OSV STORY FOR MAY 11

Beat down & beatific

A restless requiem for the godfather of the Beats, those angel-headed hipsters who are still misleading the lost

By Mike Aquilina

When poet Allen Ginsberg died last month at age 70, America’s counterculture lost a pope of sorts.

Ginsberg, as a founder of the Beat movement, was a spiritual father to perhaps three consecutive lost generations: the beatniks of the ’50s, the hippies of the ’60s and the devotees of grunge of the ’90s.

Actively homosexual, openly promiscuous, proudly drug-abusing, Ginsberg was nonetheless given to high-toned moral language when he spoke of social ills, ecology or censorship. And he was always explicitly religious, in a contemporary American way.

Far in advance of the New Age, he practiced his own brand of syncretism: taking Buddhist vows, yet chanting Hindu mantras on TV; calling himself a Jew, yet quoting Jesus in his poems.

Thus it was with the Beats from the beginning. Though ostensibly a literary movement, the Beats were about much more. Critic John Clellon Holmes noted in 1958: "The Beat generation is basically a religious generation."

And though Ginsberg spent his last decades far from what he called "the Judaeo-Christian tradition," he and the other original Beats found some of their initial inspiration in the Catholic mystics.

Into the mystic

Perhaps that should not be so surprising. The Beat movement’s other founder, novelist Jack Kerouac, was an intermittently practicing Catholic. It was Kerouac who named the movement (in 1948) and wrote its early aesthetic manifestos.

He advocated "spontaneous writing" — recording naked reality almost immediately as it was apprehended by the mind, without the "artificial" constraints of planning, editing or revising.

Beat was to literature what bop was to jazz: improvisational, unconventional and manic. Kerouac would compose entire novels in 72-hour stretches of all-day, all-night typing, aided in the effort by Benzedrine and booze.

He said that the origin of his spontaneous prose method — its openness and honesty — was his childhood experience of sacramental confession.

But the writing wasn’t the thing. Beat writing was meant to capture the fresh experience of ecstasy. The Beat writer, according to Kerouac, had to "believe in the holy contour of life" and strive for the visionary moment when one saw the "beatific" even in the most ordinary or "beat-down" times and places.

Ultimately, what the Beats were after was mystical experience. "I want God to show me His face" was Kerouac’s description of his goal.

To that end, the early Beats spent long hours poring over the saints’ works on prayer and the spiritual life. Ginsberg, a secular Jew, was an avid reader of St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Ávila. Kerouac was fond of St. Francis of Assisi and St. Thérèse of Lisieux.

Yet just as Beat writing had rejected traditional forms and disciplines, so eventually would it reject religion. The Beats wanted the mysticism, but without any ascetical preparation.

Late in the 1940s, Kerouac, Ginsberg and company began to lean toward a philosophical Buddhism — of their own devising, really — that made no specific moral claims on the believer. They did try various meditation techniques, but mostly they sought shortcuts to their goal of ecstasy.

Poet Gary Snyder wrote that "vision and illumination-seeking" was integral to Beat religion and "most easily done by systematic experimentation with narcotics."

A sympathetic literary critic opined that this "use of drugs and hallucinogens only illustrates that the quest for inward reality has taken advantage of the resources of modern science. A sincere beatnik might easily see himself as a jet-age St. John of the Cross."

Indeed. The Beats’ drug and alcohol consumption was voracious, their sexual practices almost indiscriminate. Kerouac was heterosexual but given to experimentation, and it was he who initiated Ginsberg’s first homosexual experience.

In the 1950s, sodomy made the Beats social pariahs, but, again, that suited their persona.

Another way the Beats escaped society’s conventions was by "dropping out." Kerouac’s most famous book, "On the Road" (1957), documents the quintessential Beat activity of hitchhiking cross-country with little money, no job and no responsibilities.

Thus the Beats often found themselves (and their "ecstasies") on the fringes of society, among junkies, prostitutes and hoboes.

Since they considered themselves beyond the Western notions of good and evil, they were also given to occasional crime, mostly petty, but occasionally more serious — as when novelist William S. Burroughs killed his wife while both were stoned.

This was the life the Beats lived, documented and rhapsodized in their books and poems. Through the ’50s they continued their binges of travel, drug consumption and sex at high intensity. But by decade’s end, the veterans were showing wear.

