the Beatniks and the Hippies
Click for the introduction to this series: “The Roots of the Hippie Idea.”
Click for “Whitman and Thoreau and the Hippies.”
On the left in the above photograph is Ken Kesey. Kesey was an ace novelist. But he also was, in the mid-1960s, an early LSD afficionado, and the leader of the Merry Pranksters and San Francisco’s exuberant “Acid Tests.” The original brightly painted, used school bus journeyed from San Francisco to New York in 1964, with Ken Kesey as its captain.
Kesey is also. the star of the best book written about the hippies: Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Along with LSD guru Timothy Leary (whom Kesey and his bus visited in New York), and Jerry Garcia (whose band gained renown at Kesey’s Acid Tests), Kesey would have had a claim on the designation, if there were such a thing: Hippie # 1.
But my point here is that on the right in the above photograph, standing next to Ken Kesey, is a remarkably strong link between the hippies and their precursors, the beatniks: Neal Cassady.
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The “beat” came from beaten down and/or the beat of a jazz song. Beatitude might have been lurking in there too. Jack Kerouac referred to the “beat generation” as early as 1948.
“Nik” is a Russian suffix that found its way into the mouths of much of humankind as half of the name of the earth’s first artificial satellite: Sputnik, launched in 1957. Beat was first mated with nik by an influential San Francisco Chronicle columnist, Herb Caen, in 1957, in a description of some “bearded cats and kits” “slopping up” free booze at a party.
Neal Cassady (on the left on this book cover) drove the car in which Jack Kerouac rode not long after the end of World War II in that seminal Beatnik book, On the Road. His name was changed to Dean Moriarty when the memoir became a novel. Indeed, Neal Cassady, apparently, slept with the man who, along with Kerouac, would have the best claim to the designation Beatnik # 1, Allen Ginsburg.
So Neal Cassady—a stream-of-consciousness talker and notorious wild man—was smack dab at the center of the Beatnik legend in the second half of the 1950s. Then, a decade and a half later Neal Cassady—still non-stop talking and still skillfully if aggressively driving—appeared at the center of the Hippie legend.
For beatnik Neal Cassady drove that brightly painted used school bus that transported hippie Kesey and his Merry Pranksters from San Francisco to visit Leary in New York.
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If we were to 23andMe the hippies, the beatniks would appear as a (young) parent or an (older) sibling.
The suddenly prosperous United States after the Second World War was gripped by a conservative, 9-to-5, pre-pill, virgin-until-wedding-night, straight-in-all-senses-of-that-word, cultural conformism: narrow-tie, jacket, tight plastered- down hair for men; skirt, curled and sprayed-in-place hair for women.
The beatniks, at least Allen Ginsberg, borrowed an openness, a sensitivity, a sexuality and a scruffy look, from Walt Whitman, and an individualism and pacifist stance from Henry David Thoreau.
The beatniks were also beholden to European bohemian culture and to Camus, Sartre and Beauvoir'’s crowd in Paris.
Jean-Paul Sartre and Simon de Beauvoir out, as usual, with friends in Paris.
And the beatniks took it upon themselves to initiate an assault on all the phoniness, uptightness, intolerance, racism and restrictiveness of the suddenly triumphant, wealthy and self-satisfied United States.
They refused, in particular, to blend in: with their (very European) black berets, turtlenecks and goatees; with their bobbed hair and tight skirts or even slacks; with their mad 3 a.m. conversations; with their wine and cigarettes and getting laid and jazz.
The hippies, though differently attired, would continue that assault.
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The beatniks initially orbited Columbia University but—upon reaching escape velocity—made their way south to Greenwich Village and west to San Francisco’s North Beach, near the bars and the wharfs and the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Light’s bookstore. The hippies congregated in the low-rent Lower East Side and in San Francisco’s similarly scruffy Haight-Ashbury district.
The hippies inherited marijuana (referred to then as “grass,” not “weed”) from the beatniks, but moved beyond marijuana’s cerebral pleasures to mind-rearranging LSD.
The beatniks dug jazz and its cool and in-the-moment improvisations. The hippies grooved on rock and its fire and its electrifying electric-guitar solos.
Beatniks said “cool”—indeed, along with the jazzmen, they may have pioneered use of this most popular, long-lived and understated of compliments. Hippies—never much for understatement—proclaimed, with childlike, open-mouthed joy, “wow.”
The hippies inherited an interest in Eastern religion, in particular Buddhism, from the Beatniks, in particular Ginsberg, Kerouac and the poet Gary Snyder. Kerouac’s second novel, The Dharma Bums, includes a character based on Snyder and is full of talk of Buddhism.
The beatniks hiked the mountains and wrote poems about their summer jobs as “fire spotters” out west. The hippies set off for Vermont or Mendocino in an effort to “get back to the land.” They started communes—filled with “dudes” and “chicks”—which then, as communes do, failed.
Most of the best-known beatniks were male. Ditto for the hippies. Women often cooked and cleaned in those communes, and had to struggle to obtain a share of the decision-making power.
Beatniks were mostly white. Same with the hippies. Both groups did, however, worship Black musicians: e.g., the self-possessed Miles Davis for the beatniks; the self-immolating Jimi Hendrix for the hippies.
The beatniks preached and practiced sexual experimentation and openness. The hippies did too—though, for the most part, not same-sex sex and openness. Two of the best-known beatnik authors—Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs—were gay. Both wrote about sex between men. In this area the hippies were less forward looking than their predecessors.
The beatniks often employed a James Joyce-and-Virginia Woolf-influenced, word-drunk, stream-of-consciousness-style writing. The start of Ginsberg’s “Howl”:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix….
Musicians, Bob Dylan in particular, were listening. And the Beatles—John Lennon, in particular—listened to Dylan. Whatever hippies hadn’t spent a ridiculous amount of time immersed in Dylan lyrics had spent it with Beatles lyrics. A forensic analysis would, as a consequence, reveal fragments of beatnik stream of consciousness in many hippie brains.
Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg visiting Jack Kerouac’s grave.
The beatniks wrote and wrote and wrote: poems, improvisations, lightly fictionalized memoirs, Village Voice articles. The hippies—Kesey, with his two novels, is among the exceptions—were more likely to write a song or a comic book.
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By the time I turned 21, I had read every book by Jack Kerouac.
While traveling to somewhere from somewhere during my Kerouac infatuation, a young boy came up to me and asked, “Are you a hippie?”
I was pleased. It was nice to be suspected of being something at a time when I often did not feel like anything.
And, with my beard and shoulder-length, fly-away hair and patched denim, I certainly did look the part. Moreover, I had credentials: I listened to Country Joe and the Fish. I ate brown rice. I celebrated my twentieth birthday at the Woodstock festival (to which Kesey’s bus made its last journey). I took the drugs hippies took and said, “far out!” with the requisite frequency.
But the life I was leading in those years—when not in class or sleeping through class—was very much a life I had been introduced to in those Kerouac books. He worked on ships; I got a job on a ship. He drove across the country; I drove across the country, multiple times. He hopped freight trains; uh, I got as far as a railyard in Colorado. And I wrote one-draft narratives and poems.
What this hippie was apparently trying to be was a beatnik.