for my beat writers class I had to write a one page summary of the John Clellon Holmes essay "This Is The Beat Generation." you can read a full copy of his essay here:
http://www.litkicks.com/Texts/ThisIsBeatGen.htmlhere is my summary, i am very open to suggestions and/or comments
“Any attempt to label an entire generation is unrewarding, and yet the generation which went through the last war, or at least could get a drink easily once it was over, seems to possess a uniform, general quality which demands an adjective...”The above statement, made by John Clellon Holmes in his essay “This Is The Beat Generation,” only seemed to add to the difficulty that those involved and even those on the outside of the Beat Generation faced in trying to define and understand this phenomenon in American society.
As Holmes goes on to explain, “the origins of the word ‘beat’ are obscure, but the meaning is only too clear to most Americans...a man is beat whenever he goes for broke and wagers the sum of his resources on a single number; and the young generation has done that continually from early youth.”
In the essay, Holmes notes that many are comparing this new ‘Beat Generation’ to the ‘Lost Generation’ of the post-World War I era. He calls the comparison valuable but also notes that the “wild boys of today are not lost.” He discusses at some length the world in which the youth of the Beat Generation grew up in, “during the collective bad circumstances of a dreary depression,” a generation that was “weaned during collective uprooting of a global war.” Because of this, Holmes asserts, “the ability to live at a pace that kills...led to black markets, bebop, narcotics, sexual promiscuity, hucksterism, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The beatness set in later.”
Holmes further separates the two postwar generations by saying that “this generation conspicuously lacks the eloquent air of bereavement which made so many of the exploits of the Lost Generation symbolic actions.” Instead, he says, the youth of the Beat Generation “drink to ‘come down’...not to illustrate anything. Their excursions into drugs or promiscuity come out of curiosity, not disillusionment...It is a generation with a greater facility for entertaining ideas than for believing in them.”
Jack Kerouac once wrote that he discovered the religious implications of “beat” in 1954. He said that he had heard “the holy silence in the church” and made a connection between the words “beat” and “beatific.” Similarly, the issue of faith plays a prominent role in the essay, with Holmes writing that the so-called Beat Generation “exhibits on every side...a perfect craving to believe,” with an “ever-increasing conviction that the problem of modern life is essentially a spiritual problem.”
Finally, Holmes makes the argument that these feelings among the youth did not solely affect those associated with the Beat Generation. He draws comparisons between the Beats and a Young Republican, because “both have had enough of homelessness, valuelessness, faithlessness...there is no single philosophy, no single party, no single attitude.”
“For the wildest hipster,” Holmes writes, “there is no desire to shatter the ‘square’ society in which he lives, only to elude it.” Further comparing the Beat to the Young Republican, he contends that both are “the result of more or less the same conviction - namely that the valueless abyss of modern life is unbearable.”
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