Form Our Own

John Tytell was a Beat scholar before there were Beat scholars. For that reason alone each of the books on the Beat Generation that he continues to publish, more than four decades into a prolific writing career, is worthy of attention. But this is especially true because, beginning with his 1976 Naked Angels: The Lives and Literature of the Beat Generation, the first scholarly book on the subject, Tytell has understood a basic fact that has not stopped escaping the majority of commentators: that Beat writing has considerable literary merit, all the more so for its dynamic engagement with life —life as it is both lived and dreamed, mundanely and ideally. Typical treatments of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Diane Di Prima, Amiri Baraka, Hettie Jones, and Joyce Johnson, among others, present their work as semi- or sub-literate, supposedly fetishizing countercultural life by merely chronicling it in prose or poetry composed too carelessly to yield more than the occasional rough diamond. In Tytell’s picture, the lives and writing of the Beat authors act reciprocally on each other: the authors conduct their lives not so much to have outlandish experiences as to seek time and space to write, and their writing questions the strictures that the modernization and technicization of life place on it. Like the modernists whom Tytell has also examined (he is the author of a much-cited biography of Ezra Pound), the Beats have treated literature as a cultural refuge. However, whereas the modernists may have preserved a notion of high culture as part of that refuge, the Beats have seen literature as an opening to the crudeness, abjection, and marginalization that life in modern society entails. As Tytell has long underscored, wide and deep reading has amounted to a matter of ethics among the Beats, and, contrary to popular image, it has been a part of their obsessive discipline of writing practice.

Though the Beat authors have been endlessly interviewed as a function of the predominant privileging of their lives over their books, Tytell’s The Beat Interviews stands out for its continual insistence on the imbrication of the lives and writing of the authors and for its insights into the way that their lives were lives of writing. The book consists of interviews with Herbert Huncke, John Clellon Holmes, William S. Burroughs, Carl Solomon, and Allen Ginsberg, which Tytell undertook in the 1970s (about whose dates and circumstances he could have been more exact). He follows each with one to two essays, though the relationship between the interviews and the essays isn’t always clear: the latter sometimes repeat information previously given—for example, the entire second page of the Solomon essay rehashes facts from the foregoing interview. But what makes this book distinct—with respect to, say, the remarkable 1999 Paris Review volume Beat Writers at Work—is Tytell’s intimate knowledge of the Beat Generation, both personal and scholarly, which extends to his inclusion of less discussed figures such as Huncke and Solomon. His constantly enthusiastic questioning underscores the importance of writing in their lives. His closeness to these authors is illustrated by the book’s cover photo, taken by noted photographer Mellon Tytell, the author’s wife and collaborator: it is a splendidly era-evoking image of Tytell and Ginsberg sporting prophet’s beards, along with Solomon and Peter Orlovsky (Ginsberg’s longtime companion) that showcases their pride over a late summer tomato harvest.

Detail from cover

Among highlights from the interviews that elucidate the literary character of Beat Generation writing practice are Holmes’s comments on Kerouac’s “exfoliating” sentences in On the Road, one of whose purposes is to tell the truth, in contrast to the “lie” he told in The Town and the City, his studiously drafted and revised first novel—a suggestion that...