In Defense of the Beats

Reading 'On the Road' in 2025

The beats get a lot of hate, which is somewhat fair… There’s a lot to critique in them. On a purely literary level, they usually fall short of the mark: the stand-out novels and poems are not so whole and grand to warrant anything approaching the label of masterpiece. During more progressive times, like the previous decade, they were hated for being unkind: to women, to racial minorities, and so on. Or they were simply mocked for being too boyish, “male,” aggravating in what uncharitable readers saw as their penchant to shallowly namedrop, brag, or pseudo-pontificate. Among the new reactionary right, I have heard them denigrated as “degenerate,” blasphemous, irresponsible—or responsible, for our downfall—and generally at odds with morality. This charge is somewhat true—the conclusions of Jack and Neal’s lives bear it out, Burroughs’ rap sheet was endless, and Ginsberg’s opinions on pedophilia were so revolting that they lead me to agree with Andrea Dworkin on one point.

But I think the beat movement as a literary movement is ultimately defensible. In fact I’ll say their works are responsible for some of the better ideas in fiction over the last half century, Kerouac’s On the Road chief among them.

I think the easiest defense I’d make to a natural-born hater of the beats is that they provide a singularly useful, important service to us in having meticulously detailed the America of the 1940s with a painter’s eye. So much from this period is obscured by the fairy tale of contemporaneous advertisements, Hollywood movies, and posthumous biographies that we never quite get to see what America looked like in its private moments and obscure corners. With the beats we see how similar the Americans of the 40s were to us Americans now, raucousness and all, but also how different, and how surveilled and domesticated we have become.

But a stronger defense can be made on literary merit alone. On the Road flows in a pleasant, exciting way that few books do. Through a combination of charisma and prose technique, it pushes away what is burdensome in storytelling and amplifies what brings joy. Life is made crisper by it. It achieves something more than a story: it renders America as this one big multitudinous ecosystem of organisms and allows the reader to exist within the zoo of motion; because they are freed from the cramped dollhouse-style narration of old novels, they may make their own observations.

At the same time it is not just empirical. While on the one hand the endless descriptions of people and madness in On the Road and in Howl could be accused as all externality, no interiority, this is really not the case, as the countless wanderers of the American expanse are doused in the stream of consciousness of the speaker: we never get a plain landscape, it’s always the landscape as filtered through the manic-ecstatic persona of the viewer, who is accommodating you, stooping down to you in your encumbered cant, lending a hand so you can climb out of it and enjoy the hidden poetry of our present world.

What ever happened to stream of consciousness? One of the holy grails of the high modernist movement was to eschew representation by achieving the presentation of human facticity. It was this feature that lifted the ban on Ulysses in the United States, with the judge deciding that the noble task of revealing conscious experience required a frankness that could not be accused of being merely pornographic. I would say On the Road carried on this tradition, one that was largely interrupted by the silencing of the conscious state by the algorithmic mass culture industry, the same mainstream the beats opposed. With the cessation of consciousness came the subsequent exile of literature to the land of sociological analysis, with the postmodern author as doctor-like character who diagnoses and prescribes a treatment to the period, or the uninspired droll of contemporary “literary fiction” which thinks being true-to-life means being stiff, bitchy, smart, boring.

The beats had no power, no money, no connections, no access to VIP areas. All they had was their group of friends, whom they lauded into high heavens. Their literature works because each respected the other, and they all put in the time to read and to have fascinating experiences worth writing about. See how they present their friend Alan Ansen, renamed “Rollo Greb”:

We found the wild, ecstatic Rollo Greb and spent a night at his house on Long Island. Rollo lives in a nice house with his aunt; when she dies the house is all his. Meanwhile she refuses to comply with any of his wishes and hates his friends. He brought this ragged gang of Dean, Marylou, Ed, and me, and began a roaring party. The woman prowled upstairs; she threatened to call the police. "Oh, shut up, you old bag!" yelled Greb. I wondered how he could live with her like this. He had more books than I've ever seen in all my life—two libraries, two rooms loaded from floor to ceiling around all four walls, and such books as the Apocryphal Something-or-Other in ten volumes. He played Verdi operas and pantomimed them in his pajamas with a great rip down the back. He didn't give a damn about anything. He is a great scholar who goes reeling down the New York waterfront with original seventeenth-century musical manuscripts under his arm, shouting. He crawls like a big spider through the streets. His excitement blew out of his eyes in stabs of fiendish light. He rolled his neck in spastic ecstasy. He lisped, he writhed, he flopped, he moaned, he howled, he fell back in despair. He could hardly get a word out, he was so excited with life. Dean stood before him with head bowed, repeating over and over again, "Yes . . . Yes . . . Yes." He took me into a corner. "That Rollo Greb is the greatest, most wonderful of all. That's what I was trying to tell you—that's what I want to be. I want to be like him. He's never hung-up, he goes every direction, he lets it all out, he knows time, he has nothing to do but rock back and forth. Man, he's the end! You see, if you go like him all the time you'll finally get it."

"Get what?"