Kerouac, drunk much of the time, began having episodes of severe anxiety and paranoia, which he tried to relieve by more booze and sex. In 1957, he trekked to Tangier to visit a novelist friend — and there he hit bottom. He wrote: "All I wanted somehow now was Wheaties by a pine breeze kitchen window in America."

But he wanted more than that. He tried fitfully to settle down with his mother and stick to a routine of Buddhist meditation. But he was growing uneasy with Buddhism as well — and, increasingly, with his own hypocrisy. While he preached honesty in spontaneous writing, he practiced rank dishonesty in carrying on an affair with his best friend’s wife.

He seemed to be grasping his way, again, to Christianity. In a 1959 essay on the origins of the Beats, he expresses outrage that Mademoiselle magazine, after a photo session, airbrushed out the crucifix that hung from a chain around his neck.

"I am a Beat," he wrote, "that is, I believe in beatitude and that God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son to it."

A sort of homecoming

In 1960, the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti — another lapsed Catholic — invited Kerouac to take a working vacation at Ferlinghetti’s remote cabin. There Kerouac suffered a sudden, insane terror, believing that his companions were trying to poison him.

Then, according to his account, he had a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the cross of Jesus Christ and numerous angels. He said, "I’m with you, Jesus, for always. Thank you." And so it was that he renounced Buddhism and, in intention at least, took up the faith of his childhood.

Gradually, too, he renounced other associations, including the Beat label. In his novel "Lonesome Traveler" (1960), he wrote: "I’m actually not a Beat but a strange solitary crazy Catholic mystic."

In "Satori in Paris" (1966), he says definitively: "I’m not a Buddhist, I’m a Catholic."

Indeed, one satori in the latter book (satori is a Japanese Buddhist term for illumination) is an impassioned apologia for the Catholic faith.

Still, the addictions remained, and Kerouac probably lacked the discipline to fight them. In "Satori in Paris," his sermon on Christ comes amid an excursion full of drinking and whoring.

He sometimes blamed his troubles on the guilt he incurred by his early homosexual activity and his apostasy. But, through the early to mid-’60s, for the most part, he lived in suburban retirement with his mother.

He married for the third time in 1966, but continued to destroy his body with drink. In 1969, at age 47, he suffered a massive, fatal stomach hemorrhage while watching "The Galloping Gourmet."

His funeral Mass was celebrated by Oblate Father Armand Morrissette, the priest who had encouraged him, as a teen, to take up writing.

In a sense, the poet Snyder, a Buddhist, had been right, years before, when he jibed that Kerouac would kiss the cross on his deathbed. Today, the man who named the Beats rests in a blessed grave — though most of his Beat-sympathetic biographers dismiss Kerouac’s fitful faith as the last infantile regression of a deeply troubled man.

In 1956, Ginsberg became a Beat sensation when he published his long poem "Howl," which began: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked . . ." Ginsberg, a survivor, would see bodies as well as minds destroyed: Kerouac’s and many others’.

Yet Ginsberg was not chastened in the least. He continued his drug use and promiscuity. Late in life, he confessed to at least two interviewers that he had a predilection for young boys.

And just weeks before he died of liver cancer, he expressed surprise when a blood test showed him to be HIV negative. He was surprised, he said, because his sexual activity had been quite high lately.

But Ginsberg’s books will surely continue to sell well. According to a recent Washington Post report, Kerouac and Burroughs still carry enormous appeal with the grunge set. (Post writer Henry Allen calls grungers "Outpost" people, after Tower Records’ marketing campaign for reaching disaffected youths.)

"Beat down," perhaps, best describes the spirituality of the "whatever" generation. Grunge is the mark of our contemporary Beats, and at the outposts the nihilism of the original Beats resonates.

But there’s a difference. Would today’s Beat descendant even know to think himself a "jet-age St. John of the Cross"?

And how many could say, with Kerouac, "I want God to show me His face"? After being "destroyed by madness," how many today would know to kiss the cross in the end?

These are critical questions, because Beat religion — with its drugs, perverted sex and smorgasbord of symbols from the world’s spiritual traditions — cannot deliver on the beatitude it promises.

One may hope that the counterculture’s spiritual father, Allen Ginsberg, will rest in peace, through the mercy of God. And that he may rest in a place where he can see clearly, and can pray for his spiritual offspring. q

Copyright Our Sunday Visitor, 1997; from the 5-11-97 edition

HEADLINES FOR MAY 11

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