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How Special Collections archival holdings tell the story of our time

Journal of beat poet Holmes recalls friendship, death of Jack Kerouac

Beat. The word was once used by African-Americans to mean exhausted and broke, and by jazz musicians and hustlers to describe being down and out. Being beat, the poet Allen Ginsberg once said, meant being "exhausted, at the bottom of the world, looking up or out, sleepless, wide-eyed, perceptive, rejected by society, on your own, streetwise."

	Jack Kerouac. Photo from the John Clellon Holmes Collection

In 1949, novelist Jack Kerouac coined the term beat generation; the phrase became freighted with meaning for American culture. And it acquired glamour. The black jazzman's word for the broken and defeated was appropriated by young white boys with an attitude -- a close circle of writing friends that included Kerouac, poet Allen Ginsberg, author William S. Burroughs II, and poet-novelist John Clellon Holmes. It was in a conversation with Holmes, whose journal is in Special Collections, that Kerouac came up with the phrase beat generation; it is because of Holmes that Americans learned what the beat generation was all about, even though beat writer Holmes never achieved the popularity enjoyed by the others.

Holmes felt that Kerouac's stories "seemed to be describing a new sort of stance toward reality, behind which a new sort of consciousness lay," and he urged Kerouac to try to define it in a phrase or two.

"Holmes and I were sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the Lost Generation's subsequent existentialism," Kerouac said in an interview with Playboy in June 1959. "And I said, 'You know, this is really a beat generation,' and he [Holmes] leapt up and said, 'That's it, that's right!'"
Holmes took notes during that conversation with Kerouac and published the conversation 18 years later in his book Nothing More to Declare (1967):

Holmes (1926-1988) met Kerouac in 1948 while both were attending Columbia University. He had begun publishing his poetry and had written The Daybreak Boys, which was later retitled Go (1952). Unlike some of the other literary beat figures, Holmes was not into drugs or drinking. But he was interested in the literary movement he and his fellow writers were generating and became well-known for his article "This Is the Beat Generation," published in the New York Times Magazine on November 16, 1952:

By 1952, thanks to Holmes, the term beat began to appear in the mainstream, and San Francisco became the hub of the movement. In 1957, Kerouac's On the Road, which had existed in manuscript form for a decade, finally hit the streets. A subset of beat included the hobo, the traveling man, and the train jumper. One thing all the beats were addicted to was motion -- motion anywhere: Route 66, Mexico, Tangiers. On the Road was Kerouac's cataloguing of America as it appeared to him from aboard a Greyhound bus or in the passenger seat of a stolen or borrowed car (an earlier car accident had permanently deterred him from ever driving).

The book, which became a testament for the beat generation, brought Kerouac -- now known as the king of the beats -- a fame he could not handle. Playboy, Esquire, Time, Life, and television, as well as hordes of male and female groupies, all wanted a piece of him; he retreated into the blur of alcohol.

Holmes and Kerouac remained close friends until Kerouac's death from alcoholism in 1969, and Holmes' journal entries reveal how devastated he was by the loss of his friend. On October 25, 1969, having returned only a day or so before from Kerouac's funeral, he writes,

The Department of Special Collections at Boston University, located in the Mugar Memorial Library, is one of the largest repositories of documents, memorabilia, and books chronicling the lives and careers of important writers, artists, performers, and public figures of the past century. The collection, which was started in 1963, includes archival material and rare books dating back to the 16th century. Contemporary archives now contain private papers and artifacts of 1,700 notable 20th-century figures.

These vast holdings offer a rich portrait of our time -- a living history as revealed through the accomplishments and passions of the century's great thinkers, politicians, and personalities -- as well as provide a rich source of research material for future articles, dissertations, and books of history and scholarship. Individual collections include manuscripts and typescripts in all states and drafts, galleys, notes, notebooks, journals, diaries, scrapbooks, reviews, photographs, and personal and professional correspondence, as well as various editions of published works.

7 December 2001
Boston University
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