The Beats by Mike Evans
Running Press, £17.99
On the Road: The Original Scroll by Jack Kerouac
Penguin Classics, £25
A COFFEE table book about the Beat generation? The irony contained in such a conceit is so rich you long to know the thoughts of someone like William Burroughs on the venture. His icy disdain would, I suspect, be damning. And yet, once the initial hurdle is overcome, The Beats is an attractive and entertaining volume.
In essence a comprehensive overview of the New America of 1950-1965, the core of the book looks at the work, lives and relationships of the movement’s major figures – Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady and William Burroughs – while not neglecting the involvement of secondary figures such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso and Gary Snyder. There are also suitably respectful mentions of the movement’s elder statesman, Kenneth Rexroth, and of the man credited with coining the term the Beat Generation, John Clellon Holmes.
The Beats goes further by looking at the movement in relation to the immediate post-war culture and brings in figures like Miles Davis, Jackson Pollock and Jean-Paul Sartre. And by placing this in the context of “the American Century” goes on to cite the influences of Walt Whitman, Thomas Wolfe and F Scott Fitzgerald, among others. The cast list grows ever longer, with Norman Mailer, John Cassavetes and DT Suzuki all making appearances, along with Bob Dylan and Charles Bukowski.
Within a coffee table format this broad brush approach pays off as it allows for the inclusion of many glorious photographs and illustrations. There are portraits, intimate snaps, barren landscapes, city postcards, concert posters, book jackets, film posters, LP covers and even a beautiful Greyhound bus advertisement. This is possibly not a book for academics but, with its stunning use of colour, its cheerful tone and its delightfully irrelevant photographs of gas stations, no one else will be disappointed.
The original transcript of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, originally written in 1951 and edited and revised many times before finally being published in 1957, is now available, too. Penguin Classics have, for the first time, produced an uncensored text intended to be as close as possible to the original 1951 scroll.
For the collector, this is a beautiful production; it comes with almost 100 pages of introductory essays and is a serious addition to the bookshelf. For the less committed, however, with 300 paragraph-free pages and with the characters named as written, and thus no Dean Moriarty, no Carlo Marx or Old Bull Lee, and no Sal Paradise, this is a hard read, and you can’t help but be aware of Truman Capote’s waspish remark: “That isn’t writing; it’s typing!”
Paul Spencer-Thompson
