Religious Left and Its Bull
Bām in Bengali can mean
“buttocks.” Bām can also mean “ointment.”
Again, Bām means “leftist.” The Bām I am speaking of here is
the vagabond, the eccentric wanderer, or even the beggar. When this sense of Bām was joined with Dharma
(“religion”), there arose, in the 1950s, a major literary revolution in
America—the land of “un-leftist” culture.
We know that in any country, a revolution has several centers. This one had three: Greenwich Village (New York City), Venice West (Southern California), and North Beach (San Francisco). A group of young men in their mid-twenties—followers of Zen Buddhism, believers in a Bohemian way of life, committed to writing literature for personal ends. Drugs, jazz, sexuality, and intellectualism—the literary historians named this clan of poets and writers The Beat Generation.
Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac—these poets and writers of the Beat Generation created quite a stir in American social life in the mid-1950s. Being outside the mainstream, this literary clan was distinctly the marginal tribe of America’s poets. Unlike celebrated mainstream figures—Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Elizabeth Bishop, Hart Crane, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson—the Beats never achieved such stature. Perhaps it was simply because the country was America, and the Bāms had no real significance there. America has shown this tendency often. Hemingway or O. Henry are far more famous, though Jack London was in no way a lesser writer. Indeed, his Call of the Wild stands almost unique in American literature, rivaled perhaps only by Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Yet Hemingway won the Nobel; Jack London did not. Likewise, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick remained in the shadows for decades, while novels of far lesser depth gained quick popularity. In America—the self-declared land of democracy and freedom—marginal works of art are easily swallowed by the mainstream flood.
Still, leaving aside political quibbles, one feels the Beat writers were caught in a permanent dilemma. The one-sidedness visible in their work suggests they all suffered from a certain social inferiority. Among them, the poet who overcame this negative subjectivity, who refused to imprison poetry within private expression and instead challenged America’s mainstream head-on, was Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Ferlinghetti, the most popular poet of the Beats, was a soldier by profession—an officer in the American Navy during World War II. After the war, he returned and opened a bookstore in San Francisco called City Lights. It became the den of the Beat madmen. He also established a press under the same roof, publishing their own works. The earliest Beat books were printed by City Lights Publications.
Character-wise, the Beat movement resembled Bengal’s Hungry Generation of the 1960s—Moloy Roychoudhury, Shakti Chattopadhyay, Binoy Majumdar, Shaileswar Ghosh, Samir Roychoudhury, Haradhan Dhara and others. Both were Bohemian, confessional, and deeply personal. The Beats filled their poems with obscenities, broke grammar deliberately, scribbled on pages in longhand, filled margins with doodles, alternated upper- and lowercase, wrote two-line poems across whole pages or poems of just two words. All this, too, one sees in the Hungry poets of Bengal.
If Shakti Chattopadhyay was the Hungry Generation’s most successful poet, then Ferlinghetti secured his permanent place in the history of Beat literature. When he stepped beyond private verse to strike at the state system and political hypocrisy, world-famous authors like Henry Miller embraced this current wholeheartedly. Ferlinghetti poured out explosive poetry one after another: Pictures of the Gone World (1955), A Coney Island of the Mind (1958), One Thousand Fearful Words for Fidel Castro (1961), Where Is Vietnam? (1965), Tyrannus Nix (1969), Who Are We Now? (1976)—each striking blows at American polity and consciousness. He was a genuine anti-establishment poet.
In contrast, we see in India that many of the Hungry poets eventually sold themselves—to ruling political groups or to corporate patronage.
Of his own poetry and vision, Ferlinghetti once said:
“These poems represent to me a kind of a halfway house in the ascent of a mountain I hardly knew existed until I stopped and looked back at the flatlands below. Like a Zen fool lost in the woods who laughs and lies face down on the earth to find his way.”
This came, perhaps, from a deep sense of social alienation and insecurity, which drove him toward the negative truths of life. Yet in that abyss he tasted the subtle savor of a simple, pure existence. His witty tone, raw diction, musical cadence, and social thrust—none of this was accidental; all were hard-won. And when politics, philosophy, and time entwine with an artist’s private consciousness, then we see the true mark of the artist: to be in conflict with one’s people, one’s age, one’s nation.
