This Is The Beat Generation
by John Clellon
Holmes
The New York Times Magazine,
Several months ago, a national magazine
ran a story under the heading "Youth" and the subhead "Mother Is
Bugged At Me."
It concerned an eighteen-year-old
That clean young face has been making the
newspapers steadily since the war. Standing before a judge in a
Any attempt to label an entire generation
is unrewarding, and yet the generation which went through the last war, or at
least could get a drink easily once it was over, seems to possess a uniform,
general quality which demands an adjective ... The origins of the word
"beat" are obscure, but the meaning is only too clear to most
Americans. More than 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.
Its members have an instinctive
individuality, needing no bohemianism or imposed eccentricity to express it.
Brought up during the collective bad circumstances of a dreary depression,
weaned during the collective uprooting of a global war, they distrust
collectivity. But they have never been able to keep the world out of their
dreams. The fancies of their childhood inhabited the half-light of
It is a postwar generation, and, in a
world which seems to mark its cycles by its wars, it is already being compared
to that other postwar generation, which dubbed itself "lost". The
Roaring Twenties, and the generation that made them roar, are going through a
sentimental revival, and the comparison is valuable. The Lost Generation was
discovered in a roadster, laughing hysterically because nothing meant anything
anymore. It migrated to
But the wild boys of today are not lost.
Their flushed, often scoffing, always intent faces elude the word, and it would
sound phony to them. For this generation lacks that eloquent air of bereavement
which made so many of the exploits of the Lost Generation symbolic actions.
Furthermore, the repeated inventory of shattered ideals, and the laments about
the mud in moral currents, which so obsessed the Lost Generation, do not
concern young people today. They take these things frighteningly for granted.
They were brought up in these ruins and no longer notice them. They drink to
"come down" or to "get high," not to illustrate anything.
Their excursions into drugs or promiscuity come out of curiosity, not
disillusionment.
Only the most bitter among them would call
their reality a nightmare and protest that they have indeed lost something, the
future. For ever since they were old enough to imagine one,
that has been in jeopardy anyway. The absence of personal and social
values is to them, not a revelation shaking the ground beneath them, but a
problem demanding a day-to-day solution. How to live seems to them much
more crucial than why. And it is precisely at this point that the
copywriter and the hotrod driver meet and their identical beatness
becomes significant, for, 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
reliable 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
inventing totems for him on all sides.
For the giggling nihilist, eating up the
highway at ninety miles an hour and steering with his feet, is no Harry Crosby,
the poet of the Lost Generation who planned to fly his plane into the sun one
day because he could no longer accept the modern world. On the contrary, the
hotrod driver invites death only to outwit it. He is affirming the life within
him in the only way he knows how, at the extreme. The eager-faced girl, picked
up on a dope charge, is not one of those "women and girls carried screaming
with drink or drugs from public places," of whom Fitzgerald wrote.
Instead, with persuasive seriousness, she describes the sense of community she
has found in marijuana, which society never gave her. The copywriter, just as
drunk by
The shock that older people feel at the
sight of this Beat Generation is, at its deepest level, not so much repugnance
at the facts, as it is distress at the attitudes which move it. Though worried
by this distress, they most often argue or legislate in terms of the facts
rather than the attitudes. The newspaper reader, studying the eyes of young
dope addicts, can only find an outlet for his horror and bewilderment in demands
that passers be given the electric chair. Sociologists, with a more academic
concern, are just as troubled by the legions of young men whose topmost
ambition seems to be to find a secure birth in a monolithic corporation.
Contemporary historians express mild surprise at the lack of organized
movements, political, religious, or otherwise, among the young. The articles
they write remind us that being one's own boss and being a natural joiner are
two of our most cherished national traits. Everywhere people with tidy
moralities shake their heads and wonder what is happening to the younger
generation.
Perhaps they have not noticed that, behind
the excess on the one hand, and the conformity on the other, lies
that wait-and-see detachment that results from having to fall back for support
more on one's capacity for human endurance than on one's philosophy of life.
