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.]