The Cool School (20 page)

The word “beat” originally meant poor, down and out, deadbeat, on the bum, sad, sleeping in subways. Now that the word is belonging officially it is being made to stretch to include people who do not sleep in subways but have a certain new gesture, or attitude, which I can only describe as a new
more.
“Beat Generation” has simply become the slogan or label for a revolution in manners in America. Marlon Brando was not really first to portray it on the screen. Dane Clark with his pinched Dostoievskyan face and Brooklyn accent, and of course Garfield, were first. The private eyes were Beat, if you will recall. Bogart. Lorre was Beat. In M, Peter Lorre started a whole revival, I mean the slouchy street walk.

I wrote
On the Road
in three weeks in the beautiful month of May 1941 while living in the Chelsea district of lower West Side Manhattan, on a 100-foot roll and put the Beat Generation in words in there, saying at the point where I am taking part in a wild kind of collegiate party with a bunch of kinds in an abandoned miner’s shack “These kids are great but where are Dean Moriarty and Carlo Marx? Oh well I guess they wouldn’t belong in this gang, they’re too
dark,
too
strange, too subterranean and I am slowly beginning to join a new kind of
beat
generation.” The manuscript of
Road
was turned down on the grounds that it would displease the sales manager of my publisher at that time, though the editor, a very intelligent man, said “Jack this is just like Dostoievsky, but what can I do at this time?” It was too early. So for the next six years I was a bum, a brakeman, a seaman, a panhandler, a pseudo-Indian in Mexico, anything and everything, and went on writing because my hero was Goethe and I believed in art and hoped some day to write the third part of
Faust,
which I have done in
Doctor Sax.
Then in 1952 an article was published in
The New York Times
Sunday magazine saying, the headline, “‘This is a Beat Generation’” (in quotes like that) and in the article it said that I had come up with the term first “when the face was harder to recognize,” the face of the generation. After that there was some talk of the Beat Generation but in 1955 I published an excerpt from
Road
(melling it with parts of
Visions of Neal)
under the pseudonym “Jean-Louis,” it was entitled
Jazz of the Beat Generation
and was copyrighted as being an excerpt from a novel-in-progress entitled
Beat Generation
(which I later changed to
On the Road
at the insistence of my new editor) and so then the term moved a little faster. The term and the cats. Everywhere began to appear strange hepcats and even college kids went around hep and cool and using the terms I’d heard on Times Square in the early Forties, it was growing somehow. But when the publishers finally took a dare and published
On the Road
in 1957 it burst open, it mushroomed, everybody began yelling about a Beat Generation. I was being interviewed everywhere I went for “what I meant” by such a thing. People began to call themselves beatniks, beats, jazzniks, bopniks, bugniks and finally I was called the “avatar” of all this.

Yet it was as a Catholic, it was not at the insistence of any of these “niks” and certainly not with their approval either, that I went one afternoon to the church of my childhood (one of them), Ste. Jeanne d’Arc in Lowell, Mass., and suddenly with tears in my eyes and had a vision of what I must have really meant with “Beat” anyhow when I heard the holy silence in the church (I was the only one in there,
it was five
P
.
M
.
, dogs were barking outside, children yelling, the fall leaves, the candles were flickering alone just for me), the vision of the word Beat as being to mean beatific . . . There’s the priest preaching on Sunday morning, all of a sudden through a side door of the church comes a group of Beat Generation characters in strapped raincoats like the I.R.A. coming in silently to “dig” the religion . . . I knew it then.

