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The Beats, Bless 'em, Saluted in Book

© Robert Powers

The time: the 1950s. The place: the North beach area of San Francisco, Southern California's Venice West, and Greenwich Village in New York City. Merriam Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature describes the Beat Movement as "advocating personal release, purification, and illumination through the heightened sensory awareness that might be induced by drugs, sex, or the disciplines of Zen Buddhism."

The Beat Movement was both more and less than that definition. Embraced by youths in the 50s while it outraged their elders, the Beat generation is getting a new look, which results in varying assessments of its worth and validity.

My personal encounter came with my purchase of a paperback edition of Jack Kerouac's remarkable novel, On the Road. It's hard to accept that it's been 50 years since America woke up to the work of Kerouac and his friends, including poet Allen Ginsberg and zonked-out fellow writer William S. Burroughs, Jr.

In a 452-page salute to those men and their times, The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats (Hyperion, $27.50) contains excellent articles by contemporaries, journalists and literary critics. There are hundreds of photos that serve to provide added illumination to the period.

More than half of the articles were written specifically for the book. Names of the authors are both familiar and obscure. Some of the names you might recognize are Carolyn Cassidy (wife of Neal Cassidy, Kerouac's close friend), Lou Reed, Ken Kesey, Gregory Corso, Robert Palmer and Greil Marcus.

From the past come the 1972 interview from Rolling Stone with William S. Burroughs Jr., a dazzling article on the Beats by the infamous Hunter S. Thompson, and another article that consists of a dialogue between Burroughs and glam rock star David Bowie.

Although death has claimed many of the originators of the Beat Movement, critics continue to wrangle over its achievements and its personalities. If nothing else, The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats will provide ammunition and information for the reader to make his decision.

Time has a way of assigning greatness to those who began their careers in controversy. Ginsberg, now considered by many authorities as one of the great poets of the 20th century, began his notoriety by his famous anthem of a poem, Howl. To many it was profane and couldn't possibly qualify as art.

A few years before Ginsberg's death in 1997, he was invited by the City of Columbus to give a reading of his work in the outdoor amphitheater located in Whetsone Park, just off High Street on the North Side of the Ohio capital city. Police estimated that more than 4,000 turned out to hear Ginsberg. Nothing before or since drew such an audience to that beautiful site.