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KEROUAC, Jean-Louis Lebris de ("Jack"). Typescript scroll of his article "Origins of the Beat Generation," WITH SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCES FROM THE PUBLISHED TEXT, several pencilled additions by Kerouac. Written November 1958 for a symposium at Hunter College, New York, published as "Beatific: The Origins of the Beat Generation," in Playboy, June 1959 (Vol.6, no.6), pp.31-32, 79.
A continuous scroll of wove (probably teletype) paper, 4 ft. 2 in., x 8½ in. (1400 x 215mm), comprising two strips joined by tape, title pencilled by Kerouac in large letters on verso of beginning of scroll, small tear at beginning, otherwise in fine condition.
"YOU KNOW, THIS IS REALLY A BEAT GENERATION": THE BIRTH OF THE BEAT MOVEMENT, BY ITS AVATAR
"America," Kerouac prophetically asserts at the end of the published article, "must, will, is, changing now, for the better I say." In the wake of the sensation following publication of On the Road, Kerouac was seen not just as the "avatar" of the Beat Generation, but also as its principal spokesman. In addition to interviews with journalists, he appeared on the Steve Allen Show, and as a panelist in university seminars addressing such questions as "Is there a Beat Generation?" In the same period he agreed to write several articles for the general press on the Beat movement including "About the Beat Generation" (Esquire 1957). According to one authority, "Origins of the Beat Generation," published from this scroll, constitutes "Kerouac's fullest account of 'his' generation" (Ann Charters, Introduction to Beat Down to Your Soul: What Was the Beat Generation, New York: Penguin, 2001, p.xxxi). The published article has been several times anthologized (recently in The Portable Jack Kerouac, ed. Ann Charters, pp.565-573), but the original text shows numerous differences from the published text. THE SCROLL TEXT REMAINS ENTIRELY UNPUBLISHED.
The published text opens: "This article necessarily'll have to be about myself. I'm going all out." The scroll, however, begins with his comments on "That wild eager picture of me on the cover of On the Road where I look so beat," and discusses the image (a group portrait with Corso, Ginsberg, Whalen and Kerouac) in which he wore a large crucifix belonging to Corso. In the published text, he complains that Mademoiselle had airbrushed the crucifix from the photo, and praises The New York Times for not doing so: "therefore The New York Times is as beat as I am...God bless The New York Times for not erasing the crucifix from my picture as if it was something distasteful."
In both the scroll and the published article Kerouac uses the photograph to segue into a famous, often quoted account of his naming of the Beat Generation, in 1948: "That wild eager picture of me on the cover of On the Road where I look so Beat goes back much further than 1948 when John Clellon Holmes (author of Go and The Horn) were sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the Lost Generation and the subsequent Existentialism and I said, 'You know, this is really a beat generation' and he leapt up and said 'That's it, that's right!'" In a remarkable passage, Kerouac free-associates on influences from popular culture and memories of his youth (portions are omitted or altered in the published version). "The Beat Generation goes back to the wild parties my father used to have at home in the Twenties and Thirties in New England," to "those crazy days before World War Two when teenagers drank beer on Friday nights at Lake ballrooms"; "to the completely senseless babble of the Three Stooges, the ravings of the Marx Brothers," "to the "inky ditties of old cartoons (Krazy Kat with the irrational Brick)--to Laurel and Hardy in the Foreign Legion--to Count Dracula and his smile to Count Dracula shivering and hissing before the Cross--to the Golem horrifying the persecutors of the Ghetto...to the holy old Arab warning the hotbloods that Ramadan is near," to "King Kong his eyes looking into the hotel with tender huge love for Fay Wray. To the glee of American, the honesty of America, the funny spitelessness of old bigfisted America...." Initially, he writes, "this America was invested with wild selfbelieving individuality," but "this had begun to disappear around the end or World War II with so many great guys dead...when suddenly it began to emerge again" in the form of "the hipsters," whom he "first saw creeping around Times Square in 1944." That year, Herbert "Huncke from Chicago, an old Chicago hipster, came up to me with radiant light shining out of his despairing eyes..." In the article, Kerouac adds that Huncke had said "'Man I'm beat.' I knew right away what he meant somehow."
