Writing Beat and Other Occasions of Literary Mayhem

John Tytell

Description

The story and history of the Beats couldn't be found in the traditional libraries or archives of academic research. For preeminent historian of Beat culture John Tytell, it had to be found in the bars, towns, roads, and hangouts of these writers and figures. And as Writing Beat demonstrates, the same techniques apply to new and future writers.

Approaching the history of post-war twentieth century American literature, and in particular the Beat literary movement of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and others, Tytell finds himself uniquely positioned as an eyewitness to many of these stories. In this book, he shares his insight with the reader. As he interviewed, drank, traveled, and survived countless moments with some of these literary legends, Tytell discovered much about the craft of nonfiction, biography, and the nature of history. Writing Beat demonstrates, through Tytell's growth as a professor and historian of the Beats, lessons learned and hazards encountered for those aspiring to become writers themselves.

As we approach the sixtieth anniversary of Allen Ginsberg's Howl, Writing Beat reminds us writers do not spring to life fully formed, and the struggle to get to literature can be a blast.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Popular Culture
• Literature
• History of the United States
• American
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Vanderbilt University Press
• Date de parution: 17 novembre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780826520166
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

W riting B eat
W riting B eat
AND OTHER OCCASIONS OF LITERARY MAYHEM
JOHN TYTELL

VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY PRESS
Nashville
© 2014 by John Tytell
All rights reserved
Published 2014 by Vanderbilt University Press
Nashville, Tennessee 37235
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Text and cover design by Rich Hendel
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file
LC control number 2014008056
LC classification number PS228.B6T97 2014
Dewey class number 810.9'0054—dc23
ISBN 978-0-8265-2014-2 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-8265-2015-9 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-8265-2016-6 (ebook)
For my love , MELLON,
who opened all the doors!
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
A Prefatory Note
PART I. ENGAGEMENT
1. How to Write an Essay
2. The Writer as Peeping John: On the Nature of Biographical Inquiry
3. Hemlock or Ambrosia: Writing and Editorial Process
4. Notes of a Peripatetic Lecturer
5. Senator Tripletalk and the American Dream
6. Passing Through: Fifty Years @ the Mind Factory
PART II. RECONSIDERING THE BEATS
7. Two Notes on Beat Origins
8. The Traveling Writer: Beat Mexico
9. Kerouac’s Music
10. Ginsberg Today
11. The Oppositional Writer
12. The Editor as Midwife: Writers and Little Magazines
PART III. THE METAPHYSICS OF WRITING
13. Bombing with Words
14. A Writer’s Retreat
15. Poetic Faith: Religion and the Writer
16. A Writer’s Passage
17. The Donkey and the Written Word
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My greatest appreciation is for my wife, Mellon, who inspired so many of the experiences I describe here and always had her camera ready. Mellon has been my most imaginative, loyal, devoted friend, my most reliable source of warmth and love.
This book began when Jean Tamarin, an editor at the Chronicle of Higher Education , asked me to write a piece about Allen Ginsberg, which now forms part of Chapter 10 in this book. Another point of departure occurred when Jeffrey Di Leo, dean of the humanities at the University of Houston-Victoria, asked me to speak about the editing process—a talk that ended up on YouTube and is presented here in Chapter 3 . Another talk, at the invitation of Daniel Shapiro at the Americas Society, on the Beats in Mexico, stimulated “The Traveling Writer,” part of which appeared in Studies in Latin American Popular Culture . The essay on William Burroughs’s Last Words originated in Bookforum . Yet another segment of this book was initiated by Ivan Dee, who had reprinted a few of my books and who asked me to write about Jack Kerouac’s last years for an online venture called the Now and Then Reader.
I was also led to reconsider the Beats by talks I was invited to deliver by Keith Bollum of the David Turner Warner Foundation in Melrose and Orlando, Florida, and a series of lectures I offered to a graduate seminar at New York University in the fall of 2011. “The Donkey and the Written Word” began as a talk I prepared for the Sigma Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.
Thanks, as well, to David Chapman of the South Carolina Review , to my fellow editors on American Book Review , and to Beat enthusiasts Joyce Johnson, David Amram, Regina Weinreich, Bill Morgan, Peter Hale, Ken Stuart, and Hassan Melehy for good cheer and advice along the way. Jaime Wolf offered valuable contractual advice for which I am grateful. Eli Bortz at Vanderbilt University Press was enthusiastic from the beginning and full of constructive suggestions, as was Jeremy Rehwaldt.
Urge and urge and urge, Always the procreant urge of the world
—Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies—captivating books if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences, that which is really his experience, and how to record truth truly .
