As a youngster I was really into Burroughs. He was presented to me by older people as great writer, a cool artistic sort of person like Andy Warhol or Jackson Pollok, but in the literary sphere. When you’re young you don’t have life experience yet, so if someone gets enough critical praise, you think they must be great. Boy is it hard growing up and realizing that not only does the emperor have no clothes, but the people you idolize are morally, intellectually and artistically bankrupt. I still really adore some of Ginsburg’s poems, there are some real gems in the dross. But Ginsburg was a legit pedo. Kerouac was an overrated drunkard. Burroughs killed his wife and seemed to have little to no remorse, arguably he was a sociopath. As you note, as a group they were horrible people, abusive parents, drunkards, pedophiles, junkies, but for me the most difficult realization was that they were artistic frauds and really not very talented, and even worse, that everything presented to me by authority figures about aesthetics and culture was complete bullshit. But that is the best sort of liberation, and the beats would approve of liberation from the baggage of the past so it sort of goes full circle.
I don't know that they were artistic frauds - perhaps one test for this is how their work lives on in other artists. From that point of view, Burroughs probably lives on in his paranoid way; Kerouac less so; Ginsberg I have no idea. But yes I hear you that if older people in your life handed you this stuff as anything to admire or live by, then the only self-enlivening response is to reject it completely.
It's very odd reading this because, to me, the Beats were never regarded well by authority figures, teachers, or other established credentialiers of literature that you interact with as a kid. They were seen as comic books, video games, etc. Junk for people who like junk.
I think the appeal of them was never that they had great, enviable lives. Ginsberg's famous refrain is that he saw the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness. Doesn't that resonate so much with young people, especially today, who have all the acumen, follow all the rules, and end up priced out of any kind of normal middle class life? Sure it's not the same thing the Beats faced, but isn't the idea of seeing a society from the outside and never being able to join (or for the Beats, wanting to join) isn't that common?
They were talented writers who didn't fit into the times they lived in, and who made choices that made their lives worse (and documented them extensively) and who reached for drink and drugs (and Eastern spirituality) to numb themselves at being in a world which they felt so apart from. How much different is that than many famous writers across many times and places in history?
Agreed with everything you've said, but I'd note that Tom Wolfe is definitely one of the talented ones to come out of that circle.
Ginsberg as you noted also had his moments of literary height. And I can appreciate some of the artistic merits of Burroughs' work as well, though as you note, he was either a sociopath or at least incapable of critical self-reflection in his writing.
On the Road, for whatever reason, was a complete miss for me.
There are others. Ferlingetti as just one example had some great stuff. That was the critical lesson for me: you have to evaluate works by big names with self blinding to the person’s reputation. Real life reviews aren’t that different from yelp. I ask myself, is a work good on its own, not because of who did it or what other people tell you to think or how often you hear the artist’s name referenced. Doing so opens a whole world of beauty and saves you from so much dreck and wasted time. So much is overrated and so much is underrated. There’s a lot to gain by understanding that and then seeking to refine one’s own sensitivity to what is good.
Ferlinghetti was remarkable. He started before the Beats and outlived them all. He said he wasn't a Beat poet but the City Lights Bookstore he co-founded gave them an outlet and a publisher. He published his last novel, Little Boy, when we was 100 years old.