But this was 1954, so then what horror I felt in 1957 and later in 1958 naturally to suddenly see “Beat” being taken up by everybody, press and TV and Hollywood borscht circuit to include the “juvenile delinquency” shot and the horrors of a mad teeming billyclub New York and L.A. and they began to call
that
Beat,
that
beatific . . . bunch of fools marching against the San Francisco Giants protesting baseball, as if (now) in my name and I, my childhood ambition to be a big league baseball star hitter like Ted Williams so that when Bobby Thomson hit that homerun in 1951 I trembled with joy and couldn’t get over it for days and wrote poems about how it is possible for the human spirit to win after all! Or, when a murder, a routine murder took place in North Beach, they labeled it a Beat Generation slaying although in my childhood I’d been famous as an eccentric in my block for stopping the younger kids from throwing rocks at the squirrels, for stopping them from frying snakes in cans or trying to blow up frogs with straws. Because my brother had died at the age of nine, his name was Gerard Kerouac, and he’d told me “Ti Jean never hurt any living being, all living beings whether it’s just a little cat or squirrel or whatever, all, are going to heaven straight into God’s snowy arms so never hurt anything and if you see anybody hurt anything stop them as best you can” and when he died a file of gloomy nuns in black from St. Louis de France parish had filed (1926) to his deathbed to hear his last words about Heaven. And my father too, Leo, had never lifted a hand to punish me, or to punish the little pets in our house, and this teaching was delivered to me by the men in my house and I have never had anything to do with violence, hatred, cruelty, and all that horrible nonsense which, nevertheless, because God is gracious
beyond all human imagining, he will forgive in the long end . . . that million years I’m asking about you, America.

And so now they have beatnik routines on TV, starting with satires about girls in black and fellows in jeans with snap-knives and sweatshirts and swastikas tattooed under their armpits, it will come to respectable m.c.s of spectaculars coming out nattily attired in Brooks Brothers jean-type tailoring and sweater-type pull-ons, in other words, it’s a simple change in fashion and manners, just a history crust—like from the Age of Reason, from old Voltaire in a chair to romantic Chatterton in the moonlight—from Teddy Roosevelt to Scott Fitzgerald . . . So there’s nothing to get excited about. Beat comes out, actually, of old American whoopee and it will only change a few dresses and pants and make chairs useless in the livingroom and pretty soon we’ll have Beat Secretaries of State and there will be instituted new tinsels, in fact new reasons for malice and new reasons for virtue and new reasons for forgiveness . . .

But yet, but yet, woe, woe unto those who think that the Beat Generation means crime, delinquency, immorality, amorality . . . woe unto those who attack it on the grounds that they simply don’t understand history and the yearnings of human souls . . . woe unto those who don’t realize that America must, will, is, changing now, for the better I say. Woe unto those who believe in the atom bomb, who believe in hating mothers and fathers, who deny the most important of the Ten Commandments, woe unto those (though) who don’t believe in the unbelievable sweetness of sex love, woe unto those who are the standard bearers of death, woe unto those who believe in conflict and horror and violence and fill our books and screens and livingrooms with all that crap, woe in fact unto those who make evil movies about the Beat Generation where innocent housewives are raped by beatniks! Woe unto those who are the real dreary sinners that even God finds room to forgive . . . woe unto those who spit on the Beat Generation, the wind’ll blow it back.

Playboy
, June 1959

The Beats were not entirely a boys’ club, but their scene could pass for one most of the time. Joyce Johnson’s 1983 memoir
Minor Characters
provides an alternate take. Johnson tells of her first encounters as a Barnard student with what would be (courtesy of a magazine article by novelist John Clellon Holmes) called the Beat Generation. Set up on a blind date with Jack Kerouac, she began a long, turbulent, and intermittent romance that kept her near the center of that crazy cultural experiment. Johnson eloquently and meticulously describes that world through a woman’s eyes, providing a revealing perspective that cuts through the clichés and hype that accumulate around legends.

H
E
CAME
back not because of me but because he was profoundly homesick. He wanted America, a bowl of Wheaties by a kitchen window; he wanted Lowell, not New York.

Across the Atlantic he hadn’t found the Old World but a new one he was inadvertently helping to create. Through a perpetual haze of marijuana he’d viewed the international scene like a dismayed elder, noting a cool that was colder and deader than any hipster’s earned fatalism, a pose conveying nothing. He saw himself imitated, and hated what he saw. Was that bored indifference his? These new young people with their cultivated inertia, their laconic language (consisting mainly, he observed derisively, of the word
like),
seemed to have the uniformity of an army. They’d invaded Tangier, swarming around Burroughs; when Jack went to Paris, he found them there too. He left and went to London, but stayed less than a week. Just before he’d sailed, he’d found his family’s genealogy in the British Museum and read for the first time the emblematic motto of the Kerouacs:
Aimer, travailler, souffrir.