"IT! IT! I'll tell you—now no time, we have no time now." Dean rushed back to watch Rollo Greb some more.

Or the legendary introduction of William Burroughs, named “Old Bull Lee”:

It would take all night to tell about Old Bull Lee; let's just say now, he was a teacher, and it may be said that he had every right to teach because he spent all his time learning; and the things he learned were what he considered to be and called "the facts of life," which he learned not only out of necessity but because he wanted to. He dragged his long, thin body around the entire United States and most of Europe and North Africa in his time, only to see what was going on; he married a White Russian countess in Yugoslavia to get her away from the Nazis in the thirties; there are pictures of him with the international cocaine set of the thirties-gangs with wild hair, leaning on one another; there are other pictures of him in a Panama hat, surveying the streets of Algiers; he never saw the White Russian countess again. He was an exterminator in Chicago, a bartender in New York, a summons-server in Newark. In Paris he sat at cafe tables, watching the sullen French faces go by. In Athens he looked up from his ouzo at what he called the ugliest people in the world. In Istanbul he threaded his way through crowds of opium addicts and rug-sellers, looking for the facts. In English hotels he read Spengler and the Marquis de Sade. In Chicago he planned to hold up a Turkish bath, hesitated just for two minutes too long for a drink, and wound up with two dollars and had to make a run for it. He did all these things merely for the experience. Now the final study was the drug habit. He was now in New Orleans, slipping along the streets with shady characters and haunting connection bars. […] He had a set of chains in his room that he said he used with his psychoanalyst; they were experimenting with narcoanalysis and found that Old Bull had seven separate personalities, each growing worse and worse on the way down, till finally he was a raving idiot and had to be restrained with chains. The top personality was an English lord, the bottom the idiot. Halfway he was an old Negro who stood in line, waiting with everyone else, and said, "Some's bastards, some's ain't, that's the score.”

Bull had a sentimental streak about the old days in America, especially 1910, when you could get morphine in a drugstore without prescription and Chinese smoked opium in their evening windows and the country was wild and brawling and free, with abundance and any kind of freedom for everyone. His chief hate was Washington bureaucracy; second to that, liberals; then cops. He spent all his time talking and teaching others. Jane sat at his feet; so did I; so did Dean; and so had Carlo Marx. We'd all learned from him. He was a gray, nondescript-looking fellow you wouldn't notice on the street, unless you looked closer and saw his mad, bony skull with its strange youthfulness—a Kansas minister with exotic, phenomenal fires and mysteries. He had studied medicine in Vienna; had studied anthropology, read everything; and now he was settling to his life's work, which was the study of things themselves: in the streets of life and the night.

It would be a mistake to take their boasts at face value: they had plenty of misery and boredom, but they took it as their mission to deliver energy and enthusiasm as much as we take ours to be outraged or snide. In the face of poverty and the brute facts of modern existence, the beats maintained this earnestness and intense joy at the simplest things—so far from the irony and colossal conceits of contemporary writers. This earnestness is not lame because it is not careful or polite: it is rude and spastic, somewhat criminal, and virile. Take this passage:

"Now this is the first time we've been alone and in a position to talk for years," said Dean. And he talked all night. As in a dream, we were zooming back through sleeping Washington and back in the Virginia wilds, crossing the Appomattox River at daybreak, pulling up at my brother's door at eight A.M. And all this time Dean was tremendously excited about everything he saw, everything he talked about, every detail of every moment that passed. He was out of his mind with real belief. "And of course now no one can tell us that there is no God. We've passed through all forms. You remember, Sal, when I first came to New York and I wanted Chad King to teach me about Nietzsche. You see how long ago? Everything is fine, God exists, we know time. Everything since the Greeks has been predicated wrong. You can't make it with geometry and geometrical systems of thinking. It's all this!" He wrapped his finger in his fist; the car hugged the line straight and true. "And not only that but we both understand that I couldn't have time to explain why I know and you know God exists." At one point I moaned about life's troubles—how poor my family was, how much I wanted to help Lucille, who was also poor and had a daughter. "Troubles, you see, is the generalization-word for what God exists in. The thing is not to get hung-up. My head rings!" he cried, clasping his head. He rushed out of the car like Groucho Marx to get cigarettes—that furious, ground-hugging walk with the coattails flying, except that he had no coattails. "Since Denver, Sal, a lot of things— Oh, the things—I've thought and thought. I used to be in reform school all the time, I was a young punk, asserting myself-stealing cars a psychological expression of my position, hincty to show. All my jail-problems are pretty straight now. As far as I know I shall never be in jail again. The rest is not my fault." We passed a little kid who was throwing stones at the cars in the road.

"Think of it," said Dean. "One day he'll put a stone through a man's windshield and the man will crash and die-all on account of that little kid. You see what I mean? God exists without qualms. As we roll along this way I am positive beyond doubt that everything will be taken care of for us—that even you, as you drive, fearful of the wheel" (I hated to drive and drove carefully)—"the thing will go along of itself and you won't go off the road and I can sleep. Furthermore we know America, we're at home; I can go anywhere in America and get what I want because it's the same in every corner, I know the people, I know what they do. We give and take and go in the incredibly complicated sweetness zigzagging every side." There was nothing clear about the things he said, but what he meant to say was somehow made pure and clear.

