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not the comrades of the Stewart Cafeteria nor yet of the road,
as Kerouac would disingenuously have it, but pick-ups on dark
morning streets. But they have their connection with us who were
young in the '30's, their intimate political connection, which we deny
at risk of missing what it
is
that makes the "beat" phenomenon
something to think about.
As
they used to say on 14th Street, it
is
no accident, comrades, it is decidedly no accident that today in the
'50's our single overt manifestation of protest takes the wholly non–
political form of a bunch of panic-stricken kids in blue jeans, many
of them publicly homosexual, talking about or taking drugs, assuring
us that they are out of their minds, not responsible, while the liberal
intellectual is convinced that he has no power to control the political
future, the future of the free world, and that therefore he must sub–
mit to what he defines as political necessity. Though of course the
various aspects of a culture must be granted their own autonomous
source and character, the connection between "beat" and respectable
liberal intellectual exists and is not hard to locate: the common need
to deny free will, divest oneself of responsibility and yet stay alive.
The typical liberal intellectual of the '50's, whether he be a writer
for
Partisan Review
or a law school professor or a magazine or news–
paper editor, explains his evolution over the last two decades - spe–
cifically,
his
present attitude toward "co-existence" - by telling us
that he has been forced to accept the unhappy reality of Soviet
strength in an atomic world, and that there is no alternative to capitu–
lation - not that he calls it that - except the extinction of nuclear
war. Even the diplomacy he invokes is not so much flexible, which he
would like to think it is, as disarmed and, hopefully, disarming, an in–
strument of his impulse to surrender rather than of any wish to dom–
inate or even of his professed wish to hold the line. Similarly docile
to culture, the "beat" also contrives a fate by predicating a fate. Like
the respectable established intellectual - or the organization man, or
the suburban matron - against whom he makes his play of protest, he
conceives of himself as incapable of exerting any substantive influence
against the forces that condition
him.
He is made by society, he
cannot make society. He can only stay alive as best he can for as long
as is permitted him. Is it any wonder, then, that
Time
and
Life
write
as they do about the "beats" - with such a conspicuous show of su–
periority, and no hint of fear? These periodicals know what genuine,
