The Longest Footnote

By R.Z.S.

THE BEAT GENERATION by Bruce Cook. 248 pages. Scribners. $6.95.

For those who have learned to accept labels without questioning, the 1950s produced two generations in a single decade. There was the Silent Generation, so called for its members' apparent shyness about anything that might jeopardize their future security. And there was the Beat Generation, which loudly ridiculed the values the quiet ones were so concerned about. Bruce Cook, the 39-year-old book-review editor of the National Observer, seems divided between the two. In mind and body he is with the Silents, but his heart belongs to the Beats.

The split is evident in his book, The Beat Generation--part sketchy sociology, part elementary lit. crit., part personal reportage and part casual Ph.D. thesis. "The almost schizophrenic change that has been worked in the temper of our times," Cook proclaims, "was predicted a decade before, implicit in every poem, novel and prose piece produced by the Beat Generation."

This is one of those resounding overstatements at once perfectly true and thoroughly misleading. It is not hard to find elements in Beat writing--or any other serious writing of the time--that predicted something as vague as "almost schizophrenic change" in "the temper of our times." Allen Ginsberg, whose poem Howl is generally thought to have started the literary side of the movement, sang of devastated minds, mysticism and hallucinogenic drugs. Gregory Corso raged against authority, lamented the thinning of his wild hair and questioned the institution of marriage. Jack Kerouac's On the Road bubbled about the transient life. Lawrence Ferlinghetti was charming about overpopulation, and obsession with the tyranny of drugs, governments and unspecified malevolence could be found in the work of even a marginal Beat like William S. Burroughs.

But as Cook knows, writers were dealing with those subjects generations before the Beats. He attempts to provide some historical perspective with a name here, an influence there. But mainly he depends on rhetoric, and it blows his subject out of all proportion: "No writer better than he has ever infused travel--simply getting from one place to another--with such a keen sense of adventure." This to describe Kerouac. But, even granting such a restricted distinction, any travel book by Sir Richard Burton, to name but one other writer, makes Kerouac's sense of adventure seem like a pinball ricocheting in a glass-enclosed prison of lights and bells.

A Little Numb. In addition to Ginsberg (and Kerouac), many of the people Cook interviewed--Kenneth Rexroth, Burroughs, Poets Robert Duncan and Michael McClure--make sensible distinctions between the Beats. In fact, the distinctions are so varied that the term "beat" means anything from tired blood to street existentialism to blissful cosmic consciousness.

It is not surprising, then, to find Cook a little numb by the time he gets to Woodstock, which he sees as the natural outgrowth of one Beat movement. Having gone there to observe the rock festival (though his base of operations was a motel room), he reports that most of the people he saw were sullen, mud-caked and silently straining to hear the music. He dismisses the claim that Woodstock was the soul-expanding event portrayed in Michael Wadleigh's film documentary. Well and good. But amid the chaos of Max Yasgur's farm, Cook seems a little like Stendhal's young soldier, who doesn't realize that he's in the battle of Waterloo because he perceives it as only a scattering of minor incidents. Likewise, Cook inadvertently stumbles upon a critical subject: the contrast and relationship of reality to myth. If Woodstock ever becomes a milestone in a social or spiritual revolution, it will not be because of its soggy realities, but because it has been successfully mythologized. The colorful, short-winded realities of the Beats, however, are the stuff that footnotes are made of.

R.Z.S.

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