Book Review: "The Beats: A Very Short Introduction" by David Sterritt

The series of A Very Short Introduction books are always great for learning new things, but they are also great for checking out things you already knew as well. In this one, I investigated the beat poets, a group of people I have met and met again over the course of the last decade and a half (at least). I read my first ever beat poetry book in my late teens and yet, ever since - I have never really been able to get enough of them. I have often fallen in love with the works of Kerouac whilst not really falling as hard for William S. Burroughs' novels.

I have enjoyed the poetry by this group of misfits but have had to admit that they were essentially and massively flawed as human beings. If there was any time you needed to separate the art from the artist in literature's 20th century history - it would be here.

First we receive a landscape of America in the 1920s and the 'dirty thirties'. It isn't as great as many would have you believe and some of the oldest beats spent their childhoods wading carefully through this new America - a post-war crisis of youth painting its picture slowly but surely. Ernest Hemingway writes for the 'lost generation' and as the beats grow, we see yet another military expedition in to the second world war, one that would leave more youth even more lost.

Many of the beats would serve in the military for small stints of time, my own favourite book by Kerouac is a collected work published over thirty years after his death called The Sea is My Brother. It's about his months in the navy. It didn't go well to say the least. But the 50s post-war landscape is even more interesting. Every corporation admits that sex sells but nobody wants to accept it into mainstream culture. Everyone's on valium, but nobody wants to talk about drugs. A Neo-Victorian era is born. One built on the back of the nuclear family and its deafening lies.

After this, we get a better look into each beat as we see them, starting with Kerouac - the king of the beats. These chapters about writers draw on books like The Best Minds of My Generation and of course, Ann Charters' book on the beat writers. Kerouac was a complicated man who took the road less travelled yes, but wherever he was in life, would continue to return to his mother well into his 30s if he was struggling. She was just as bad as he was. They were both heavy drinkers, which would later be the cause of Kerouac's death. One thing we learnt about Kerouac is that he was complex in his writing too - the 'one scroll' method may not have been as spontaneous as we would think. Honestly, I could not take much more of it - it made me feel sad to think that Kerouac was not really the man I thought he was. However, I was aware that in terms of niceties, he was probably not the best person alive. Definitely not one of God's best men. Though I still appreciate the talent. The writer's claims made about the book The Town and the City being known as amateurish hurt me, it is one of my favourite Kerouac books.

Another writer we get to look at is of course, Ginsberg. Allen Ginsberg again, probably wasn't great as a human being - deeply flawed and often involved in questionable groups even if he did claim it was only for discussion - he was in deep with the weirder side of life. Again, this chapter concentrates somewhat on Ginsberg's relationship with his left-wing mother and how her death impacted him so much that he wrote the poem Kaddish about her. The chapter details Ginsberg's relationships and the way in which he wrote - obviously he lived longer than most beats but the main ideas in this section of the book deal predominately with his output. However, it doesn't shy away from Ginsberg getting arrested, ending up in an institution and building up from there.

Of course one of the more controversial writers this book covers is William S. Burroughs. I've often had difficulty with Burroughs' works because I sometimes find them disconnected and shallow. It's almost like it is shock value for shock value's sake. However, there are a few of his books that have made me think differently about the social landscape back then, especially concerning Burroughs himself when it came to shooting his wife dead in a game of William Tell. I enjoyed the writer's perspective on this event; he backs away from moralising it and focuses on how it changed Burroughs in his writings. It definitely made his work darker and more unhinged.

There are plenty of other people in this book and more than that when it comes to things going on. We don't have time to cover murder here, but there's one in this book. I love reading books about the beat poets because they are the one group of writers from the 20th century where you can accept that they were great writers whilst also accepting the fact that you would not like to be left alone with any of these people under any circumstances ever.