It is a rare but magnificent thing when a group of friends all become successful artists. This was never more prevalent than with a group of young writers called the beats. They were first called the beat by Jack Kerouac , seen as the voice of the generation. They were beat because they were like the energy and beat of free flowing jazz music, they were beat because they were spat out, and they beat because they wandered the streets in search of kicks.
The beats were originally a group of mates that met around various New York campuses. Kerouac shot to fame with his book On the road which chronicled his journey back and forth across America with his best friend Neil Cassady . It was a book he wrote in a frenetic three weeks, using sheets of paper stuck together so he didn't need to stop. He wrote the whole thing in one paragraph using the then legal Benzedrine to keep him going. This book painted a picture of a whole generation of youths that had given up the post war quest for capital and decided to live their lives in the moment.
The rest of the group were all themselves successful. Allen Ginsberg wrote many poems and joined up later with the Hippy movement. His most famous poem Howl described their nomadic life. The first line is a classic..."I saw the best minds of my generation starving, hysterical, naked”, and he was right; these people were the best minds of many generations yet their lives were a mess. William Burroughs was another. He spent a lot of his time in Texas with his wife as a junkie, but he also wrote some amazing books about the hell of heroin addiction, including Naked Lunch . Other lesser known friends included Lawrence Franghetti , Mike McClure and Hal Chase .
The most important I think was Neal Cassady . He hardly wrote a thing...but he was the heart of the group; the mad-capped, live-life-to-the-full, urban cowboy, good looking, wild and super spontaneous hero of so many of his friend's novels. He inspired Ginsberg and Kerouac to write, and they centred their novel on him. Kerouac took his non-stop rapid-paced talk style for his books, which he called spontaneous prose. Neal Cassady was brought up on the street; he learnt the skills of con man and became one of America 's great modern heroes. He was brilliant with women, the centre of every party and an amazing conversationalist. He was a fantastic driver who once stole five hundred cars in a night from Denver , racing them across town, dumping them, stealing another and so on...all in search of kicks. He would later join Ken Kessey on his FURTHER bus across America which advocated the use of LSD. Cassady drove the bus which contained Tom Wolfe, Kessey, The Grateful Dead and various other madman. Wolf wrote a book and the Grateful Dead wrote several songs about Cassady. The Door's Jim Morrison copied the Cassady he had read about in On the Road , mimicking his he he laugh and trying to encapsulate his charisma.
Bob Dylan, The Doors, Bono and other artists and bands proudly proclaim the influence this crazy, drunk, mixed up group of writers had on them. They represent freedom and spontaneity, the lust for life at its most pure, forgetting about the future and just living right now. Thrashing their bodies and minds through endless evenings of booze and drugs and poetry, bouncing the whole time to the sounds of jazz in dingy basements and pool halls of a fifties world long forgotten.
... but their dream of a world of poetry and prose, of wine and talk and sex, of life at its most primal.... will remain forever.
