Beats, Beatniks, and Route 66

When you’re talking about war and peace, it’s easy to find the hinges of history, even forgotten ones. But where culture is concerned, you rarely get a clear point of popular change. Maybe one could cite Elvis on The Ed Sullivan Show, The Beatles arriving in America, or Star Wars opening in May 1977. Most dramatic shifts aren’t as obvious, though. They happen smoothly and quietly in the background, like culture’s elevator music. That’s why I’m nominating a maybe-surprising candidate, 1957-’60, as a hidden hinge of history.

The significance of those years in things like the space program and the civil rights movement are already well known, but the late Fifties were also another kind of turning point. America was one kind of place in 1955 and another kind of place by 1965. This story, from hipsters to hippies, is but one small fragment of how it happened.

When I read Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel “On the Road” in college, I was surprised to discover that it was set in the late Forties, featuring a bunch of earnest young writers with short hair who wore jackets and ties to go to jazz clubs. Some casually called themselves “the beat generation,” a label the true hipsters came to scorn. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen sarcastically called them “beatniks” in 1958, and it stuck.

In fact, it really took off. By the fall of 1959, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis featured a comic cliché beatnik named Maynard G. Krebs, whose signature gag was quaking, shrieking terror at the very sound of the word “work.” MGM and CBS announced that they would produce projects about the phenomenon in the coming year, 1960.

Who were these guys, anyway? “A Handbook on the Beat” is a 1960 college textbook that refers to the segment most sympathetic to the Beats as being “the Volkswagen crowd and the woofer-tweeter set.” A modern analogue would be “the “Tesla crowd and the iPhone set”—products whose mass appeal is based on a coolness verdict rendered by idealistic intellectuals. Then, as now, they are often urbanites, likely to listen to non-profit FM stations, often seen in coffee houses. The year 1958 and today: separated at birth?

Some of the earliest pioneers got discarded along the way. John Clellon Holmes was in Jack Kerouac’s circle of friends and turned their lives into a novel, just as Kerouac would do in 1957, but Holmes’ book, “Go,” was published to much less fanfare in 1952. In later life, Holmes ruefully knew full well that he was destined to be remembered as an early Beat who didn’t catch on the way that the famous later ones did, so his introduction to “Go” is unabashedly his case for the defense.

Lady Fortune is known to change sides. Kerouac was the first of the pals to sell a book, but “The Town and the City” (1949) was something of a dud. “Go,” with some of the same people and events, did sell well for John Holmes, and at first, it made a bigger splash than Jack’s had.

From the 1952 standpoint of writing a saleable novel, Holmes did something shrewder than what Kerouac would do with nearly the same characters and events: Although he kept to what really happened, sticking even closer to the real facts than Jack would, Holmes rearranged the real-life timeline so every big thing that actually happened happens at or near the end. Instead of a years-long ramble, it became the story of one intense summer of adventure, friendship, humor, and madness, leading up to an inter-related climax that resolves the fates of several key characters.

Five years later, in the artsier, readier-for-bohemia literary world of 1957, Kerouac’s own version of “Go,” “On the Road,” finally got into print and went thermonuclear. Other members of this mutually supportive group, like Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, were also published. They made it.

The title “Jack’s Book” (1978) sounds a little presumptuous. After all, Kerouac didn’t write this one, which is all interviews and commentary about him. But “Jack’s Book” refers to the Kerouac concept of using one’s entire life as source material for his fiction. The authors, Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee, do an excellent job connecting the interviews with objective prose. I’ve long identified with something they wrote about Kerouac: “He was a most careful curator of his own memories. He intended to make use of them.”

Among the most interesting interviews are the ones with the women. Compared to today, 1978 was something of an in-between period of feminism, but much of what we’d understand now was already understood 45 years ago. It’s not that the Beat Generation writers ignored women, either as lovers, companions, or a variety of other friends and acquaintances. As male novelists usually do, they saw them as innocents, or kindly assisting angels, or as sultry temptresses. The authors of “Jack’s Book” say correctly that Kerouac’s female characters tend to be vague and generic.

Not many men are good at writing women (some, of course, are exceptional at it), and for all his Beat Generation gestures, Jack Kerouac was a man of his times (born in 1922), caught in a typical bind between a stereotype of the kind of sweet hometown girl who’d cook for him, and the kind of mysterious artistic muse he idealized in Greenwich Village and San Francisco. It was a personal and creative confusion he never overcame. Give Kerouac a partial break, especially compared to most of his contemporaries. Prewar novelists leaned towards Freudian fascinations, and the predominant “school” of postwar novelists, everyone from Norman Mailer to Mickey Spillane, were dismissive or deliberately callous towards women.

Throughout the book, there are hints and suggestions of an Ozymandias effect, where the 1978 authors assume a settled, permanent status for “now” classic 1950s cultural markers. Democratic politician Larry O’Donnell called his memoirs “No Final Victories,” and cultural historians should keep that in mind with a little humility.

