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Beatniks

Beatniks were the forerunners of the hippies. Maynard G. Krebs was the famous beatnik on TV's "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis" from the early 1960s. The strange but lovable Maynard G. Krebs entered millions of American homes weekly via "Dobie Gillis". Maynard G. Krebs, the beatnik on the Dobie Gillis show who reacted to the ugly thought of working by shouting “Work!”, was played by Bob Denver, later Gilligan. Dobie is caught between the conventional values of his father [ Mr.G ] and his corner grocery store and the rich kid - Chatsworth Osborne Jr. - and Maynard's unconventional values. Maynard became the inspiration for the generation of the 1960s.

The typical Hollywood treatment of the bohemian of the 1950s contained a "square," i.e., a "normal" person, who founds himself in a smoky tomb-like cafe featur1ng the props necessary to represent a "beatnik scene:" expresso coffee, unwashed, bearded men wearing sweatshirts, dungarees, and sneakers accompanied by classic beatnik. "chicks" [female bohemians] with long, straight hair, an abundance of dark eye shadow, perhaps sunglasses, and, of course, they are clad entirely in black. Without fail, the center of activity would be a touseled-haired young man wearing sunglasses, goatee, beret, or some other suitable badge of eccentricity. This bard would be shouting unintelligible poetry against the equally unintelligible rhythms of a beatnik bongo.

John Clellon Holmes, who, among other accomplishments, popularized the term beat in a New York Times Magazine article in 1952 called “This Is the Beat Generation.” (Five years later, after Sputnik, Herb Caen tweaked the term by adding the Russian suffix -nik.) The Beats were situated within 1950s consensus ideology, not only as social critics but as highly “visible” icons within it.

The Beats, as in beaten down and beatific, were a collective of writers, artists and thinkers that congregated in 1950s San Francisco. The “Beatnik” satirized in films and television was the embodiment of disaffected youth, “mad to be saved” but mired in social contradictions. Maynard G. Krebs on television’s Dobie Gillis was the schlemiel version; James Dean in Rebel without a Cause was the romantic variation. Sensationalist films like Bucket of Blood or The Beat Generation used a Beat character to harness social anxieties about sexual and youthful energy, while supporting a consensus narrative that could endorse larger American Cold War ideals.

Greenwich Village was a beatnik enclave popular with artists. Bohemians and Beatniks congregated in South Village's famous cafes and a flourishing off-Broadway scene developed in its small theaters. At the end of World War II and into the 1950s the South Village experienced a large infusion of people looking for acceptance for their alternate points of view. This period marked the arrival of Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso, and other writers of the Beat Generation. They met and worked in Village bars and coffeehouses. Greenwich Village at that time, however, was too expensive for most of them to actually live there.

Many of their favorite hangouts were in the South Village, including the San Remo Café, 93 MacDougal Street/189 Bleecker Street, and Minetta Tavern, 111 MacDougal Street, where they would discuss their views on creating a new society, one which would move “away from hypocrisy toward honesty, truthfulness, and, they hoped, a new spirituality.” Aided by drugs and alcohol, these young writers lived hard, intense lives, spending long nights at establishments such as the San Remo with other artists, such as James Agee, Larry Rivers, Paul Goodman, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, W. H. Auden, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline. Their writings evidenced that Greenwich Village was still a location for those who followed a different path.

As more people read or heard about what happened there, the South Village “began to fill with Weekend Beatniks,” although the people for whom that term was coined had long since moved on to other localities. By 1958, the Village had many such tourists. Although cartoons of people wearing beards and berets appeared in establishment publications, and documentaries were produced on TV and in magazines, the original “Beat” period had long since ended.

Norman Mailer defined the hipster as white Negro. The word "cool" is, according to linguistic anthropologist Robert L. Moore, the most popular slang term of approval in English. Cool is urban; it is strongly associated with jazz; and it has something to do with race.

Starting in 1938, Cab Calloway began publishing his “Hepster’s Dictionary,” a pamphlet explaining that “jive talk is now an everyday part of the English language. Its usage is now accepted in the movies, on the stage, and in the song products of Tin Pan Alley.” To be unhep was to be “not wise to the jive, said of an icky, a Jeff, a square.” A square was an “unhep person (see icky; Jeff).” And an icky was “one who is not hip, a stupid person.”

The personification of cool, however, continued to be the hipster. Norman Mailer, a close reader of Anatole Broyard, was clearly influenced by Broyard’s essays on the subject, but made the connection to black culture even more explicit in “The White Negro.” Mailer’s essay is a manifesto of sorts, against conformity, against large organizations, modern society, squares, and anyone else helping to uphold the big lie of American life. He spoke for those who, having lived through World War II, now understood that all could die at any second. Humanity had proven itself a great collective murderer, and the modern state was its greatest weapon. White people, Mailer tried to show, were thus forced into the condition of black people who had lived “on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries.”

Pleasure-seeking freed the hipster from the expectations of square society, but it’s a cheerless sort of hedonism. “To be cool is to be equipped,” wrote Mailer, “and if you are equipped it is more difficult for the next cat who comes along to put you down.” James Baldwin did not appreciate the way Mailer eroticized black people, considered the essay “downright impenetrable.”

For Leroi Jones (aka Amiri Baraka) to be cool was to be “calm, even unimpressed, by what horror the world might daily propose.” Cool was a quietly rebellious response to the history of slavery and post-Civil War injustices.

Hollywood “B” films that portray the Beat hipster with de rigueur bongo drums, coffee houses, and poetry read to jazz. Coffeehouses gained the reputation of being friendlier, less edgy places than the jazz clubs and beat poetry bars that preceded them. Part of this was due to the lack of liquor and, at least early on, of drugs—certainly hard drugs. Their “cleaner” image allowed coffeehouses to attract younger, more middle class audiences. However, like in the earlier jazz and beat poetry clubs, patrons were expected to listen to the performers – not talk over them or dance around them.

And like their beat predecessors, coffeehouses were also thought to be liberal-leaning, slightly “bohemian” places. The connection between folk music and progressive “message music,” which was already present in urban folk revival circles during the 1930s and 40s, found a welcome home in the coffeehouses of the 1950s.

By the late 1950s and 60s, many of the folk music coffeehouses springing up across America were on or near college campuses. There, they benefited from being liquor-free and from their aspirational messaging—as well as a growing academic interest in American folklore and traditional culture.

Moreover, even before the Kingston Trio’s 1958 megahit “Tom Dooley” inspired the commercial folk boom, coffeehouses were ‘hip.’ They were places that challenged the conservative blandness of Eisenhower’s 1950s America. Especially for many younger Americans, folk music was their rebellion against middle class life. Where else could middle-class kids from suburbia talk to African American sharecroppers from Mississippi or mountaineers from Appalachia about the powerful music that they all loved?

The Beat Museum pays homage to the literary movement that gave birth to On the Road. Located---where else?---in San Francisco, the museum is part bookstore, part history lesson, featuring memorabilia dealing with Beat writers such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Neal Cassady. For an added Beatnik bonus, head across the street to the City Lights Bookstore, whose owner published Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems in 1956. Howl's publication later led to an obscenity lawsuit, which helped cement the work's place in history.