When William Burroughs first heard the word "beat" some time in the mid-1940s, its connotations were criminal rather than musical or literary, all to do with underbelly, underside and underworld - and there lay the attraction. It was a world he was to find, in all its beat glory, in the New York apartment of "a committed reject" called Herbert Huncke (rhymes with junkie) - hustler, jailbird, fluent speaker of what was known as jive talk, and genuine "Beat". The word had other meanings too, such as to "beat it" across the country in a freight train, but whichever way you looked at it, this was a time when to be "beat" was hardly a desired state. That would come later.
In 1952, with Burroughs's book Junkie about to be published and all manner of strange things going on in the shady nooks of Greenwich Village, the traditionally square readers of The New York Times were getting rather confused. They were beginning to hear the word "beat" cropping up in everyday conversation but, as far as they could see, all it seemed to amount to was a rum crowd of shady characters who took a lot of drugs and wrote weird books. They weren't far off the mark either, but The New York Times felt that it was probably time to let its readers know that there was rather more to being "beat" than reading Rimbaud aloud on street corners.
It was John Clellon Holmes, the author of Go, who actually got the weighty job of explanation. It would be up to him to define the Beats for hip and unhip alike. He wrote: "A man is beat whenever he goes for broke and wagers the sum of his resources on a single number; and the young generation has done that continually from early youth. Its members have an instinctive individuality, needing no bohemianism or imposed eccentricity to express it. Their own lust for freedom, and the ability to live at a pace that kills (to which the war had adjusted them), led to black markets, bebop, narcotics, sexual promiscuity, hucksterism and Jean-Paul Sartre. The beatness set in later."
Back in 1946, a musician and drug aficionado called Mezz Mezzrow had published a book, Really The Blues. Mezzrow, a white clarinettist with a deep love of all things black, was perhaps the first to employ the speech of black America without either condescension or disrespect. His motives were certainly honourable, but the book nevertheless marked the beginning of a familiar cultural process. As Ginsberg described it, Really The Blues was "the first signal into white culture of the underground black, hip culture that pre-existed before my generation". The soon-to-be beats were mad for it, and something black became something white. It had already happened with music, and language was next.
When the word "beat" entered white usage, it referred to someone who actually rejects, as opposed to someone who is rejected. This new Beat Generation saw itself as "at odds", anything but "beat" and found its fluent voice through jazz, insanity, drugs, visitations from William Blake and a remarkable belief in its own potential. Fuelled on all of the above, there followed periods of great creativity, extraordinary work, many murky episodes and a fair amount of odd behaviour. Taking its title from that same New York Times article, James Campbell's new book This Is The Beat Generation, is a fairly unblinking account of this most romanticised of eras. From the New York of the 1940s, Campbell traces the development of attitudes, practices and literary output of all the main players and their many muses. William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac are at the heart of it, and are given equal billing in this often depressing tale of mental illness, big ideas, drugs, sex and letters. As Campbell puts it, all three of the leading lights of the Beat Generation had seen the inside of mental institutions and prisons by the time they were 30.
Among William Burroughs's early gestures was to cut off the little finger of his left hand with a pair of poultry shears - unlike Van Gogh, however, Burroughs saw fit to present the severed emblem to his analyst. Other than that, however, Burroughs seemed to see himself a "homo non sapiens" - a person without context. Ginsberg - whom Campbell described as "more of a `case' than Kerouac could hope to be" - had a definite context, however. It was to him, after all, that William Blake/God had allegedly appeared. As an understandable result the poet, according to Campbell, "rarely doubted his rightness". Kerouac, however, was merely "in the grip of a baleful romance about being `so drearily a white man"' and, according to Campbell, was guilty of well-meaning trespass, particularly in his best-known book On the Road. As the writer James Baldwin said rather tellingly at the time, "I wouldn't like to be in his shoes if he should ever be mad enough to read this aloud in Harlem's Apollo Theater."
The many episodes in the various lives of the Beats are already the stuff of legend but here, once more, Campbell brings a steadying hand to the mythologies. Burroughs's accidental shooting of his wife, the writing of On the Road and the publication of Howl are dealt with thoroughly, as are the roles of Neal Cassady, Gary Snyder, Ferlinghetti and others. One added tale, however, concerns a murder, committed by a member of their early circle and to which, according to Campbell, both Burroughs and Kerouac were material witnesses. For Campbell, however, the real story ends at the start of the 1960s, when Ginsberg goes East and Burroughs begins publishing his cut-ups.
The end was already in sight, however, some time in 1957. Sputnik went up and the Beats became the "beatniks" - a mocking term used to connote idleness, beardedness and ultimately (given the Russian suffix) an inherent Communism. As Campbell puts it, "beatnik" turned "beat" into kitsch, and soon you could Rent-a-Beatnik for an uptown party - there was even a Beatnik Cookbook which included a recipe for Ginsburgers. Certainly none of this had anything to do with the Beats themselves, but image and perception had begun to overtake reality and, of course, the work itself.
Jack Kerouac died in 1969, Ginsberg and Burroughs, within months of each other, in 1997 - cults in their own lifetimes. Ginsberg, Campbell insists, had a genuine desire to improve the health of Blake's sick rose. Burroughs, who wrote about the untouchables in Naked Lunch and had wished a certain pariah status on himself, had also doubtless achieved his purpose - a "priestly function" in taking on himself "all human vileness". And Kerouac, King of the Beats with books like On The Road behind him, was quite happy to live out the rest of his life with his mother. All three, Campbell concludes, had been entirely true to themselves. This is The Beat Generation by James Campbell is published by Secker and Warburg