—Ralph Waldo Emerson , Journals, January 1841
A PREFATORY NOTE
It’s béat, it’s the beat to keep, it’s the beat of the heart, it’s being beat and down in the world and like oldtime lowdowns and like in ancient civilizations the slave boatmen rowing galleys to a beat and servants spinning pottery to a beat .
—Jack Kerouac , Desolation Angels
The beat may have begun by striking a hollow log whose sound would resonate and echo the need to gather in either an emergency or for some ritual purpose—or, perhaps, to hear the shaman or storyteller chant once again a shared history. That repeated story was the oral history that gave the tribe a central part of its identity. If the storyteller accompanied himself with a lyre, he was our first musician, but in any event this preliminary historian was often also our first poet, and from him we receive the legends of the Norse or Greek gods, sometimes fashioned with the enormous skill of blind Homer, who may, after all, only be an apocryphal figure himself.
I mean “beat” in a more vernacular sense as well. In the way that a foot patrol officer has a particular sector to police in a defined and regulated manner, with the expectations of the community, knowing that behavior is measured by a code. One can see the ramifications of policing in a dozen television programs, and the evolution of its procedurals and demands from Sherlock Holmes to CSI seem manifest. The writer’s beat—both the nature of the work and its procedurals—may be less apparent and certainly less visible as matter for mass media.
I’m also interested here in a more mysterious arena than the police officer’s precinct or the detective’s sleuthing. I’ve written and edited nonfiction for half a century and so I regard that as my “beat,” the territory whose protocol I best understand, whose potential problems and possible dangers I’ve encountered many times, whose changing opportunities I’ve always tried to gauge. The priority of nonfiction has always been to tell the truth as well as the writer can. Although surely this is as much a concern for the writer of fiction, the novelist has been known to be more inventive, to distort deliberately, to magnify or minimize for dramatic effect. The job of the nonfiction writer is different, to discern the truth of what actually occurred through the fog of the past, a past subject to defamation, often reconfigured by polemicists, confused by propaganda, obfuscated by faulty memory, or imagined with the license we afford novelists.
This book focuses on the challenges and perils facing any writer today, but particularly the writer of nonfiction. My subject is the process any writer of nonfiction must consider: the way the spoken word can become the launching pad for an essay, for example, the nature of historical inquiry and biography, the craft and consequences of the interview, or the resistance to revision and the implicit opportunity it affords. Some of the essays in this book focus on perennial issues for the writer: the exotic portal of travel and the more mundane presence of a subject as close as the next barstool, the value of seclusion as opposed to a more journalistic exploration of the culture, and the future of the written word as we know it. These essays depend mostly on the perspective of memoir and as such may be anecdotal and instructive, as well I hope as entertaining. I’m not approaching my subject in any programmatic manner, but as an organic expression of what I have experienced myself in the field of action.
Although I have been able to accept journalistic assignments throughout my career and have experienced a taste of the worlds of film and advertising, I am essentially a literary historian focusing on the lives and creative output of modern American writers, particularly those like Ezra Pound or Henry Miller who have challenged and helped change social and literary conventions. In one sense, to the extent that my subjects—and my own much more modest ambitions—reflect our larger needs and aspirations, I am a social critic as well.
I am also using “beat” in its more narrow literary sense, as it applies to a group of American writers emerging after the Second World War, whose members were called a Beat Generation. Some of these writers, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, or William Burroughs, for example, have been part of my chosen “beat,” and reevaluations of their accomplishments and new discoveries about them may be expected to figure in my narrative.
Finally, this book is what I call a hybrid memoir. It begins with the heartbeat of my own experiences and focuses on what I have learned about the nature of writing. Part of the narcissism of memoir, however, is that the writer gets so caught up in the immediate particularities of recovered experience that the larger context of history and culture is often sacrificed. The vital center of this book, its blood flow, is the social history of the recent past and the legacy of the writers whose lives and literary efforts are reflected here. The crucial element in history—what affords it a future—is how capably its story has been shaped and narrated, but that is surely a judgment best left to the reader.
O ne
E ngagement
CHAPTER 1
HOW TO WRITE AN ESSAY
Reading could lead to a trance of utter lucidity in which, unknown to oneself, one could make the deepest resolutions .
—Henry Miller , Tropic of Capricorn
I don’t wish to sound arch, dogmatic, presumptuous, or sententious, but the chemistry is fundamental: I’ve been