H e a r t   S o n s   &   H e a r t   D a u g h t e r s   of   A l l e n   G i n s b e r g

N a p a l m   H e a l t h   S p a :   R e p o r t   2 0 1 4 :   A r c h i v e s   E d i t i o n

 

 

DAVID COPE

 

 

Building the Beat Canon

 

The Typewriter is Holy:  the complete uncensored history of the Beat Generation.

by Bill Morgan.  New York:  Simon & Schuster, 2010. 

 

Bill Morgan’s The Typewriter is Holy:  the complete uncensored history of the Beat

Generation has been, for those of us who knew them, a distinct pleasure.  One revisits a

vast hoard of memories gleaned from the writers’ books, from casual yakking with Allen,

Gary, Joanne, Anne Waldman, Corso, Jack Micheline, Peter, et al, from their books and

from study of ancillary volumes ranging from those by Ann Charters, Joyce Johnson,

even such early books as Parkinson’s A Casebook on the Beat or The Beat Scene, ed.

Wilentz.  The great virtue is that Bill has carefully placed them on a timeline which

shows the gradual process of their lives in great detail and in context. 

 

While reading, I also thought long and hard about how the book could provide a better

foundation for those who know little or nothing about the beat revolution, as well as for

those younger poets imitating the supposed mannerisms and ethos (to the extent that they

could grasp it) of being “hip.”  Bill has done an admirable job of showing the agonies, the

confrontations with themselves and with a world gone mad which characterize the

writers’ journeys, and perhaps this will do something to raise the consciousness of those

who’ve confused a carefully constructed pose with the harrowing journeys these poets

and writers took.

 

Although I’d take issue with the claim that the beats “did not represent a genuine literary

movement,” as stated in Simon & Schuster’s blurb for the book, I appreciate the

emphasis on their social networking as part of their development as writers.  As one who

grew up in that Postbeat group that began with Allen’s blessings, I myself know this

aspect of the writer’s life in thirty years of friendships borne of those early meetings.  I

would thus caution against any claim that “the beats were not a literary movement . . . but

a social group.”  Just as with the English dramatists and poets of the Elizabethan age, the

romantics, American transcendentalists, Pound and the high modernists or Williams and

the objectivists, all great movements in literature—including the beats—inevitably

involve a convergence of social friendships and the dialogues that lead to changes in the

art.  Further, the diversity of their styles and approaches to writing does not negate the

genuine quality of a literary movement:  who would ever mistake writings by Percy

Shelley with those of Coleridge or Wordsworth?  Or Whitman for Emerson, Thoreau,

Margaret Fuller or Hawthorne?

 

Thankfully, Bill has avoided this either/or in his book, emphasizing the personal struggles—

and the evolving nature—of their friendships while connecting their interactions to

changes in the work itself.  I was particularly interested in the rift between Burroughs and

Allen re cutups vs. poetry, or Kerouac’s constant struggle to delineate his methods even

as he began the tragic process of withdrawal from the others. 

 

Finally, as an old Shakespearean, I am acutely aware that in preserving and canonizing

writers’ works for future generations, there must be new editions, quality scholarly

activity that presents new information, critiques a propos to the time, as well as an ever

renewing dedicated readership for the work—usually developed through the works’

presence in academic study, publication or continued performance.  While there has been

a resurgence of interest in the beats on many levels, I credit Bill Morgan as a one-man

canon maker for the ways he has ferreted out biographical and critically important details

for future scholars and those who will want to know everything about the writers to

whom they dedicate their professional lives.  Just as the cultural and biographical essays

at the front of Nicholas Rowe’s 1709 edition of Shakespeare began the process that

would eventually lead to Malone’s magisterial work later in that century—the necessary

foundation for later critical ventures dedicated to the bard—so too, Bill Morgan is doing

much the same thing for the beats.   Thus, I end with deepest gratitude for making these

books available for those future scholars and “adolescent farmboys opening book covers

with ruddy hands” in Kansas and elsewhere, who will find a light they had not previously

seen in their lives, as we did.

 

 

[Originally published in NHS 2010, http://www.poetspath.com/napalm/nhs10/index.html.]