Shelf Life — Scott Dickensheets: Getting a bead on the Beats in some new books

Friday, Sept. 24, 1999 | 9:50 a.m.

Scott Dickensheets' books and magazines column appears Fridays. Reach him at 990-2446 or dickens@vegas.com

The other day I walked into a bookstore, saw two new books about the Beat generation and immediately thought of a T-shirt I own. It's a beige cotton number, with a jaunty graphic of a beret, shades and goatee: a stylized Maynard G. Krebs-like bohemian. The slogan, in '50s-jazz-album-cover script, reads, "Beatnik Brand."

I love that, because of its cheap irony in commodifying our most famous counterculture stance, and because it's so obviously true. Beatnik brand -- the enduring fashionability of "Beat style" (black clothes, passionate talk, a cultivated outsiderism) -- undoubtedly has as much to do with the appearance of "The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats" (Hyperion, $27.50) as interest in the writings of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and the rest. (Who can name the rest off the tops of their heads?)

It's joined on shelves by John Tytell's coffee-table book, "Paradise Outlaws: Remembering the Beats" (William Morrow and Co., $24), which follows, among others, "The Beat Book," an anthology edited by Anne Waldman, and "The Beat Generation: A Biographical Teaching Guide," by William Lawlor.

There's even "Beat Spirit: The Way of the Beat Writers as a Living Experience," which presumably stops short of suggesting such Beat "living experiences" as getting hooked on heroin and killing your wife while trying to shoot a drink from her head (Burroughs), or living with your mother in bloated, bitter dissolution (Kerouac). (In fact, the publisher vows, "It kick-starts the rebellious, nonconformist and fiercely independent streak that lives within everyone." I'll be sure to give it to my kids.)

As critic James Wolcott points out in an essay on Jack Kerouac in the October Vanity Fair, "Hundreds of titles have been published on the Beats from every personal-critical-psychosexual angle." Fascination with them rarely wanes, and every couple of years a major magazine will publish an article wondering why fascination with them rarely wanes.

You have to wonder how much of it has to do with what the Beats actually wrote. Wolcott argues that Kerouac's classic "On the Road" hasn't lost its jazzy, word-drunk fizz. Fine, I'll buy that. Likewise, Ginsburg's "Howl" is still a good read, although I've seen parodies of it I liked better.

I've tried over the years to read Burroughs' supposed masterpiece, "Naked Lunch," only to come to a grudging new appreciation of the word "beat." Not because of the book's hallucinatory imagery, violence or deviant sexuality -- lunch chat with my friend the shadowy Mr. X is far more graphic -- but because the writing is so dull.

"His prose style, where one can get at it, is undistinguished," sniffs Martin Seymour-Smith in "Who's Who in 20th Century Literature" (he's similarly unimpressed by Kerouac).

Maybe you had to be there.

So it's safe to conclude that, for many, Beat vogue has more to do with style, symbolism and the certainty that we look good in black (although, as an essay in the Rolling Stone book says, the actual Beats didn't give rise to the fashion tropes we associate with them). "We exalt this original youth culture's artifacts over its actual ideals," journalist Tad Friend wrote in Vogue in 1995, during another spike in Beat nostalgia.

The subtitle of "Bohemia," a 1993 paean to the unsquare life by boho elder Herbert Gold, says it all: "Where Art, Angst, Love and Strong Coffee Meet." Each is a component cliche of beatnik brand, all right, but you can see why the kids dig it.

In the popular mind, the Beats represent freedom, being on the road, chicks 'n' kicks, pushing the limits, placing oneself beyond the smothering values of the dominant culture; but then again, so do Mountain Dew commercials. In reality, Kerouac became a grumpy old goat, Ginsberg stuck it to The Man by selling (selling out?) his papers and beard clippings to Stanford University, and Burroughs, while a genuine exile from Main Street, was more than a little creepy.

But in our media-saturated, race-divided, master-planned communities, we need someone to help kick-start the rebellious, nonconformist, fiercely independent spirit that lives within everyone, and there the Beats are.

"We need the Beats to be cooler than we are," Friend wrote, "so we make them cooler than they were."

So don't worry if you miss the "Rolling Stone Book of the Beats" (although it does contain an essay by Johnny Depp!). There'll be another along anytime.

Reading list

Houston is the usually appealing author of the story collection "Cowboys Are My Weakness" and the novel "Waltzing the Cat," not to mention a seasoned river runner, adventure traveler, mountain climber and outdoorsy daredevil. I'm sure if I'd encountered these pieces singly, in the magazines in which they first appeared, I'd have enjoyed them immensely.

Yet, when they're clumped between covers, you can't ignore Houston's irritating habit of trotting out her tomboy credentials at the drop of a snow hat. Either she's telling you about her river running, adventure traveling, mountain climbing and outdoorsy daredeviltry, or she's wondering why she's compelled to run rivers, etc.

She does write well about dogs, though.