They were also courageous, ready to sleep anywhere and work any job so long as it continued to bring them their vaunted freedom. On the Road is closer and truer to ancient literature than much of what is produced by students of the classics. While classicists worship at the feet of literary “artifacts,” draping those “texts” in stately auras and pious tears, beat literature does the unthinkable by enacting their vagabond vitality—it goes to the museum display and lifts the relic out of the glass. The moralist grovels before his heroes of old like they were angels, but this is posthumous whitewashing. Cassady and Kerouac’s reckless abandon shares something in common with the semi-outlaw conquerors who wade like Goya’s Colossus through the epics of Homer and the histories of Romans. If the results are less heroic, it is the fault of human rights law and the atom bomb, not a handful of young men dropped into the pacified world of FDR and the United Nations.

They made the literature wherever they went. They did not need an explosive plot, they provided one themselves by saying “Yes!” to every suggestion and forcing each night to its apex. Such writing could easily turn out poor if done by a lazy author who relies on shock and celebrity, or endless self-aggrandizement, but Kerouac always surprises with his strong writing and creative vocabulary, his natural instinct for the poetic gesture of word. Like this description of the Mississippi River:

On rails we leaned and looked at the great brown father of waters rolling down from mid-America like the torrent of broken souls——bearing Montana logs and Dakota muds and Iowa-vales and every cundrum clear to Three Forks where the secret began in ice. Smoky New Orleans receded on one side; old sleepy Algiers with its warped woodsides bumped us on the other.

Or this:

We had to make Frisco. The golden goal loomed ahead. Neal Louanne and I leaned forward in the front, all alone again, and zoomed. It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late after­noon of time. “There she blows!” yelled Neal.

It is a literature that is both rich poetically and monstrously simple, and can be practiced anywhere, in any age. If one’s issue is that they are too sophomoric, or too overfocused on mysticism or jazz or poverty or any dimension in particular, that is fine; the genre welcomes the injection of new material and tastes. But see to it that you do not kill the enthusiasm with your learning, and eradicate the simple, gentle, universal humanity with your niche culture, erudite or ethnic, because the reason this literature works is that it bypasses impersonality and gets to the heart of the poem despite faults—like Whitman, the beats know that the real poetry lies in the excitement of the breaking of routine thoughts, at the outset of adventure, of tender moments shared between humans, of the equal and shared ignorance we have toward to destination of all things.

Kerouac evades his own stereotype in a second way, in that he pokes fun at himself and his traveling companions for their delusions and shortcomings:

She knew Neal had something to be ashamed of, and me too, by virtue of my being with Neal, and Neal and I accepted this sadly. My mother once said the world would never find peace until men fell at their women’s feet and asked for forgiveness. This is true. All over the world, in the jungles of Mexico, in backstreets of Shanghai, in New York cocktail bars, hus­bands are getting drunk while the women stay home with the babies of the everdarkening future. If these men stop the machine and come home—and get on their knees—and ask for forgiveness—and the women bless them—peace will suddenly descend on the earth with a great silence like the inherent silence of the Apocalypse. But Neal knew this, he’d mentioned it many times.

But he always remains confident and honest, never descending into self-effacement.

On the topic of modernism—like Joyce, there is an Aristotelian quality to Kerouac’s writing. “Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot,” Stephen Dedalus says at the opening of Proteus, declaring himself an artist of the real, a cataloger of the actual. The beat novelist uses his eyes to read the world, and parses the lines already there inscribed; he is a naturalist, not a magi, and attunes his senses to the quiet music that’s already here.

Stephen continues: “Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured.” There are signs, sure—it is not just Epicurean chaos, metastasizing cancerous matter—but he does not get caried away into Platonic allegory and spectral bickering. The most high-flung verbiage is only a referent to living, breathing, decaying bodies—"I entreat you, my brothers, remain true to the earth!” I’ve read that when traveling as a Merchant Marine, Kerouac wept at the sight of Ireland, thinking of his hero James, and endeavored to treat Lowell as he treated Dublin and learn Italian like him. He considered On the Road a Ulysses: “On the Road is inspired in its entirety…. I can tell now as I look back on the flood of language. It is like Ulysses and should be treated with the same gravity.”

Perhaps it falls short of Ulysses (many things do), but the point is On the Road could have been written a million different ways, as social documentary, as memoir, coming of age, crime novel, drug literature… and while it does contain all that, the primary characteristic is a Ulysses-like collection of all the disparate ends of experience into one complete artwork: a bulging purple and red river, a heaving bevy of wine and music and vulgarity that breathes life into life when it grows stale and weary; it is inspired without being scholastic or geometrical, true without orthodoxy, transgressive without being evil… it remains one of the best literary achievements of our present world, still dominated as we are by their highways and cars and popular music. I see no path forward for writers of our day that does not include reading and re-reading the beats in search of fun and ammunition.