Holy Fools: The Beat Generation and the Cold War

In August 1957, just two weeks before the publication of On the Road, Esquire asked Jack Kerouac to write an article explaining the "Beat Generation" that his novel would instantly immortalize. "Deceptively light-headed" as the essay might seem, Kerouac told his girlfriend Joyce Johnson, it contained "immense historical forces carefully considered and the 'beat generation' carefully placed therein."¹ Uncannily attuned to the way pop fashions mirror larger shifts in historical reality, Kerouac saw his "true-story novels" as a "contemporary historical record for future times . . . [of] what really happened and what people really thought."² Allen Ginsberg, Kerouac's closest collaborator, brought a showman's instinct for his audience's nerve centers to the Old Testament prophet's role of provocateur, truth-teller, and zeitgeist. His claim in Howl (1956) that his circle of friends, virtually all of them veterans of mental hospitals or jails or both, constituted "the best minds of my generation" struck those supervising the nation's intellectual life at Partisan Review and elsewhere as breathtakingly presumptuous; they perhaps thought that title was best deserved, and certainly best conferred, by themselves. It was also an expression of Ginsberg's gift, as Edmund White has put it, for seeing "his cohorts as instant historical personages"³—catalysts as well as representatives of their age.

The Beats' insistence on "100% honesty," in Kerouac's words, "both psychic and social,"⁴ makes little sense outside its Cold War context and the drastic restrictions of civil liberties that war purportedly mandated. The Beats attempted to declassify human experience, beginning with the male body, in an era that witnessed an unprecedented expansion of classified information; they sought to make spontaneity and deliberate defenselessness supreme virtues at a time when over-militarization and its concomitant creed of preparedness first became U.S. foreign and domestic policy. J. Edgar Hoover declared the "Beatniks" a threat to national security in 1961; but to Ginsberg's mind, if the authorities smeared the Beats—a "relatively innocent" group of writers—as subversive Frankenstein "monsters," then they were probably also lying about everything else, "from the Communists to the radicals to the anarchists."⁵ Kerouac never shared Ginsberg's left-wing politics, but he was dogged, nonetheless, by the specter of the U.S. as an ever-more sinister police state run by the FBI and blinded by "cowardice and hysteria . . . piling up arms and pathological propaganda."⁶ By 1960, he hardly knew who scared him more, the "American-haters" or the "American-lovers."⁷

As Cold War statesmen and politicians reiterated the unfathomably portentous gravity of America's omnivorous crusade against the evil of communism, the Beats pushed back the frontiers of comedy, enrolling their government along with themselves as exhibits in an American funhouse. "It's them bad Russians," Ginsberg warned in mock-alarm in "America." "The Russia's power mad. She wants to take our cars from out our garages!" Ginsberg and Kerouac's mentor, William Burroughs, a virtuoso of black-hearted wit trolling the Cold War wasteland for his jests (he resembled, an observer noted, "T.S. Eliot on smack"⁸), compared the arms race to an imaginary long-ago convention of dinosaurs. Facing extinction with the advent of smaller, nimbler species, the big beasts resolve: "size is the answer . . . increased size . . . (Applause) . . . size will enable us to crush any opposition . . . [and] continue to dominate the planet . . . (Wild Applause.")⁹ The founders of the Beat Generation were at once avant-garde artists and self-conscious social commentators; the most important form they created...