He ponders the origin of the word: "perhaps brought from some Midwest carnival or junk cafeteria"; "it was a new language" and "originally meant poor, down and out, dead-beat, on the bum, sad, sleeping in subways," but nowadays, "'Beat Generation' has simply become the slogan or label for a revolution in manners in America." When he first encountered hipsters "I thought they were criminals. But they kept talking about the same things I liked, long outlines of personal experience and vision, night-long confessions full of hope that had become illicit and repressed by war, stirrings and rumblings of a new soul (that same old soul.)" He recalls, "by 1948 it began to take shape. That was a wild vibrating year when a group of us [Kerouac's New York circle] would walk down the street and yell hello and even stop and talk to anybody that gave us a friendly look," and "it was the year I saw Charley 'Bird' Parker strolling down Sixth Avenue in a black turtlenecked sweater..." Kerouac clarifies the distinction between two strands of Beat culture, the cool and the hot, observing that "It was a hot hipster like myself who finally cooled it in Buddhist meditation, though when I go in a jazz joint I still feel like yelling 'Blow baby blow!' to the musicians...."
"I wrote On the Road (in three weeks) on a 100-foot roll and put the Beat Generation in words in there comparing it to the Fidelio of Beethoven who lifts a rock from underground and comes up saying 'O I am so sorrowful.' The manuscript was turned down on the grounds that the sales manager would not approve of it, tho the editor did say that it was "Dostovokyan [sic] work." Then, Kerouac relates, Holmes published an article ("This is the Beat Generation") in 1952 in The New York Times magazine..."and gave the BG its first public notice in print....Anyway the title was in quotes because I had said it, as the article explained." He notes the excerpt entitled "Jazz of the Beat Generation" from On the Road published in 1955 "from an in-progress novel whose title "I later changed...to On the Road." Finally, in 1957, "after the publishers [Viking] had spent six long years deciding to publish On the Road and did so," the term "mushroomed all out of proportion...as a simple label for a million desperate people."
But, Kerouac adds, in 1954 the term "Beat" had acquired an additional personal meaning for him--"Beatific"--"after sitting in Ste. Jeanne d'Arc Church in Lowell Mass, in 1954 and seeing a vision of why the word had appealed to me in the first place. For on that afternoon with Holmes, I said many (1948) things such as, maybe 'everythingbelongs to me because I'm poor,' or leafing idly through a sonnet of Shakespeare, 'Genius is funny,'" After publication of On the Road, he felt "horror" "to suddenly see 'Beat' being taken up by everybody, press and TV and Hollywood Borscht circuit." Now, he adds in disgust, "they have beatnik routines on TV," and he predicts that much of this is "a simple change in fashion and manners, just a history crust--like from the Age of Reason 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 living room and pretty soon we'll have Beat Secretaries of State..."
Discussing language, he proclaims that "the time has come to speak freely, but its always been here that time. And to fear to do so, or to decide not to do so, not only impoverishes, but kills..." Then, in a remarkable passage (partly used at the end of the published article), he writes: "Woe to them, they who listen not to the voice from within, and bend the knee and listen instead to the voice from without...Woe, in fact to them who believe that the outside is important. Knowledge to them who know that the 'still, small voice which nudges and elbows from within, tho it often may lead one into wordly predicaments, is still the voice of Truth...Woe unto the beat generation, woe even more yet unto the critics of the beat generation, for the staff of truth should be carried to the bloody bleeding end..." Some text in the scroll is not part of the published article (including a "beat haiku"), and it is also evident that there has been drastic rearrangement and revision of Kerouac's text, which here ends with the prediction that "the next generation (our kids) will revolt against us and become quite [sic for quiet] and glad and formal again...," and concludes "It was that old Washington Irving started it all."
