Beat

“We’re Organ-Donors 

for The Rich —

If We TRY to Play 

like The Yankees in here —

We Will Lose 

to The Yankees

out THERE —

and I HATE to Lose —

I Hate to Lose even more than 

I like to Win.”

“As William Blake wrote at the start of the nineteenth century, ‘For the eye altering, alters all.’ 

Existentialism also flowered in the United States, but American existentialists were considerably more engaged with life than their Irish and French counterparts. Jack Kerouac was an athletic, Catholic-raised writer from Massachusetts. He gained a scholarship to Columbia University on the strength of his American football skills, but dropped out and gravitated to the bohemian underworld of New York City. This subculture inspired his book On the Road, the most famous of all the Beat novels. On the Road was written during an intense three-week period in 1951. It was typed, single spaced and without paragraph breaks, onto a continuous 120-foot-long scroll of paper that had been made by taping together separate sheets of tracing paper. Kerouac hammered away at the typewriter for long hours at a stretch, fuelled by amphetamines and not stopping for food or sleep. The scroll meant that he did not need to stop in order to insert a new page. 

The result was a stream-of-consciousness outpouring of pure enthusiasm which had the rhythms of jazz. It was as if he was constantly ramping up the energy of his prose in order to outpace and escape the nihilism of the world he wrote about. Kerouac’s writings are peppered with references to the Buddhist concept of satori, a mental state in which the individual perceives the true nature of things. The true nature of things, to someone experiencing satori, was very different to the true nature of things as perceived by Sartre or Beckett. 

It was Kerouac who coined the phrase ‘the Beat Generation’. The name arose in conversation with his friend John Clellon Holmes. As he later recalled, ‘[John] and I were sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the Lost Generation and the subsequent existentialism and I said “You know John, this is really a beat generation”; and he leapt up and said, “That’s it, that’s right!’’’ 

Although many people in the underground drug culture of the 1940s and 1950s self-identified as both ‘hipsters’ and ‘Beats’, the term ‘Beat’ has since gained a more specific definition. The phrase ‘Beat Generation’ is now used mainly to refer to the American writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and their muse Neal Cassady. Original nihilistic Beat writers such as Trocchi are left out of this definition. 

There are also attempts to include the American writer William Burroughs in the Beat Generation, despite Burroughs’s unique ability to escape from any category he is placed in. 

This narrowing of focus has led the American poet Gregory Corso to remark ‘Three writers do not a generation make.’ 

Kerouac had originally picked up the word ‘beat’ from a street hustler and junkie who used the term to sum up the experience of having no money or prospects. Kerouac’s imagination latched onto the word because he saw another aspect to it, and one which complemented its original meaning of referring to a societal outcast. 

For Kerouac, the word implied beatitude. 

Beatitude, in Kerouac’s Catholic upbringing, was the state of being spiritually blessed. Shunned outcasts who gain glimpses of grace and rapture are a constant theme of Kerouac’s work, and the word summed this up in one immediate single-syllable blast. The word became attached to the wild, vibrant music that the Beats were so attracted to, and it was this connection to ‘beat music’ that lies behind the name of The Beatles. 

Unlike the more nihilistic European Beats, the American Beat Generation flavoured their version of existentialism with Eastern mysticism. By the middle of the twentieth century a number of Eastern texts had become available in Western translations. Richard Wilhelm’s 1924 German translation of the I Ching was published in English in 1950, for example, and the American anthropologist Walter Evans-Wentz’s 1929 translation of the Bardo Thodol, better known as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, gained widespread attention following its 1960 reissue. 

These texts described a spirituality that differed greatly from the hierarchical monotheistic religions of Judaism and Christianity, with their subservient devotion to a ‘Lord’. They talked about divinity as being something internal rather than external. They viewed spirituality as a matter of individual awareness. 

There are distinct differences in the definitions of words like satori, beatitude, enlightenment, grace, rapture, peak experience or flow, but these terms also have much in common. They all refer to a state of mind achievable in the here and now, rather than in a hypothetical future. They are all concerned with a loss of the ego and an awareness of a connection to something larger than the self. 

They all reveal the act of living to be self-evidently worthwhile. In this they stand in contrast to the current of individualism that coursed through the twentieth century, whose logical outcome was the isolation of the junkies and the nihilism of the existentialists. 

But interest in these states, and indeed experience of them, were not widespread. They were the products of the counterculture and obscure corners of academia, and hence were treated with suspicion, if not hostility. The desire for personal freedom, which individualism had stoked, was not going to go away, especially in a generation that had sacrificed so much in the fight against fascism. 

How could we maintain those freedoms, while avoiding the isolation and nihilism inherent in individualism? Reaching out towards satori or peak experience may have been one answer, but these states were frustratingly elusive and too difficult to achieve to provide a widespread solution. 

The writers of Casablanca had difficulty finding the right ending for the film, but the script they turned in at the last minute created one of the great scenes in cinema. 

It takes place at Casablanca airport during a misty night, and includes a waiting plane, a dead Nazi, and a life-changing decision. Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine makes the decision not to leave Casablanca with Ilsa, the love of his life. 

He instead convinces her to leave with her husband and help him in his work for the Resistance. 

‘I’m no good at being noble,’ he tells her, ‘but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.’ 

This is the moment when he admits that there is something more important than his own individual perspective and desires. Although he previously declared that he stuck his neck out for nobody, he now risks his life and liberty in order to allow the Resistance leader to escape. 

Rick ended the film leaving for a Free France garrison so that he too could fight the good fight. 

Hollywood movies fought off nihilism by offering hope, either through personal love, symbolic escape or the vaguely defined better future of the American Dream. 

Occasionally, they would offer warnings. Oscar-winning films such as Citizen Kane, There Will Be Blood or The Aviator were tragedies which depicted the ultimate isolation of those who got what they wanted. 

Casablanca’s screenwriters were helped by the fact that the film was set and made during the Second World War. This gave them a clear ‘greater good’ which they could appeal to. Rick was able to leave his spiritual and personal isolation in order to dedicate himself to the anti-fascist cause. 

But the film continued to resonate with audiences long after that war had been won, because Rick’s escape from nihilism remained powerful on a symbolic level. The promise that there was something better than individual isolation was something that audiences craved. 

That something better, whatever it was, would take effort, and involvement. But that effort would make it worth working towards. 

Existentialism lingered in Europe, but America was too industrious to navel-gaze. As the Second World War receded into memory, the United States was about to show the world exactly what mankind was capable of. 

It was time, President Kennedy boldly announced, to Go to The Moon....."