1950s: Agency

1951 – Paul Goodman’s essay “Advance-Guard Writing in America, 1900 - 1950” appears in the Kenyon Review. Goodman advocated for the formation of small counter-communities based on familiarity, sensitivity, and shared aesthetic concerns. Through the process of localized and community-specific artistic creation and consumption, these communities would together withstand the nullifying effects of Eisenhower’s America. 

     In the summer of 1951, critic Paul Goodman’s essay Advance-Guard Writing in America: 1900 – 1950 appeared in the Kenyon Review. In the same vein as Clement Greenberg’s essay from 1939, Goodman used the essay to argue the case of a cultivated counter-elite at odds with an increasingly intolerant mainstream majority, now less under threat from the fascist totalitarianism than a post-war American hegemony Goodman assessed as “shell-shocked” and alienated. In the aftermath of war, and in the face of new Cold War realities, the cultural climate of the United States was socially and politically conservative, financially prosperous, and profoundly apprehensive. Having seen the damage that economic depression and global warfare brought about, the country put its faith in the small-c conservative mores of domestic order, social conformity, and deep censure of any dissent, personal or public. A technicolor sheen was glossed across popular culture in an attempt at wholesale reassurance. If pre-war German kitsch was, in the words of Robert Hughes, “elevated, classical … Bulls and Greeks and naked broads …  the vocabulary of classicism”, post-war American kitsch was populated by what historian Paul Fussell described as “good-looking Aryans, blond and tall, beloved by slim blonde women [and] surrounded by much-desired consumer goods.”

     Goodman drew uncomfortable parallels between a triumphant post-war United States and post-Reformation France, seeing in both the governing tenets of a “stable land-rooted bourgeois morality, an official ‘Cartesian’ culture of peculiar uniformity, and a sentimental [religiosity] … calculated to impress themselves on growing minds as the norms of all sense, reason, and charm.” Goodman found this uniformity culturally restrictive and personally stultifying, concluding that the only logical result of such restrictions, “if one had any intellect or spirit, the subsequent inner nausea was bound to be early and total: Bohemian, anti-syntactical, and social-revolutionary.”

     Having outlined the increasingly divisive relationship between the bullying mainstream and the bullied counter-elite, Goodman went on to suggest the formulation of a protective counter-culture, comprised of those who had grown up benefitting from the education and cultivation the mainstream had to offer, but who now found themselves with the restrictions that same mainstream now expected in return. This counterculture would be founded on aesthetic capital (financial capital being, at least for the time being, out of the question), bound together by education and taste, and existing autonomously from the mainstream whole. By example, these artists would invert the accepted notions of margin and center, an effective counter-rejection of the standards and practices of mid-century America.

     Goodman’s envisioned community mirrors Greenberg’s earlier model of a pre-industrial folk culture, self-created and self-defining, a village culture. As with that folk culture, this community was to be anchored in the direct and intimate relationship between the often-interchangeable artist and audience, culminating in an alternative and intimate vernacular particular to the place. However, in Greenberg’s model that folk culture was created by masses excluded from the education and comforts of the elite. Here, the roles are reversed, and it was the elite who were excluded from the masses.

1951 – Frank O’Hara, having graduated from Harvard and finishing his Master’s Degree at the University of Michigan, follows the essay to New York. Once there, he takes a job at the Museum of Modern Art, where he will continue to work for the rest of his life.After reading the Paul Goodman essay, O’Hara wrote to his friend Jane Freilicher: 

“The only pleasant thing that’s happened to me since you left … is that I read Paul Goodman’s current manifesto in Kenyon Review and if you haven’t devoured its delicious message, rush to your nearest newsstand … It is really lucid about what’s bothering us both besides sex, and it is so heartening to know that someone understands these things … he is really the only one we have to look to now that Gide is dead, and just knowing that he is in the same city may give me the power to hurl myself into poetry.”

1951 – Rosenberg Trial.

1951 – William Burroughs shoots and kills his wife Joan Vollmer in Mexico City, flees to Tunisia. When testifying after the killing, their four-year-old son Billy Junior stated: “She placed an apple or an apricot or a grape or myself on her head and challenged my father to shoot.”