Most of Ferlinghetti’s poems were not born of a compulsion to “create art.” They were scribbled in cafés, to be read aloud to friends. Jazz rhythms pervade them. This jazz-dependence gave his poems both their biting satire and their lyrical sweetness.
His celebrated collection Who Are We Now? begins with a famous line of Edward Carpenter—later hailed in America as a historic document of the 1970s:
“Underneath all art and social life, sex and fraternity.”
The Beat writings began from extreme subjectivity. But eventually the movement grew into a wider social context. Their greatest contribution to twentieth-century poetry was to forge an alternative aesthetic—free of convention and stale formalism. This paved the ground for the unorthodox mastery of postmodern literature and art.
And perhaps, in today’s twenty-first century, the Beat Generation again becomes relevant—when we see that individualistic, self-absorbed writing holds little meaning in society. Our present vacuum of values makes stronger the demand that the artist must shoulder the burden of expressing political, social, and economic consciousness from within the self. Writing centered in the self becomes firm only when it influences the larger society—when it shakes the status quo and gestures toward change. That is the art that proves necessary.
Ferlinghetti wrote:
The door to the invisible
Is visible
The hidden door
Is not hidden
I walk through it forever
Not seeing it.
The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard once said: “Avant-garde in art is fully political.” And the search for the invisible door of the world and life—that is its true work. The Beat Generation, then, stands for us today as a lesson from the past—one easily harnessed to shape the future.
Two Poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
1. From Berlin (Who Are We Now?)
O God, return, across the holy world,
with one song, one line, one primal utterance.
Let autumnal capitals blossom,
their alleyways alive with foliage.
O friends, exiled by history,
hands and feet in chains—
long to hear once more the language of our tears,
the siren’s wail
on the false rivers of the present shore.
2. After the Dream (The Secret Meaning of Things)
The tender doorway of fur opens—
She turns back,
about the girl’s body,
her kingfisher limbs enclosing her,
and imposes Rama
only in Shaivite yoga and meditation,
then the broken hand of the advancing Mahadev
extends itself.
We know that in any country, a revolution has several centers. This one had three: Greenwich Village (New York City), Venice West (Southern California), and North Beach (San Francisco). A group of young men in their mid-twenties—followers of Zen Buddhism, believers in a Bohemian way of life, committed to writing literature for personal ends. Drugs, jazz, sexuality, and intellectualism—the literary historians named this clan of poets and writers The Beat Generation.
Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac—these poets and writers of the Beat Generation created quite a stir in American social life in the mid-1950s. Being outside the mainstream, this literary clan was distinctly the marginal tribe of America’s poets. Unlike celebrated mainstream figures—Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Elizabeth Bishop, Hart Crane, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson—the Beats never achieved such stature. Perhaps it was simply because the country was America, and the Bāms had no real significance there. America has shown this tendency often. Hemingway or O. Henry are far more famous, though Jack London was in no way a lesser writer. Indeed, his Call of the Wild stands almost unique in American literature, rivaled perhaps only by Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Yet Hemingway won the Nobel; Jack London did not. Likewise, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick remained in the shadows for decades, while novels of far lesser depth gained quick popularity. In America—the self-declared land of democracy and freedom—marginal works of art are easily swallowed by the mainstream flood.
Still, leaving aside political quibbles, one feels the Beat writers were caught in a permanent dilemma. The one-sidedness visible in their work suggests they all suffered from a certain social inferiority. Among them, the poet who overcame this negative subjectivity, who refused to imprison poetry within private expression and instead challenged America’s mainstream head-on, was Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Ferlinghetti, the most popular poet of the Beats, was a soldier by profession—an officer in the American Navy during World War II. After the war, he returned and opened a bookstore in San Francisco called City Lights. It became the den of the Beat madmen. He also established a press under the same roof, publishing their own works. The earliest Beat books were printed by City Lights Publications.