At the forum entitled "Is there a Beat Generation?" at Hunter College Playhouse, 6 November 1958, Kerouac read excerpts from the article. A recording of that reading is part of "On the Beat Generation," Rhino Records R270939. After publication in Playboy, the article was republished in Encounter, vol.xiii, no.2 (August 1959), pp.57-61.
A continuous scroll of wove (probably teletype) paper, 4 ft. 2 in., x 8½ in. (1400 x 215mm), comprising two strips joined by tape, title pencilled by Kerouac in large letters on verso of beginning of scroll, small tear at beginning, otherwise in fine condition.
"YOU KNOW, THIS IS REALLY A BEAT GENERATION": THE BIRTH OF THE BEAT MOVEMENT, BY ITS AVATAR
"America," Kerouac prophetically asserts at the end of the published article, "must, will, is, changing now, for the better I say." In the wake of the sensation following publication of On the Road, Kerouac was seen not just as the "avatar" of the Beat Generation, but also as its principal spokesman. In addition to interviews with journalists, he appeared on the Steve Allen Show, and as a panelist in university seminars addressing such questions as "Is there a Beat Generation?" In the same period he agreed to write several articles for the general press on the Beat movement including "About the Beat Generation" (Esquire 1957). According to one authority, "Origins of the Beat Generation," published from this scroll, constitutes "Kerouac's fullest account of 'his' generation" (Ann Charters, Introduction to Beat Down to Your Soul: What Was the Beat Generation, New York: Penguin, 2001, p.xxxi). The published article has been several times anthologized (recently in The Portable Jack Kerouac, ed. Ann Charters, pp.565-573), but the original text shows numerous differences from the published text. THE SCROLL TEXT REMAINS ENTIRELY UNPUBLISHED.
The published text opens: "This article necessarily'll have to be about myself. I'm going all out." The scroll, however, begins with his comments on "That wild eager picture of me on the cover of On the Road where I look so beat," and discusses the image (a group portrait with Corso, Ginsberg, Whalen and Kerouac) in which he wore a large crucifix belonging to Corso. In the published text, he complains that Mademoiselle had airbrushed the crucifix from the photo, and praises The New York Times for not doing so: "therefore The New York Times is as beat as I am...God bless The New York Times for not erasing the crucifix from my picture as if it was something distasteful."
In both the scroll and the published article Kerouac uses the photograph to segue into a famous, often quoted account of his naming of the Beat Generation, in 1948: "That wild eager picture of me on the cover of On the Road where I look so Beat goes back much further than 1948 when John Clellon Holmes (author of Go and The Horn) were sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the Lost Generation and the subsequent Existentialism and I said, 'You know, this is really a beat generation' and he leapt up and said 'That's it, that's right!'" In a remarkable passage, Kerouac free-associates on influences from popular culture and memories of his youth (portions are omitted or altered in the published version). "The Beat Generation goes back to the wild parties my father used to have at home in the Twenties and Thirties in New England," to "those crazy days before World War Two when teenagers drank beer on Friday nights at Lake ballrooms"; "to the completely senseless babble of the Three Stooges, the ravings of the Marx Brothers," "to the "inky ditties of old cartoons (Krazy Kat with the irrational Brick)--to Laurel and Hardy in the Foreign Legion--to Count Dracula and his smile to Count Dracula shivering and hissing before the Cross--to the Golem horrifying the persecutors of the Ghetto...to the holy old Arab warning the hotbloods that Ramadan is near," to "King Kong his eyes looking into the hotel with tender huge love for Fay Wray. To the glee of American, the honesty of America, the funny spitelessness of old bigfisted America...." Initially, he writes, "this America was invested with wild selfbelieving individuality," but "this had begun to disappear around the end or World War II with so many great guys dead...when suddenly it began to emerge again" in the form of "the hipsters," whom he "first saw creeping around Times Square in 1944." That year, Herbert "Huncke from Chicago, an old Chicago hipster, came up to me with radiant light shining out of his despairing eyes..." In the article, Kerouac adds that Huncke had said "'Man I'm beat.' I knew right away what he meant somehow."