1951 – Jack Kerouac writes “On the Road” over a three-week period in his Manhattan apartment.

1951 – Leo Castelli curates the “9^th Street Show” at a storefront gallery at 60 East 9^th Street (the rent is fifty dollars a month).

1952 – Willem de Kooning moves into a cold-water loft at 88 East 10^th Street.

1952 – Harold Rosenberg coins the term “Action Painter” in his essay “American Action Painters” in ART/news.

O'Hara Downtown, with Larry Rivers and Grace Hartigan

1952 (May) – Frank O’Hara takes part in panel discussion at The Club, “The Use of Image in Poetry and Painting.” He uses the discussion to distance himself and his generation of writers from the more established confessionary writers (who he refers to as the “Sons of Eliot”) and claim a stake for his own group.

     O'Hara's aesthetic sensibilities were shaped as much by what he decided to reject as what he decided to embrace. Just as Abstract Expressionism had moved away from European Surrealism, O'Hara's New York School rejected the academic and confessional poetry of his own era. In May 1952 O'Hara appeared as part of a panel discussion at The Club, a relatively informal and unrecognized social gathering of of painters of poets and painters originated by de Kooning and Kline.

O'Hara Uptown, with Nelson Rockefeller

     O'Hara used the opportunity to chart out a clear delineation between the contemporary poets he saw as relevant and, echoing Rosenberg, those that continued to reinforce the codified traditions and concerns of form to stilted and self-defeating ends. The really vital poets, O'Hara argued, were up for the jump, ready if not eager to forgo previous advances in form, while the academic traditionalists were becoming increasingly careful, solipsistic, and hermetic - and useless beyond their own immediate comfortable milieu. 

     After sketching out the perils of both approaches, of the "conventional design and form" which led to dullness on one hand or else the "reliance on private ideas and emotions" on the other, O'Hara singled out a few contemporary poets who he deemed as advancing the aesthetic, before focusing on the much greater number he decided were not. He began by distancing himself - almost apologetically - from Wallace Stevens, who he allowed was a great poet but who looked to the past rather than the future. Rather audaciously, he then claimed Auden as an honorary American, who "extended our ideas of what poetry could be ... [his] poems saw clearly into obscure and complex insights, into areas which had hitherto been banal."
     The real intent of O'Hara's lecture was to claim the death of European Modernism, and while he was at it claim his own place at its grave. Echoing Rosenberg, O'Hara placed the murder at the feet of T.S. Eliot, and while this was not an exactly new argument by 1953, it was something of an admirably brazen career move for O'Hara to make. The schism between the American and European strains of Modernism had existed since 1917, the year William Carlos Williams published Al Que Quiere! in New York and Eliot published Prufrock and Other Observations in London. Both works were given the beneficial nod by Ezra Pound, who had by then claimed himself as the Idaho Scout of the movement, rustic when it suited him. They were all American, but Pound and Eliot relocated to Europe and brought Modernism with them, and it was in Europe where the traditions of Modernist poetry were settled. Williams enjoyed a more limited influence from his base in Rutherford, N.J. and while he made the most of it, he had reason to.
     Back at The Club, O'Hara asserted the value of Pound's Cantos, equally influential and beneficial to both sides of this regrettable current divide, "its influence is pervasive and ... almost invariably healthy in that it seldom distracts form the individuality of the poet who admires him; rather it points up, clarifies it." Eliot was another story. In his embrace of the "deadening and obscuring and precious effect," he managed to separate poetry from any recognizably living impulse and, having done so, effectively rendered the Modernist tradition unusable. Williams, on the other hand, insisted on the primacy of life as an aesthetic influence and insisted that "life is not a landscape before which the poet postures, but the very condition of his inspiration in a deeply personal way ... this is not the nineteenth-century Romantic identification, but a recognition." He was working to redress the imbalance of plurality against singularity that - he felt - didn't leave much room for any topic outside of the purely "poetic". As he complained in his Autobiography:

I felt at once that [The Waste Land] had set me back twenty years and I'm sure it did. Critically, Eliot returned us to the classroom just at the moment when I felt we were on the point to escape to matters much closer to the essence of a new art form itself - rooted in the locality which should give it fruit.

