Meet the ‘cool’ generation

Shelley Walia

It all started when a group of budding writers collected near Columbia College Campus in New York over 70 years ago. America’s homegrown counterculture, which later began to be known as the ‘Beat Generation’, finally got its kick-start at San Francisco in the early1950s. Here Bill Morgan, the avid Beat historian, recounts the explorations of America’s writers, poets and artists who travelled widely, visiting and often living for years in Paris, Mexico City, Tangiers, Columbia, India, Siberia and many more places around the world. The influence worked both ways inspiring an itinerant generation-without-borders whose impact is palpably present in the numerous subcultural groups ever since. 

Moving from country to country across the globe, Bill Morgan has a close look at the lives and detailed notes of some of the pioneers of the Beat generation like Ginsberg, Burroughs, Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, Corso and others. Going into minute details, the book becomes a reference guide to the admirers of this counterculture to the extent that it is possible to even locate the hotel in Tangiers where William Burroughs and many of his friends would come and go for decades, or trace Ginsberg’s trail through South America or India. It is at Tangiers, for instance, that Burroughs began his Naked Lunch. The biographical experiences indeed inspire you to even visit the grave of Shelley in Italy which had attracted many of these writers or the concert hall in London where Bob Dylan influenced Allen Ginsberg to hold a poetry reading for over 5,000 spectators.

Interestingly, Allen Ginsberg’s experience in Jerusalem is rather telling and symbolic of the American hand in the Middle-East nightmare when he by chance comes across young boys making a living of the military scrap left on the battlefield. A note in the book reads: ‘Allen found it sadly ironic when they showed him fragments of bombs made in America by the Bethlehem Steel company.’

The surrealist poet Ted Joans who had been a close friend and associate of Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac travelled, like them, to various continents finally settling in Timbuktu in Mali where he lived away from home and friends but experienced the age-old culture of the natives about whom he said, ‘Africa should start sending missionaries out into the world. The missionaries would teach people how to be cool.’ Throughout his life, he had been pained by the harsh reality of Africans living in America, an emotional disturbance which became the wellspring of his poetic compositions.

The poet Gregory Corso would spend decades in Rome falling in love with the ruins, the Roman inscriptions, the half-columns and ‘those missing noses.’ For him, the past was ‘true and all here. Shelley, Caesar, Augustus, Vespasius, Keats, Michelangelo, the new Pope, Giovanni XXIII.’ He spent much of his time hanging out in the streets and piazzas, taking in the past and the remains of Western civilisation which would find expression in his poetry. So deep was his love of Shelley that after his death his family arranged for his ashes to be interred in a plot at the feet of Shelley in the Protestant Cemetery located at 6 Via Caio Cestio. On his tombstone is inscribed: ‘Spirit in Life/ It flows thru the death of me/ endlessly like a river/ unafraid of becoming the sea.’ Ginsberg too visited the city, ravished its ancient spirit articulated in his poem, Forum, Rome. Though he loved Rome, he was angered by the practice of covering the genitals of the nude statues with fig leaves, an order of the earlier Popes: ‘I almost flipped there, it is maddening after all the beautiful nakedness of David in Florence.’

Ginsberg and his friend, the famous poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who later started the radical publishing house City Lights, were inspired by Machu Picchu, the beautiful site high in the Andes. The haunting vision of the lost city became the inspiration for his poem Hidden Door that he dedicated to ‘Pablo Neruda on the heights of Macchu Picchu.’ Ginsberg’s poem Aether was composed a week after his return from Machu Picchu: ‘The millipede’s black head moving inches away/ on the staircase of Machu Picchu/ the creature feels itself destroyed/ head and tail of the universe cut into two.”

Both of them would visit South America again, especially that memorable visit to the University of Concepcion in Chile, where their interaction with the communists and exhilaration at Fidel Castro’s takeover of Cuba would be celebrated. But it was the terrible condition of the miners in the Lota Coal Mines that had a deep and lasting impression. It was almost months later that Ginsberg would discover the mysterious drug ‘yage’ that Burroughs had so intimately described a decade earlier. Jack Kerouac too experienced his first involvement with opium, sprinkled on his cigar in a small town near Culiacan in Sinaloa. In his very first vision, he began to imagine that ‘the earth is an Indian thing’ a phrase that became a refrain with him for years.

The influence of Zen Buddhism would also find its way into the philosophy of the beat generation through the experiences of Gary Snyder who spent decades in Japan studying at the Shokoku-ji Zen Temple in Kyoto. He spent many years here, translating poetry from the Japanese and experiencing the freedom of the wideness in the mountains in the north that he loved to climb.

It is a difficult to take a complete guided tour of the places the pioneers of the beat generation visited but this brief account gives a taste of the kind of nomadic life that many lived and enjoyed and experienced and which became the impetus to a lifestyle that finally could be termed quite accurately as ‘cool’.