After a typically good chapter about a letdown period in Jack Kerouac’s life and writing career, Gifford and Lee write,

In late February of 1951, twenty-eight going on twenty-nine, fresh from the failure of his second marriage, Jack sat down at his typewriter and inserted the end of a roll of teletype paper that Lucien had brought him from the wire service where he worked. Jack’s thoughts went back to 1945 and the aftermath of his first marriage, and of his illness: ‘I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up…'

The Subterraneans (1960), based on Kerouac’s 1958 book, isn’t a long movie. I can see why it failed, and I can see why it was, in some ways, a brave attempt. It wasn’t a schlock production; MGM saw it as a jazz-driven picture and assigned it to Arthur Freed, the same musical producer who made Singin’ In the Rain and It’s Always Fair Weather.

The jazz club scenes were very good, straightforwardly filmed. Some of the drama was gripping, in a 1950s live TV show kind of way. I liked the pre-West Side Story spontaneous group acting and dancing in the street, and in the Beat club’s roving spotlight on individuals in the crowd. The characters playing Gregory Corso and Gore Vidal were particularly colorful.

Though his role is awkwardly written, at least George Peppard looks remarkably like Jack Kerouac or Neal Cassidy; in some ways, it reminded me of seeing Ryan O’Neal in Barry Lyndon, a good-looking but not terribly deep actor earnestly trying his best in a movie for intellectuals. The problem is it pleases no one; the hipsters sneered at it as a Hollywood Technicolor confection, ripping off their seriousness for cheap thrills, while the normal human beings who buy movie tickets were more indifferent than fascinated by a cast of mostly self-indulgent and pretentious young people.

Jack’s biggest complaint about the film script was inventing a pregnancy for Mardou, the female lead of The Subterraneans, prompting an overdue but heartfelt commitment to her from Leo Percepied, the Kerouac stand-in. I expected to dislike the phony artifice I’d read about, but watching it, it made reasonable human and dramatic sense. The screenwriter, for whatever his artistic faults, knew what kind of emotions it took to end a movie, and Kerouac didn’t.

A side note: There were very few non-whites in Kerouac’s life or his writing, one exception being Mardou, a black woman who the movie changed into an exotic European war refugee. This isn’t hypocritical, exactly: there’s no great passion for black history or culture in the Beats, just a hazy sympathy for the downtrodden, combined in Jack’s case with thinly disguised jealousy about supposed black ease with marijuana and promiscuity. It was a largely blank spot in their imaginations. Norman Mailer wrote a famous, influential essay called “The White Negro”. The bolding is mine; it shows how quickly publicity for a couple of poets in sandals was harnessed to a much wider project:

So there was a new breed of adventurers, urban adventurers who drifted out at night looking for action with a black man’s code to fit their facts. The hipster had absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro….If there are ten million Americans who are more or less psychopathic (and the figure is most modest) there are probably not more than one hundred thousand men and women who consciously see themselves as hipsters, but their importance is that they are an elite with the potential ruthlessness of an elite, and a language most adolescents can understand instinctively for the hipster’s intense view of existence matches their experience and their desire to rebel.

Sounds like a plan! That 100,000 hipsters (the number is, of course, metaphorical; Mailer had no actual way of guessing, but it’s probably about right) represented, at that time, only about 1/1750^th of the country, yet it could become “an elite with the potential ruthlessness of an elite,” provided they could own the future by enlisting adolescents in a language that they “understand instinctively.” How did they succeed? Brilliantly.

But before we cast a jaundiced eye at the future, let’s return to the fall of 1960 and the premiere of Route 66, an hourlong show on CBS. This wasn’t a show about beatniks, but it was close enough to the original Beats that Jack Kerouac threatened to sue CBS and Columbia Pictures Television. Tod Stiles (Martin Milner) was a genial, straight-arrow Yale dropout whose tycoon father died bankrupt, leaving him only a car, a Chevrolet Corvette convertible. His friend Buz Murdoch (George Maharis) worked for the family business before it went under. The two of them restlessly cris-crossed the country, drifting between temporary jobs and gallantly respected, but just as temporary women. They met new guest stars every week, learned life’s lessons, tried to right wrongs, and moved on to the next town like Caine in Kung Fu a half-generation later.

Route 66 didn’t interest me as a kid; too talky, too much mush stuff. But the car! Wow! Although there was the backstory to explain why a pair of drifters drove one of the most expensive cars made in America, they never bothered to explain how it got mysteriously updated each year, although the fact that Chevy was the show’s sponsor offered a clue.

Politically, Kerouac was a conservative, as were Tonight Show host Steve Allen and Firing Line creator William F. Buckley, both of whom had him on their shows. There was a lost moment when there wasn’t necessarily a cultural straight line between 1958 and 1968. You may not like poetry—frankly, I don’t know a thing about it—but take a look at Kerouac’s introduction to The Tonight Show audience, shyness and all, and see what was once an honest, dark expression of inarticulate, dissatisfied restlessness felt by plenty of "squares" after the War.