Eliot had taken the once-promising spark of Modernism back to Europe like a dog with a bone between its teeth, returned it to the dry concerns of tradition and form at the expense of vitality and expression. Williams, in dismissing both European forms and European traditions, insisted that "poetry was where he lived." Everything was up for grabs, rooted in the locality and without need for some outside legitimizing pat on the head. 
     O'Hara took up this transatlantic schism now. The New York poets and painters had firmly placed themselves in the American camp. It was here, in this notion of an art rooted in and based on the lives and locality of the artist, that O'Hara owed Williams. Williams allowed himself the freedom to create poetry from the non-poetic scraps of urban life around him - newspaper headlines, street names, phone calls, notes left on a refrigerator door - the sort of workaday urban detrius that would appear in O'Hara's poems, in the work of the Second Generation New York Painters, and eventually in the work of the Pop artists. This sense of linguistic and cultural entitlement claim for the poetic legitimacy of everyday experience, appealed most to the anti-authoritarian and academic writers of the New York School. As Kenneth Koch later said: "I would say that if Williams was using plain American speech, what we wanted to use was plain American speech, fancy speech, comic-strip talk, translation talk, libretto talk, everything, we wanted all kinds of speech."
     If the object of O'Hara's scorn had simply been Eliot, the 1952 discussion wouldn't have amounted to much more than a young poet's complain about the overbearing influence of an aging and unreachable elder. Eliot himself was by then in his mid-60s, prizes won and greatest work behind him, and it's doubtful he would have been much bothered by some obscure young poet complaining in the upstairs loft on 8th Street. However, this was more a bottle by proxy. O'Hara's real targets were both closer to home and closer in age - the young academics and confessional poets on the other side of of the ideological divide, most especially Robert Lowell. By adhering to the accepted standards of Modernism, these "sons of Eliot" - as O'Hara termed them - were only reinforcing the already ironbound limits of their own subservience, accepting what could and couldn't be considered poetic subject and form, and constructing "elegantly written and intellectually supple poems ... written to such acclaim on American campuses." They were the young poets who mattered, read by the same cultural gatekeepers O'Hara pitted himself against. Pound's credo was "Make it New" and these poets, already safely ensconced in academia, were making it anything but.
     O'Hara accused these poets of intellectual and artistic cowardice, and Koch further taunted them in his poem "Fresh Air":

Where are the young poets in America, they are trembling in publishing houses and universities, Above all they are trembling in universities, they are bathing the library steps with their spit,They are gargling out innocuous (to whom?) poems about maple trees andtheir children, Sometimes they brave a subject like the Villa d'Este or a lighthouse in Rhode Island,Oh, what words they are! They wish to perfect their form.

The lecture itself was something of a career move for O'Hara, an act of self-affirmation and self-promotion. In attacking Eliot, O'Hara gave himself the opportunity to attack Eliot's American heirs and place himself firmly into the debate as a voice (soon the voice) of the opposition. It's worth remember that O'Hara was only twenty six at the time, making his living selling postcards behind the counter of the MoMA gift-shop, and presenting his lecture to a small room of artists and writers to whom the outside world was, at that time, almost entirely indifferent. No matter. This new generation was setting out to build a new vernacular based on the rejection of old forms, based on an embrace of the personal and on the blending of high culture and low culture into one aesthetic voice that was their own. 

1952 – The Congress for Cultural Freedom (a quasi-CIA front) organizes a touring exhibition of Abstract Expressionism, “Modern Art in the United States.”

1953 – Senator Joseph McCarthy placed as head of Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, begins “Red Scare” hearings.