Five days after I sent the cable, he knocked on my door. He stood out in the hall, smiling rather shyly, the rucksack at his feet. Since early that morning I’d been waiting, calling the office to say I was sick, wanting to go down to the dock and actually see the ship come in, but what if I missed him there? Now he was here, and in that first moment I thought Who is he? But I kissed him in the doorway and he followed me inside. He left his rucksack on the floor and we lay down on the couch. The cat walked all over our bodies with utter disdain. “Ti Gris, Ti Gris,” Jack called to it coaxingly, and then I knew he was back.

But it turned out he wasn’t. He’d only be passing through for a few days—three or four at most—to pick up some money the publisher owed him. Then he’d be taking the bus down to Orlando, Florida, where his mother was now. Maybe he’d be back in the fall when Viking was publishing
On the Road
. He seemed a little embarrassed. “You have to let me go and be a hermit,” he said, as if he was counting on me to understand.

I remember I went into the bathroom and cried and splashed a lot of cold water on my face before I came out. I got up my courage and said brightly, “How about staying a week?” But he shook his head and said he couldn’t.

Hadn’t I been the one, he reminded me, to say that what he needed was a home? Hadn’t I said exactly that to him before he went off on this trip he never would have taken if he’d had any sense? Well, now he was going to have a home at last—in California. Ah, Berkeley was the place . . . A beautiful little wooden house with trees and flowering bushes in the yard, where he could lie on the grass and write haikus like Li Po and where Neal Cassady and Gary Snyder would come visiting, but most of the time he’d be alone. There was no room for me in this house, because his aloneness would include his mother, stirring her big pots in the kitchen, watching her game shows on the television set he was going to buy her, with a glass of red wine in her hand. It had always been his dream to do what he’d promised his father—settle down in a house with Memere, who’d worked in shoe factories so he could stay home and write his books, who didn’t understand but always forgave her no-good, lazy son, who didn’t like
Allen, hadn’t liked either of his wives; she’d been right about them, too. Memere was the woman he was going to now. “I really like you, though, Joycey,” he said.

For the first time, I asked Jack, “Would Memere like me?”

He said, “Maybe. Yeah, she might. She doesn’t approve of sex, though, between unmarried people.”

Of course not. Neither did my parents. Suddenly the problem seemed clarified.

He was going to Memere the way he’d gone to Tangier, dreaming the whole thing before he ever got there. It was as if the power of Jack’s imagination always left him defenseless. He forgot things anyone else would have remembered. Like how lonely and bored he was quickly going to be in Memere’s house. Or that maybe Memere didn’t even want to move. I was sure old ladies liked to stay in one place, not be trundled around with all their stuff in boxes, back and forth across the country on Greyhound buses.

But somehow I knew I couldn’t say any of this—even though he always told me how practical I was and treated me like a worldly person, an authority on publishing, for example. No matter how skeptical you were, you couldn’t strike at someone’s deepest vision. Why, I was very hard-boiled, really, I thought, compared to Jack.

“You should get yourself a little husband,” he said to me with sad generosity.

I said I didn’t want that.

“Well, then finish your book, travel with Elise.”

I said, “What if I came to San Francisco?”

With a flash of exhilaration I saw that I could do it. I didn’t need Jack to take me, only to be at the other end of my destination. I started talking about how I’d begin saving money immediately, how I’d collect Unemployment out there until I found another job, how I’d get my own place in the city where he could come. I was sick of New York anyway, I said. I’d spent my entire twenty-one years in one place, and he was right, that was too long.

Somehow this solution to our relationship never had occurred to Jack. Once again I’d surprised him.

“Well, do what you want, Joycey,” he said. “Always do what you want.”

It was disconcerting, though, to be left so free. Men were supposed to ask, to take, not leave you in place. I wanted to be wanted. Unlike Alex, Jack took what you gave him, asked no more. For Jack you didn’t have to be anything but what you were—just as Ti Gris the cat was only Ti Gris, to be admired in all his hopeless Ti Grisness. Sometimes it was Jack who fed Ti Gris. Crouching motionless at a respectful distance from the plastic bowl, hed watch with tender attentiveness each tiny ingestion of food. Could leaving in place be a kind of loving?