From Our Own

For nearly 40 years John Tytell has been at the forefront of Beat Studies, a field that he helped to define with his seminal 1976 account, Naked Angels: Lives and Literature of the Beat. Since then, Tytell has published, Paradise Outlaws: Remembering the Beats (1999) a photo-text collaboration with his wife, Mellon, and most recently, The Beat Interviews (2014). As an academic, but one who encountered many of the Beats, Tytell is uniquely placed as a witness, but also as critic and a chronicler of the counter-cultural movement.

In Writing Beat and Other Occasions of Literary Mayhem, a collection of seventeen interconnected essays, Tytell meditates on the challenges facing non-fiction on his experiences as a literary historian. He is concerned with “the way the spoken word can become the launching pad for an essay…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.” Tytell describes Writing Beat as “a hybrid memoir,” a work that “begins with the heartbeat of my experiences and focuses on what I have learned about the nature of writing,” and this blend of anecdote and criticism largely succeeds as a work that is both “anecdotal and instructive.”

Part 1, “Engagement,” focuses on writing, editing and lecturing. In “How to Write an Essay,” Tytell is careful to avoid sounding “arch, dogmatic, presumptuous, or sententious.” Tytell rather wears his erudition lightly, which is energised by the brio of his prose, illustrated by a reading of the beginning of On the Road (1957) where Tytell describes the invented word “dingledodies” as “like slaphappy, Harpo Marx in a tub of whipped cream.” There are entertaining anecdotes about meeting Anaïs Nin at a party, getting drunk with Lucien Carr, a central figure in the inner circle of the Beats in 1940s New York City, and an account of tracking down and then working with Olga Rudge, Ezra Pound’s long-term mistress. In the midst of these engaging chapters Tytell lightly scatters knowledge and insight about a wide range of writers and literary movements, as well as anecdotes about his neighbourhood that are surprising and intimate. At Queens College, where he has taught for over fifty years, Tytell is aware that to some students he is “a hoary fossil” but his commitment to reading and intellectual rigour is fresh, compelling and vital.

In part two, “Reconsidering the Beats,” the book’s most engaging section, Tytell includes a mixture of new and previously published pieces on the Beat Generation. In “Two Notes on Beat Origins,” Tytell explores the origins of the term “Beat,” a term appropriated by the media and frequently elided with “hip” and “cool.” As Tytell explains, “The problem of using hip as a handle …is that the Beats were more polymath, nurtured also by such uncool passions as Buddhism and the political awareness that caused Ginsberg to organize the protests against the Vietnam War that became the soul of the counterculture.” Tytlell points out that there was nothing “hip or cool” about Carl Solomon, the dedicatee of Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1956), whom Tytell knew for several decades, despite his long association with the Beats.

In “The Traveling Writing: Beat Mexico,” one of the book’s most perceptive chapters, Tytell considers the Beats’ fascination with Mexico, including observations about how “Kerouac’s idealizations of Mexican life irritated Burroughs,” who reprimanded the younger writer’s romanticization of Mexico, “which is not simple or gay or idyllic.” In “Kerouac’s Music,” Tytell considers the enduring appeal of Kerouac, the subject of numerous biographical accounts, which, with the exception of Joyce Johnson’s The Voice is All (2012) “are mostly flawed attempts, limited either by estate prohibitions or inadequate access… or the inability to distinguish the actual from the literary legend or self-perpetuated myth.” One of the strengths of Tytell’s book is his ability to shift from personal recollections with writers such as Ginsberg to contemporary critical reflections. In...