April 2: The term
"beatnik" was coined on this day in 1958 by Herb Caen in his column
for the San Francisco Chronicle. Caen said that "the word
popped out," a flip comment inspired by the recent Sputnik launch, but the
context and tone of the coinage reflect the Beat-bashing then current:
Look
magazine, preparing a picture spread on S.F.'s Beat Generation (oh, no, not
AGAIN!), hosted a party in a No. Beach house for 50 Beatniks, and by the time
word got around the sour grapevine, over 250 bearded cats and kits were on
hand, slopping up Mike Cowles' free booze. They're only Beat, y'know, when it
comes to work….
Jack Kerouac caught the
derogatory tone and complained to Caen that he was "putting us down and
making us sound like jerks." Kerouac had published an article in Esquire magazine the previous month in
which he had presented his vision of the Beats as busted-out "Bartlebies,"
an allusion which links Herman Melville's malcontented, office-bound scrivener
to post-war road rage:
The Beat Generation…a
generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America,
serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an
ugly graceful new way…. It never meant juvenile delinquents, it meant
characters of a special spirituality who didn't gang up but were solitary Bartlebies
staring out the dead wall window of our civilization….
But until the bongo-beard
image replaced it, the juvenile delinquent image stuck, especially in
Hollywood. In the 1959 movie The Beatniks,
billed as "the screen's first story of a mutinous generation" and an "answer
to the beatnik question that all America is asking," a hepcat who only
wants to sing gets dragged down into coffeehouse crime. In The Beat Generation, also from 1959, the villain is a beatnik-serial
rapist.
NextGen Beat poet Anne
Waldman was born on this day in 1945. She and Allen Ginsberg co-founded the
Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and her Beat Book anthology includes an excerpt from Kerouac's "The
Origins of the Beat Generation," first published in 1959. Here Kerouac
takes the long view, tracing the Beat spirit from his Breton ancestors through
his defiant French-Canadian grandfather to America:
Like my grandfather this
America was invested with wild selfbelieving individuality and this had begun
to disappear around the end of World War II with so many great guys dead … when
suddenly it began to emerge again, the hipsters began to appear gliding around
saying "Crazy, man."
Daybook is contributed by Steve King, who teaches in the English Department of Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland. His literary daybook began as a radio series syndicated nationally in Canada. He can be found online at todayinliterature.com.
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