SG: Did you take any pride in being considered such a threat to America?
AG: No. It was a dismay that they were so mean-spirited and lacking in humor and enthusiasm in old American values. What would they do with Walt Whitman? What would they do with Thoreau if they were going to do that with us? They were out of sync with basic American values--Emerson, Thoreau and all that. I thought they were sort of un-American.
Kerouac was all-American if anything. Neal Cassady was an all American kid, foot warts and all. But it really was Americana and Americanist, something in an older literary tradition that runs through Whitman and William Carlos Williams and Sherwood Anderson. There was that old Americanist tradition of recognition of the land and the people and the gawky awkward beauty of the individual eccentric citizen. Or as Kerouac said, "the old-time honesty of gamblers and straw hats." His 1959 [Playboy, June] article on "The Origins of the Beat Generation," that's his statement on what he intended, a kind of yea-saying Americana which was interpreted as some kind of negative complaining by the middle class who were themselves complaining. So yes, we were, or I was quite aware of the [cultural] impact. But so was Kerouac in "Origins of the Beat Generation" and in The Dharma Bums. He predicts a generation of long-haired kids with rucksacks. He predicts and asks for it.
SG: So as you watched this younger, boomer generation in the 1960s, what was your response?
AG: I thought that the spiritual liberation aspect and the artistic purity was being somewhat degraded by the Marxist, SDS, Weatherman strain of politicalization on the basis of rising up angry. Anger was not the answer....
SG: There were a lot of young people calling themselves Beatniks in San Francisco but who did not follow a literary tradition.
AG: I think they were Frankenstein replicas created by the press. Remember, the very word Beatnik is a press invention.
SG: San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen.
AG: He invented it as a denigration. The origin was the time of Sputnik, so it was like, ah, these guys, these Beats are disloyal. Beatnik, that was his intention. He's proud of it, I'm sure, but it really actually added a slightly demeaning element. Also there was a problem that the police were quite malevolent, not only towards the false Beatniks, but also some real poets....
Allen Ginsberg (AG){hippy also. being a jazzbo term for wannabe hipster. so these two American movements, against the insect line, both given derogatory names, both remembered as cartoonish and ineffectual. and there was this twilight band between them I remember, a layer of older kids though they seemed unapproachably grown up to me at the time. twenty five and thirty year old vagabonds in the mid 60's, not 'beatniks' not 'hippies'. and then not there.}
interviewed by Seth Goddard (SG) at life.com
link from randomwalks