Not that the Beat Generation is immune to ideas; they fascinate it. Its wars,
both past and future, were and will be wars of ideas. It knows, however, that
in the final, private moment of conflict a man is really fighting another man,
and not an idea. And that the same goes for love. So it is a generation with a
greater facility for entertaining ideas than for believing in them. But it is
also the first generation in several centuries for which the act of faith has
been an obsessive problem, quite aside from the reasons for having a particular
faith or not having it. It exhibits on every side, and in a bewildering number
of facets, a perfect craving to believe.
Though it is certainly a generation of
extremes, including both the hipster and the radical young Republican in its
ranks, it renders unto Caesar (i.e, society) what is
Caesar's and unto God what is God's. For the wildest hipster, making a mystique
of bop, drugs and the night life, there is no desire to shatter the
"square" society in which he lives, only to elude it. To get on a
soapbox or write a manifesto would seem to him absurd. Looking at the normal
world, where most everything is a "drag" for him, he nevertheless
says: "Well, that's the
A generation can sometimes be better
understood by the books it reads, than by those it writes. The literary hero of the Lost Generation
should have been Bazarov, the nihilist in Turgenev's "Fathers and Sons." Bazarov sat around,
usually in the homes of the people he professed to loathe, smashing every icon
within his reach. He was a man stunned
into irony and rage by the collapse of the moral and intellectual structure of
his world.
But he did nothing. The literary hero of the Beat Generation, on
the other hand, might be Stavrogin, that most
enigmatic character in "The Possessed" by Dostoevski. He is also a nihilist, or at least intimately
associated with them.
But there is a difference, for Stavrogin, behind a façade very much like Bazarov's, is possessed by a passion for faith, almost any
faith. His very atheism, at its extreme,
is metaphysical. But he knows that
disbelief is fatal, and when he has failed in every way to overcome it, he
commits suicide because he does not have what he calls "greatness of
soul." The ground yawned beneath Bazarov, revealing a pit into which he fell; while Stavrogin struggled at the bottom of that pit, trying
feverishly to get out. In so far as it
resembles Stavrogin, there have
been few generations with as natural and profound a craving for
convictions as this one, nor have there been as many generations as
ill-equipped to find them.
For beneath the excess and the conformity,
there is something other than detachment. There are the stirrings of a quest.
What the hipster is looking for in his "coolness" (withdrawal) or
"flipness" (ecstasy) is, after all, a
feeling on somewhereness, not just another diversion.
The young Republican feels that there is a point beyond which change becomes
chaos, and what he wants is not simply privilege or wealth, but a stable
position from which to operate. Both have had enough of homelessness, valuelessness, faithlessness.
The variety and the extremity of their
solutions are only a final indication that for today's young people there is
not as yet a single external pivot around which they can, as a generation,
group their observations and their aspirations. There is no single philosophy,
no single party, no single attitude. The failure of
most orthodox moral and social concepts to reflect fully the life they have
known is probably the reason for this, but because of it each person becomes a
walking, self-contained unit, compelled to meet, or at least endure, the
problem of being young in a seemingly helpless world in his own way.
More than anything else, this is what is
responsible for this generation's reluctance to name itself, its reluctance to
discuss itself as a group, sometimes its reluctance to be itself. For invented
gods invariably disappoint those who worship them. Only the need for them goes
on, and it is this need, exhausting one object after another, which projects
the Beat Generation forward into the future and will one day deprive it of its beatness.
Dostoevski wrote in the early 1880's that
"Young Russia is talking of nothing but the eternal questions now."
With appropriate changes, something very like this is beginning to happen in
This generation may make no bombs; it will
probably be asked to drop some, and have some dropped on it, however, and this
fact is never far from its mind. It is one of the pressures which created it
and will play a large part in what will happen to it. There are those who
believe that in generations such as this there is always the constant
possibility of a great new moral idea, conceived in desperation, coming to
life. Others note the self-indulgence, the waste, the apparent social
irresponsibility, and disagree.
But its ability to keep its eyes open, and
yet avoid cynicism; its ever-increasing conviction that the problem of modern
life is essentially a spiritual problem; and that capacity for sudden wisdom
which people who live hard and go far possess, are assets and bear watching. And,
anyway, the clear, challenging faces are worth it.