Character-wise, the Beat movement resembled Bengal’s Hungry Generation of the 1960s—Moloy Roychoudhury, Shakti Chattopadhyay, Binoy Majumdar, Shaileswar Ghosh, Samir Roychoudhury, Haradhan Dhara and others. Both were Bohemian, confessional, and deeply personal. The Beats filled their poems with obscenities, broke grammar deliberately, scribbled on pages in longhand, filled margins with doodles, alternated upper- and lowercase, wrote two-line poems across whole pages or poems of just two words. All this, too, one sees in the Hungry poets of Bengal.
If Shakti Chattopadhyay was the Hungry Generation’s most successful poet, then Ferlinghetti secured his permanent place in the history of Beat literature. When he stepped beyond private verse to strike at the state system and political hypocrisy, world-famous authors like Henry Miller embraced this current wholeheartedly. Ferlinghetti poured out explosive poetry one after another: Pictures of the Gone World (1955), A Coney Island of the Mind (1958), One Thousand Fearful Words for Fidel Castro (1961), Where Is Vietnam? (1965), Tyrannus Nix (1969), Who Are We Now? (1976)—each striking blows at American polity and consciousness. He was a genuine anti-establishment poet.
In contrast, we see in India that many of the Hungry poets eventually sold themselves—to ruling political groups or to corporate patronage.
Of his own poetry and vision, Ferlinghetti once said:
“These poems represent to me a kind of a halfway house in the ascent of a mountain I hardly knew existed until I stopped and looked back at the flatlands below. Like a Zen fool lost in the woods who laughs and lies face down on the earth to find his way.”
This came, perhaps, from a deep sense of social alienation and insecurity, which drove him toward the negative truths of life. Yet in that abyss he tasted the subtle savor of a simple, pure existence. His witty tone, raw diction, musical cadence, and social thrust—none of this was accidental; all were hard-won. And when politics, philosophy, and time entwine with an artist’s private consciousness, then we see the true mark of the artist: to be in conflict with one’s people, one’s age, one’s nation.
Most of Ferlinghetti’s poems were not born of a compulsion to “create art.” They were scribbled in cafés, to be read aloud to friends. Jazz rhythms pervade them. This jazz-dependence gave his poems both their biting satire and their lyrical sweetness.
His celebrated collection Who Are We Now? begins with a famous line of Edward Carpenter—later hailed in America as a historic document of the 1970s:
“Underneath all art and social life, sex and fraternity.”
The Beat writings began from extreme subjectivity. But eventually the movement grew into a wider social context. Their greatest contribution to twentieth-century poetry was to forge an alternative aesthetic—free of convention and stale formalism. This paved the ground for the unorthodox mastery of postmodern literature and art.
And perhaps, in today’s twenty-first century, the Beat Generation again becomes relevant—when we see that individualistic, self-absorbed writing holds little meaning in society. Our present vacuum of values makes stronger the demand that the artist must shoulder the burden of expressing political, social, and economic consciousness from within the self. Writing centered in the self becomes firm only when it influences the larger society—when it shakes the status quo and gestures toward change. That is the art that proves necessary.
Ferlinghetti wrote:
The door to the invisible
Is visible
The hidden door
Is not hidden
I walk through it forever
Not seeing it.
The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard once said: “Avant-garde in art is fully political.” And the search for the invisible door of the world and life—that is its true work. The Beat Generation, then, stands for us today as a lesson from the past—one easily harnessed to shape the future.
Two Poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
1. From Berlin (Who Are We Now?)
O God, return, across the holy world,
with one song, one line, one primal utterance.
Let autumnal capitals blossom,
their alleyways alive with foliage.
O friends, exiled by history,
hands and feet in chains—
long to hear once more the language of our tears,
the siren’s wail
on the false rivers of the present shore.
2. After the Dream (The Secret Meaning of Things)
The tender doorway of fur opens—
She turns back,
about the girl’s body,
her kingfisher limbs enclosing her,
and imposes Rama
only in Shaivite yoga and meditation,
then the broken hand of the advancing Mahadev
extends itself.
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