1953 – Ginsberg leaves New York for San Francisco. He is twenty-seven, and attempting to leave behind a series of traumas, beginning with his mother’s institutionalizations, his own institutionalizations, university expulsions, an arrest for possession of stolen goods, indirect involvement in Lucien Carr’s killing of David Kammerer, and sessions of electro-shock therapy at Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Institute. Exhausted, he undertakes the move to California in a bid for rehabilitation and reinvention, taking both a girlfriend and an office job. The experiment lasts a year.

1953 – Rauschenberg’s “Erased de Kooning.”

1953 – William Burroughs’s “Junky” is published by Ace Books, with Ginsberg acting as editor and literary agent. Ginsberg wrote:

Once the manuscript was complete, I began taking it around to various classmates in college or mental hospitals who had succeeding in establishing themselves in publishing - an ambition which was mine also, frustrated: and thus incompetent in worldly matters, I conceived of myself as a secret literary agent. Jason Epstein read the ms. of Burroughs' Junky (and of course he knew Burroughs by legend from Columbia days) and concluded that had it been written by Winston Churchill, it would be interesting; but since Burroughs' prose and 'undistinguished' (a point I argued with as much as I could in his Doubleday office, but felt faint surrounded by so much Reality ... mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors ... my own paranoia or inexperience with the Great Dumbness of Business Buildings of New York) the book was not of interest to publish. That season I was also carrying around Kerouac's Proustian chapters from Visions of Cody that later developed into the vision of On the Road. And I carried On the Road from one publishing house to another. Louis Simpson, himself recovering from nervous breakdown at Bobbs-Merrill, found no artistic merit in the manuscripts either.

1955 – “The Village Voice” founded by Ed Fancher, Dan Wolf, and Norman Mailer.

1955 – Ginsberg writes “Howl” while living in San Francisco, reads it to an enthusiastic audience (including Kerouac) at the Gallery 6.

1956 – Jackson Pollock dies, after driving his car into a tree on Long Island, age 44.

1956 – The Five Spot opens on St. Mark’s Place.

1957 – Ginsberg’s “Howl” publisher at City Lights Books, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, is arrested on obscenity charges. Ginsberg himself has left San Francisco, first for Tangiers (to assist William Burroughs in editing “Naked Lunch”) and then for New York.

1957 – Kerouac’s “On the Road” published by Viking Press.

1957 – Frank O’Hara’s “Meditations in an Emergency” published by Barney Rosset’s Grove Press.

1957 – Donald Hall edits “New Poets of England and America,” published by Meridian Books, which features the poetry of young modernist writers. It is seen as a pushback by the literary establishment of the day, and is met with scorn by the New York poets. The relationship between Hall and O’Hara dates back to undergraduate animosities at Harvard.

1957 – Frank O’Hara writes “Why I Am Not a Painter.”

1958 – Ginsberg returns to New York, taking an apartment at 170 E. 2^nd Street.

1958 – The Congress for Cultural Freedom organizes and tours a second and more ambitious touring exhibition of Abstract Expressionism, “The New American Painting.”

1958 – Norman Podhoretz’s “The Know-Nothing Bohemians” appears in the Partisan Review, a critical response to the increasingly popular Beat movement. The social critic Norman Podhoretz, who had known Ginsberg since their undergraduate days at Columbia University in the 1940s, made an early case against what he regarded as a new synthesis of artist and degenerate in his 1958 Partisan Review essay The Know-Nothing Bohemians. Podhoretz intended to counter, or at least mark, what he saw as the rising tide of nihilistic anti-intellectualism from within certain (and increasingly popular) quarters of the American avant-garde. He had come to this conclusion gradually, but decidedly.

     After establishing the bona fides of his own more conservative and established New York intellectual faction, those he termed “The Family”, Podhoretz turned his censorious attention to the Beats, those “hipsters and hipster-lovers… young savages in leather jackets… [fostering] resentment against normal feeling and the attempt to cope with the world through intelligence.” Unable or unwilling to grant the movement any artistic merit in an aesthetic pose that rejected established artistic orthodoxy, Podhoretz found only thoughtless aggression and destruction, a “revolt of the spiritually underprivileged and the crippled of soul… who can’t think straight and so hate anyone who can… who can’t get outside the morass of self and so construct definitions of feeling that exclude all human being who manage to live, however miserably, in a world of objects.” The abandonment of tradition and form, in Podhoretz’s view, was the abandonment of civilization itself.

