman, William Burroughs:

Living on a stipend from his wealthy parents, he lived abroad quite a bit -- Weimar-era Central Europe and pre-war Berlin, Mexico City, Tangiers, Paris and London are just a few of the places he called home. Though he was married, his preference for "boys" in these places is well documented, and if some of the passages in his works are indications, he liked them pretty young, although I don't recall ages ever being specified. (I'm thinking he probably didn't mind too much what side of barely-legal he was dealing with.)

He's one author who it's generally more interesting to read about than to actually read -- the biography of him or his letters are generally very entertaining. When he wasn't banging local boys or using enormous amounts of drugs and alcohol, he was carelessly accidentally killing his wife or journeying through the jungle in search of mystical psychedelic drugs.

His actual books are a bit more of a hard slog. Also published in the late 50s, NAKED LUNCH is a hallucinatory drugged-out collection of characters, stories and descriptions, kind of arranged at random - calling it a novel is reaching a bit. Such nuggets of meaning as can be gleaned from it, though, often involve his expat existence in Mexico, Morocco and the hallucinated "Interzone" which always sounded to me a bit like Khao-San Road.



(Highlights from the David Cronenberg film version.)

JUNKIE is a nice hard-boiled story of drugs in mid-century New York; QUEER is a pretty straightforwardly-narrated story of a trip through South America with a purchased companion he was in unrequited love with. Other novels are quite literally, words pasted together at random, and you'd probably need a couple of syringes of morphine to appreciate them. He got paid for that! Good work if you can get it.

His creaky gallows voice and creepy old sardonic persona make him an interesting spoken-word artist, also. Amazingly, after such a debauched life, he died peacefully at home with his long-time companion at age 83. Heed his advice on life here:



"Beware of whores who say they don't want money," heh heh.

Now the third member of that triumverate was Allen Ginsberg, who as a poet, I will not deal with in great detail, other than to say that he went Burroughs one further in the pederast department, and became a card-carrying member of NAMBLA.

So! Pederasts, junkies, mamma's boys, layabouts, careless firearm users, they also made evading responsibilities and undisciplined, sloppy, random, unedited writing and poetry acceptable for generations to follow. Let's raise our glasses to THE BEATS!