Like many people writing this week, I used to love the Beats. At about 14 my friend and I would sit at the back of the school bus, eyes edgily climbing over the copy of Naked Lunch to stare down any un-hip fool that would look back and sneer at someone reading a book. We devoured all the Ginsberg, Kerouac, and just about anyone that ever coughed out a book and visited City Lights. I bought a rare and overpriced CD of Kurt Cobain playing guitar to a voice recording of Burroughs. I used Levi Asher's Literary Kicks website and found out about the back row Beats that came about later, people like Jim Carroll, Richard Brautigan and the radical publisher and artist DA Levy . Occasionally my friends and I would email Asher for more information on someone and he always kindly helped these irritating Mancunian teens as much as he could.
English had been taught at our school by an absurd parody of an olde snob who could tell us, without wincing, that "Hamlet was Shakespeare's very flawed masterpiece. Let me point out where it falls down." He found Kerouac and co to be Bad Writing. We took that to mean that it was just too damn subversive and The Man simply couldn't take it. We delightedly delved into them ever more eagerly.
The problem was that the Beats kept on foolishly introducing me to people much better than themselves. The old Russians, Joyce, Eliot. I started to read books to enjoy them and realised, with much reluctance, that I may have been ploughing through the Beats more to sneer at the back of the school bus than just to enjoy them. The final straw came when reading a biography of Kerouac which may have been (it was a long time ago) by Barry Miles. Unintentionally, the king of the Beats, as drawn by Miles, became, well, a bit of a twerp. Each book he wrote, he would tell everybody, was going to be the prose Waste Land or Ulysses times 10 - but it always ended up being about people getting drunk at a party and moving to a little Enid Blyton gang hut. It was the moment when his anti-Semitic mother told him to stop seeing that Jewish boy Ginsberg or she would cut off his allowance that definitely ended the affair for me.
And so, again like many people writing this week, I haven't read much work by the Beats lately besides the odd leaf through Ginsberg and an occasional peak at the ever wonderful and eccentric collection of short stories, Revenge of the Lawn. But there is one poem by the old gang I have never stopped appreciating; Gregory Corso's Marriage.
The poem is a celebration and mockery of the Beat world, and of the impulse of everyone to destroy the safe world they inhabit which, ultimately, they know they will never do. It pretty much sums up the situation every adolescent Beat fan finds themselves in while sat mournfully in a school room.
He imagines the small rebellions he would perform should he find himself in the suburban world: "And when the milkman comes leave him a note in the bottle/ Penguin dust, bring me penguin dust, I want penguin dust"; "Like sneaking into Mr Jones' house late at night/ and cover his golf clubs with 1920 Norwegian books," or, when he threatens "hanging a picture of Rimbaud on the lawnmower". A hilariously pathetic rebellion, I still think I will have to do that should I ever have a lawn to require the purchase of the mower.
Such acts of minor surrealism would keep him sane, like a first year university student having their final fling with a beard and dreadlock combo after a year backpacking that they thought would be a lifetime. The poem playfully acknowledges what the rest of the Beat oeuvre so rarely did: that they were a bunch of intelligent young men refusing to grow up. He imagines what would happen if he did, each life played by a different wife: suburbia, city poor and city literati. None seem to satisfy, so he will continue with his handful of "scroungy and bearded" friends until, as his mother told him, the right girl comes along.
It's a poem often neglected by collections, even Beat collections, but the late Ian Hamilton put it in his great, if occasionally grumpy, final book Against Oblivion where, unlike with ee cummings and (insanely on Hamilton's part) Stevie Smith, he found it a treat.