     The Beats saw themselves as excluded and threatened by the establishment. Podhoretz saw his own branch of New York intellectualism threatened by the Beats. However, in his alarm, Podhoretz refused to recognize the source of – and attraction to – the “primitivism” that vexed him. He also credits the Beats, circa 1958, with more influence over, or at least greater affinity with, the juvenile delinquents of the era than could possibly have been deserved. Podhoretz’s juvenile delinquents were certainly paying less attention the Ginsberg and Kerouac than Podhoretz himself was, and this was ultimately a fairly rarefied turf war between New York’s rivalling intellectual communities, with far more ink than blood being spilled in either camp.

     It’s tempting to dismiss Podhoretz as hopelessly out of touch, but it’s true to say that there was a developing cultural overlap between criminals and artists, which was fast becoming a central feature in the aesthetic itself. They occupied the same spaces on the periphery. Marginalization may have been a new experience for the Harvard graduates of O’Hara’s coterie or the Columbia gang, but their neighborhood had long been home to the outcast, and it was among these outcasts that the New York avant-garde took root. This was often a mutually beneficial cohabitation. Criminal association lent outsider street-credibility to these once middle-class artists, and the artists lent intellectual legitimacy to the down and out. Both were operating outside the mainstream, but depended on the mainstream for their livelihoods. Both communicated through necessarily opaque codes of belonging. Genet was as much an artist as he was a criminal, but without his criminality he would have lost much of his art. Neal Cassady’s criminality was his art. In 1953, while Ginsberg was taking exploratory steps into mainstream respectability in San Francisco, William Burroughs was living in Tunisia, addicted to heroin and teenage Arab rent boys, having fled Mexico after killing his wife two years before. Neal Cassady and Gregory Corso, neither of them long out of jail, were attempting to write – Cassady hampered by the complications of having, simultaneously, two wives and three children. Kerouac, already dishonourably discharged from the U.S. Navy on grounds of a “schizoid personality,” was being sued for non-payment of child support. Nine years before both Kerouac and Burroughs, along with Ginsberg, had been involved with their friend Lucien Carr’s killing of David Kammerer. As James Campbell wrote, “almost all have been subjected to psychiatric detention, or ‘observations’, and have been held in mental wards of one kind or another… [and] all have tried their hand at writing poetry, fiction, or memoir.” 

     Ultimately, it didn’t much matter that Norman Podhoretz held the Beats in such low regard. Podhoretz wasn’t part of their community, and they weren’t writing for him. In rejecting the established standards of both the mainstream and “The Family” they were (at least outwardly) rejecting any outside approval those groups could offer. They would rely instead on the critical judgements of their own countercultural elite. They gave their art artistic legitimacy simply by claiming artistic legitimacy. Podhoretz’s judgements were less than irrelevant, and his disapproval was worth far more. By rejecting academic or commercial verdicts, verdicts that lay beyond their control anyway, these artists rendered such verdicts meaningless, and robbed the traditional gatekeepers of their authority. Anyway, as Ginsberg shouted at Podhoretz as he was walking away from the poet’s apartment, “we’ll get you through your children.”

1959 – William Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch” published by Olympia Press (in Europe). In 1962, the U.S. edition would be published by Grove Press.

1959 – Ginsberg begins “Kaddish.” Ginsberg returned to New York in 1958 from San Francisco, by way of Paris and Tunisia. He had managed to avoid the “Howl” obscenity trial, had helped Burroughs edit his Naked Lunch manuscript, had sought out and irritated Ezra Pound, and now he was more or less home. He took up residence in the first of his East Village apartments at 170 E. 2^nd Street, and he would remain a resident of the neighborhood for the rest of his life. The neighborhood held some resonance for him. The Lower East Side was where his mother Naomi had first arrived as an immigrant child from Russia, and Ginsberg’s memorial poem to her begins with an associative walk through the neighborhood of her childhood in the wake of her death – attempting to summon her up through the streets themselves.

