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BEAT_BREAK

                                             August 14, 2009

On the Beat break with the past, including the
past breaks with the past...

This was a post to alt.gothic,
which I quote verbatim for once:

Madelyn Boudreaux writes:
> ~Fianna wrote:

>> A lot of my extreme critique of the 60s social
>> movements is delivered through my 3rd-wave feminist
>> lens.  2nd-wavers (the boomers) in the end did more
>> damage to feminism than help.  A lot of women in my
>> generation had to take something of a tortourous path
>> to even get to the point where we were comfortable
>> using and embracing the "f-word" at all, and race
>> relations weren't all that much better.  That's part of
>> the reason that the hippie movement splintered in to so
>> many different social identity movements in the first
>> place - the hippie movement was, in most respects, just
>> a kindler, gentler patriarchy.

> I have the same issue with the Beats. On paper, they
> read as very open-minded sexually and socially, but as
> you delve deeper, you start realizing that the people
> who really pushed the Beat movement along were almost
> exclusively male, and that for them, women basically
> existed in that culture as fuck-toys and providers of
> food/shelter when needed, and not much else.

My guess was that you were talking about Kerouac and
"On the Road" here, and peeking a few messages ahead I
see that this is more or less right.

So yeah, you have a point, but a lot of it depends on
which particular beats you're talking about.  If you want
to talk just the Big Three, it's true that Kerouac and
Burroughs don't score a lot of feminist points... and
Ginsberg may do a little better, but probably only a
little (and probably, mostly, much later).

But then, in the original New York Beats of the forties,
there were some very key women at the center of what
Ginsberg called "the libertine circle", notably Joan
Vollmer (later married to, and killed by, Burroughs).  And
then there was Hope Savage, aka Sura, who impressed Corso
as being very knowledgeable about Eastern art and religion
(at around the same time that Kerouac and Ginsberg were
just getting into it...).

The really weird thing is that women like this ran into
some kind of reality filter, and not only never became
regarded as central figures, their very existence was
barely acknowledged.

It is, in my opinion, the worst crime of sexism among the
original core beats, not that Joan Vollmer was killed by
Burroughs -- which might really be an "accident" on some
level, just like the Burroughs apologists always insist --
but that none of those guys ever wrote much of anything
about her.  Why did Neal Cassady deserve a book-length
love letter, and Joan Vollmer just get a couple of
mentions here and there throughout the Kerouac corpus?

> It was a real shock to realize this about them. They were very
> much locked in to the gender roles and mindset of their era.

Yeah, and we might try to make excuses for them -- they
were beginners, just breaking with the establishment, how
likely is it they would get everything right on the first
try?

But then, it's not like the 70s feminists were the *first*
feminists.  How is it that the Beats paid such selective
attention to their counter-cultural forebears?  Not only
is there no mention of de Beauvoir, there doesn't seem to
be any mention of Sartre...

Why were these guys all jazzed up about the likes of
Blake, Proust and (somewhat oddly) Thomas Wolfe without
any sign of interest in, say, Hemingway or Virginia Wolfe
or Edna St. Vincent Millay or Eugene O'Neill or...

Burroughs was ten years older than the rest of the gang,
and very well read: he picked up a number of odd
obsessions: Reich, Korzybski, Spengler --

What happened to the Existentialists?  What happened
to the Moderns?

They named themselves after the Lost Generation, but
that parallel played no role in their thought.

As far as I can tell, for these 20-somethings in the
mid-1940s, all of that was stale, obsolete stuff left
behind with the twenties; it was all pre-war,
pre-depression, even, who cares about that these days?

It could be that walking away from suffragette city
was just a small part of this compulsive break with
the past.

> - Madelyn, who was once treated very badly by Alan Ginsberg, but
> who also received a flower from Alan Ginsberg another time.

Funny, I hadn't noticed this line when I wrote the
above comment about Ginsberg...


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