Happy Generation

See also: Beatnik

The term of Beat Generation was employed for the first time in 1948 by Jack Kerouac to describe her circle of friends to the novelist John Clellon Holmes (who will publish later the first novel on the Beat generation, entitled Go , in 1952, at the same time as a proclamation in the NewYork Times : “ Happy This is the generation”). The adjective Beat (proposed by Herbert Huncke) initially had the direction of “tired”, “softened”, but Kerouac added to it the paradoxical connotation of upbeat and beatific .

To qualify this small circle of candidates writers, artists, swindlers and drug addicts in any kind of “Generation” was a way of asserting their importance, their representativeness, and especially the beginning of a new movement (on the traces of the lost Génération ). It was the kind of bravado which could have been only illusions of size, but the history shows that happy the generation was allowed to be a true literary movement, social and cultural. The name preceded the gasoline, reinforcing the crystallization of the ideas around the concept.

The members of Happy the generation were new gipsies who engaged in a vigorous and libertarian creativity. The Beat writers produced a corpus of works dominated by spontaneousness, an quasi-automatism in the writing, to cause a free and rythmée prosody.

The “canonical” members of Happy the generation met with New York: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs (in the Years 1940), joined later by Gregory Corso (in 1950). It is at the university of Columbia that Ginsberg and Kerouac met, then both students. During Years 1950, the group had extended to figures from the scene from San Francisco: Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen and Lew Welch.

Major works of these founders authors are On the road of Kerouac, Howl of Ginsberg and the naked Feast of Burroughs.

Around this hard core of artists revolved of the personalities to the less known course but to the contribution quite as important: Lucien Carr (which presented Burroughs to Kerouac and Ginsberg); Herbert Huncke (a small gangster drug addict who met Burroughs in 1946); Hal Drives out (an anthropologist of Denver which presented Neal Cassady to the group in 1947). Cassady became very close to Kerouac and was immortalisé in the novel On the road under the features of the character Dean Moriarty, a hooligan antisocial without the penny, avid of life and experiments.

It is Cassady which inserted the Rap in the Beat scene, with its spoken slackened and spontaneous which would be associated to the beatniks later. Cassady was not writer when it integrated the group, but strongly impressed his slackened and spontaneous style that Kerouac will quote later as influences major which carried out it to formalize its free prose, that it used in On the road (other major influences being the solos impromptu Jazz and pre-hippie rock'n'roll of The Weaver Temptations).

The women took also a place of importance in the Beat circle: Joan Vollmer, Edie Parker. Their apartment of the Upper West Side of Manhattan quickly became the meeting place privileged of Happy, Joan Vollmer becoming itself participating active ignited discussions which proceeded there.

In 1950, Corso meets Ginsberg, which was very impressed by poetry that he had written whereas he was imprisoned for vol. the Années 1950 were marked by reciprocal influences between writers New Yorkais and of San Francisco (Ginsberg, Corso, Cassady and Kerouac settled there even for a time). Ferlinghetti (which directed the publisher City Lights Close ) took a greatter importance, like Rexroth (a poet resulting from the modernism, older than the Happy ones, and which exerted on them a deep influence) whose apartment became a point of meeting obliged of the literary discussions. Rexroth organized the reading of Six Gallery , where the poem Howl appeared for the first time.

With the publication of On the road in 1957 (the outline was made by it in 1951), excellent criticisms (in particular of the literary column of the NewYork Times ) made an instantaneous best-seller of it. This event involved the wave of interest for the Beat movement which clarified all its members.

Beatniks

The word beatnik appears for the first time the April 2nd 1958 under the feather of in the newspaper San Francisco Chronicle. The term, forged starting from the Russian satellite Sputnik , was initially pejorative while seeking to show that the happy ones were a community of enlightened Communists. The term remained and became the emblem of a generation of young hairy and débraillés people. Hello, beatnik! is the title of a song written and interpreted by Léo Ferré in 1967. the Beatniks is the title of a song written by Patrice Laffont and interpreted by Michel Sardou in 1966.

The Beatniks rejected the taboos of the public gardens (rigid people which do not benefit from the life, middle-class men). They rejected the organized and corrupted company and the traditional values; they wanted to live simply, at bottom. They revolted against the materialism, hypocrisy, the uniformity, superficiality. They wanted to create a company of simple feelings, without prejudices.

Women of Happy the generation

Often left side in the history of the first times of Happy the generation, Joan Vollmer (which became later Mrs. Burroughs) was unambiguous present as of the whole beginning of the adventure. It is described like an intelligent and interesting woman, but who did not imply herself in the writing. In addition, contrary to a man like Cassady, nobody chooses to write about it. It remained in the history only as the wife that William Burroughs killed by accident of a ball in full head (by seeking with rejouer the myth of Guillaume Tell).

Corso supported that the women were very present in the circle, but which it was very hard for them to assert the Bohemian lifestyle of the happy ones: stigmatized, seen like insane, some were torn off with the movement. He thus told the history of the young person “Hope” who was the first mentor of Kerouac and Ginsberg in their interest for Buddhism, making them read certain authors, of which Li Bai.

Some managed all the same to be made a name within the Happy ones: Joyce Johnson, Hettie Jones, Diane DiPrima.

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