As I walk toward Lower East/Side – where you waked 50 years ago, little girl – from Russia/Eating the first poisonous tomatoes of America – frightened on/the dock - / Then struggling in the crowds of Orchard Street towards what? – towards/Newark - /Towards candy store, first home-made sodas of the century, hand-churned/Ice cream in backroom on musty brownfloor boards - /Towards education marriage nervous breakdown, operations, teaching, school,/and learning to be mad, in a dream – what is this life?

Ginsberg’s account of his creative process at

1959 – Kerouac appears on “The Steve Allen Show” and reads the ending of “On the Road” while Allen improvises on piano.

1959 – Ed Sanders, a classics major from the University of Missouri, moves to New York and transfers to NYU after reading Ginsberg’s “Howl.” Sanders arrived in the city pursuing the Beat traditions of Kerouac, Corso, and Ginsberg more than any other. As an aspiring poet, growing up in 1950s semi-rural Missouri, Sanders had been influenced by the works of “Olsen, Ginsberg, Dylan Thomas, Poe, Blake, and Eliot” and he enrolled in the University of Missouri in 1958, reluctantly prepared to shoulder a career in academia. Ginsberg’s Howl answered a lot of questions for him. As Sanders later wrote, it “seemed like, as a young man, about everything I’d ever been looking for in terms of a model for writing poetry and combining poetry with your personal life in a way that I thought would be appropriate.”

The timidity of 1950s American culture was swept aside as it dawned on an entire generation that there was oodles of freedom guaranteed by the United States Constitution that was not being used. Out of that knowledge a generation of Shellyan eleutherarchs arose, strengthened by the complex and beautiful trends of Beat/Objectivist/Black Mountain poetry, modern painting, left wing politics and jazz. One of the basic visions that inspired us at a time was the salvation of the American city. In my poetry I called it Goof City, a city of freedom for all to relax, where poverty was banished and wealth truly shared. It was the civilization for which the poet Charles Olson hungered, “an actual earth of value – to construct it.

     Sanders left the University of Missouri after his freshman year, taking up residence instead on East 11^th Street and studying Greek and Latin at NYU. He had taken up residence in the neighborhood at a time when the nature of both the neighborhood itself and the counterculture it hosted was in flux. No longer a hotbed of Beat poetry or Abstract Expressionism, but not yet the home of a more politicized radical American counterculturalism, both the creative and social character of the district were somewhat up for grabs and Sanders quickly set to establishing his own place within the pre-existing traditions of a previous downtown avant-garde, intent on bending its future towards his own expressive ends.

     Sanders was a young man in a hurry, and he sought to establish both a professional and a personal connection to the older generation, centrally to Ginsberg, from the beginning. On its most basic level, their ensuing friendship (which began through an introduction by photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank) was rooted throughout in mutual affection and admiration. They also shared a seemingly inexhaustible creative and promotional industriousness and an appetite for mainstream media attention, and in this regard their friendship would prove to be mutually beneficial. However, it’s worth remembering that Sanders had sought out the Beat poet at a time when the Beat movement itself was considered something of a spent force. Sanders writes in his introduction to Tales of Beatnik Glory:

Most of my generation laughed when they were called Beats. In fact, Beatnik and Beat were two of the great pejoratives of the era, but how magnetic and alluring it was to rebellious youth when the squares tossed the word “Beatnik” around with stupid abandon! It was as good as Turgenev’s “nihilist,” the centenary of which word occurred just in time for the birth of Beatnik.

Therefore, if Sanders can be accused of gaining from his connections with Ginsberg, it is an accusation equally applicable to the older poet. By aligning himself to the Beat movement through his association with Ginsberg, Sanders assumed the cultural gravitas of that historical legacy. Simultaneously, by aligning himself with the nascent hippie activist movement through his association with Sanders, Ginsberg was able to attain a more contemporary legacy that brought him to a younger readership, establishing a position and pattern that he was to maintain for the rest of his life.