He ponders the origin of the word: "perhaps brought from some Midwest carnival or junk cafeteria"; "it was a new language" and "originally meant poor, down and out, dead-beat, on the bum, sad, sleeping in subways," but nowadays, "'Beat Generation' has simply become the slogan or label for a revolution in manners in America." When he first encountered hipsters "I thought they were criminals. But they kept talking about the same things I liked, long outlines of personal experience and vision, night-long confessions full of hope that had become illicit and repressed by war, stirrings and rumblings of a new soul (that same old soul.)" He recalls, "by 1948 it began to take shape. That was a wild vibrating year when a group of us [Kerouac's New York circle] would walk down the street and yell hello and even stop and talk to anybody that gave us a friendly look," and "it was the year I saw Charley 'Bird' Parker strolling down Sixth Avenue in a black turtlenecked sweater..." Kerouac clarifies the distinction between two strands of Beat culture, the cool and the hot, observing that "It was a hot hipster like myself who finally cooled it in Buddhist meditation, though when I go in a jazz joint I still feel like yelling 'Blow baby blow!' to the musicians...."
"I wrote On the Road (in three weeks) on a 100-foot roll and put the Beat Generation in words in there comparing it to the Fidelio of Beethoven who lifts a rock from underground and comes up saying 'O I am so sorrowful.' The manuscript was turned down on the grounds that the sales manager would not approve of it, tho the editor did say that it was "Dostovokyan [sic] work." Then, Kerouac relates, Holmes published an article ("This is the Beat Generation") in 1952 in The New York Times magazine..."and gave the BG its first public notice in print....Anyway the title was in quotes because I had said it, as the article explained." He notes the excerpt entitled "Jazz of the Beat Generation" from On the Road published in 1955 "from an in-progress novel whose title "I later changed...to On the Road." Finally, in 1957, "after the publishers [Viking] had spent six long years deciding to publish On the Road and did so," the term "mushroomed all out of proportion...as a simple label for a million desperate people."
But, Kerouac adds, in 1954 the term "Beat" had acquired an additional personal meaning for him--"Beatific"--"after sitting in Ste. Jeanne d'Arc Church in Lowell Mass, in 1954 and seeing a vision of why the word had appealed to me in the first place. For on that afternoon with Holmes, I said many (1948) things such as, maybe 'everythingbelongs to me because I'm poor,' or leafing idly through a sonnet of Shakespeare, 'Genius is funny,'" After publication of On the Road, he felt "horror" "to suddenly see 'Beat' being taken up by everybody, press and TV and Hollywood Borscht circuit." Now, he adds in disgust, "they have beatnik routines on TV," and he predicts that much of this is "a simple change in fashion and manners, just a history crust--like from the Age of Reason 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 living room and pretty soon we'll have Beat Secretaries of State..."
Discussing language, he proclaims that "the time has come to speak freely, but its always been here that time. And to fear to do so, or to decide not to do so, not only impoverishes, but kills..." Then, in a remarkable passage (partly used at the end of the published article), he writes: "Woe to them, they who listen not to the voice from within, and bend the knee and listen instead to the voice from without...Woe, in fact to them who believe that the outside is important. Knowledge to them who know that the 'still, small voice which nudges and elbows from within, tho it often may lead one into wordly predicaments, is still the voice of Truth...Woe unto the beat generation, woe even more yet unto the critics of the beat generation, for the staff of truth should be carried to the bloody bleeding end..." Some text in the scroll is not part of the published article (including a "beat haiku"), and it is also evident that there has been drastic rearrangement and revision of Kerouac's text, which here ends with the prediction that "the next generation (our kids) will revolt against us and become quite [sic for quiet] and glad and formal again...," and concludes "It was that old Washington Irving started it all."
At the forum entitled "Is there a Beat Generation?" at Hunter College Playhouse, 6 November 1958, Kerouac read excerpts from the article. A recording of that reading is part of "On the Beat Generation," Rhino Records R270939. After publication in Playboy, the article was republished in Encounter, vol.xiii, no.2 (August 1959), pp.57-61.