Political Dreamspace

This delightful incursion into Beat studies opens entirely new territory through its examination of Beat writers' treatment of Castro's revolution in Cuba. The window of promise for a sexual and literary paradise was briefer than that promised in the early dawn of the Soviet Union, and its eclipse just as thorough, with Castro declaiming the end of the avant-garde when he turned to the Soviet Union for political alliance. The Cuban revolutionaries had gained control of the island in January 1959, and by mid-1961, the clampdown was complete. Todd F. Tietchen nevertheless posits that Cuba represented a "political dreamspace" that achieved a significant alteration of the American imaginary, many of whose ideas "remain on the table today."

The tiny sliver of time in which Castro's Cuba was not a police state produced cultural journals and meetings between North and South American writers in Havana that would have a lasting impact on some Beat writers, notably Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. On the other hand, Jack Kerouac had already aligned himself with William F. Buckley and Senator Joseph McCarthy, and openly scorned the Cuban revolution. Gregory Corso (barely mentioned in the book) published a poem in 1959's Long Live Man entitled "Upon My Refusal to Herald Cuba," a contrarian stand that alienated his erstwhile publisher Ferlinghetti. Corso writes in his poem, "Best to tease all sides with awakening vibrations." William S. Burroughs, generally configured as the fourth of the top four Beat writers, had little to do with Cuba, spending the years described on the lam from a Mexican murder charge preoccupied with Reichian orgone boxes, sex with underage boys, and heroin.

The argument of Tietchen's study is a reconceptualization of Beat writers so as to shrink the biographical reading of their work, and to refocus on a political reading. Simultaneously, Tietchen broadens the category of Beat writers to bring in numerous political "writers" whose work has never been previously described as Beat. This has the potential benefit of enlarging our understanding of the Beat milieu. Tietchen reevaluates writers such as Harold Cruse, a failed playwright who lived in Greenwich Village, as a Beat, and devotes a twenty-page chapter to this figure. Cruse had dropped out of the Communist party, briefly praised Beat writers, writing political essays (rather than poetry or fiction) in militant little magazines collected in titles such as The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967). Amiri Baraka, another black literary meteor, arguably a true Beat writer by dint of his strained, but lifelong affiliation with Ginsberg, has a chapter devoted to his trip to Cuba, and its effect on his work. Baraka did write poetry, much of it good. Yet another black figure named Robert Williams is the subject of some twenty additional pages. Williams engaged in gun battles with police in Monroe, North Carolina, and is shoehorned into the book, as an ostensible Beat. While Williams's career is fascinating (he fled to Cuba after a gun battle, trailed by the FBI, and broadcasted by radio there into southern Florida with Castro's permission), but it is hard to see him as a Beat. Williams had seemingly no literary aspirations—and was a kind of Ezra Pound of the left without the poetry. His one surviving volume (89 pages, dictated to a journalist) is entitled Negroes with Guns (1961). Scholar Tietchen writes from within a political rubric that he describes as motivated by "strangeness," and one admires the strangeness of his collection of newly minted "Beat" writers. Tietchen widens the scope of what it means to be Beat by including almost anyone and everyone of various American outsider groups that converged on Greenwich Village and San Francisco—escaping the suburbs "to seek out less inhibited (or 'stranger') forms of cultural, social, and intellectual life," and sees them as united in their (mis-?)perception of Cuba as an island utopia.

What defined the Beat generation, in reality, was not their politics or any particular interest in Cuba. (Beat writers can...