Whatever. As musician Amram points out, the look’s historical antecedents aren’t Beat, anyway: “The whole beret-and-dark-glasses thing actually came from Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk, who wore them in the early forties to show allegiance with Sartre and the Europeans.”
The Gap also tried to borrow some of the Beats’ thunder with ads trumpeting that both Kerouac and Gingsberg “wore khakis.” Both men’s khakis came, in fact, straight from the Salvation Army. “Jack just wore whatever he could manage to pick up,” says writer Joyce Johnson, Kerouac’s former girlfriend. “He had the most horrible, gaudy Hawaiian shirts.” Robert Frank’s loopy 1959 film Pull My Daisy, featuring Kerouac, Ginsberg, Amram, Gregory Corso, and Larry Rivers, shows what they really wore: nubby sweaters, threadbare khakis, and flannel shirts. In other words, the Beats founded grunge.
Pretty cool. But we need the Beats to be cooler than we are, and so we make them cooler than they were. We don’t want to hear that Kerouac lived most of his adult life with his mother, Mémêre, allowed visiting friends to sleep together in his guest room only if they were married, and denounced hippies. Or that “Jack would hate Clinton and Hillary,” as his biographer Ann Charters notes, “because he didn’t like women in positions of authority, and he supported the Vietnam War. He’d probably think Newt Gingrich was an interesting guy.”
The message Kerouac drunkenly helped compose to President Eisenhower in the mid-1950s—”Dear Eisenhower, We love you— You’re the great white father. We’d like to fuck you”—is manifestly angry, juvenile, phallocratic, and so forth. It’s also admiring.
What kind of rebellion was this? And where has it taken us?
Allen Ginsberg remembers first hearing beat, a word Jack Kerouac had seized on in 1948 to mean “exhausted, at the bottom of the world… rejected by society, on your own, streetwise.” A loose affiliate of men in New York and San Francisco in the 1950s and early 1960s, the Beats valorized spontaneity; Zen; marijuana, peyote, gin, and coffee; wild road trips; the lowlife; a ruthless honesty about transmuting private feelings into public art; and a childlike appreciation for woolly word-yokings such as “peanut- butter cockroaches” and “fried shoes.” (Try it yourself: shadow juice… sordid egg… lethal marmalade. Kind of fun.)
Beat was built on the borrowed rhythms, long breath lines, and rambunctious lifestyle of bebop musicians such as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. (Like Elvis, the Beats made black music the basis for a new—and arguably watered-down—aesthetic.) Primarily a literary movement, Beat later came to encompass new forms like Assemblage, happenings, and independent cinema.
What the Beats sought was an America far from that of Joseph McCarthy, bobby socks, and Levittown. This unbuttoned search terrified the mainstream: Even Playboy demonized the Beats as “modern-day nihilists for whom it was enough, apparently, to flout and deny.” The media also diluted the Beats’ appeal by ginning up the beatnik stereotype, a mumbling, bongo-slapping, fringe-bearded layabout epitomized by Maynard G. Krebs on TV’s Dobie Gillis. By 1959 you could rent a “beatnik” for your party, and Johnny Carson and other comedians were soon cracking jokes about “cats” and “chicks” sharing a “pad,” smoking “weed,” and “wigging out” all the “squares.”
