Who Were the Beatniks? (Vanity)

There was a spiritual movement that, as it spread outward from the originators to those who thought the originators were cool, got cheapened and commercialized. The play and then the movie Hair did convey part of the charm but were seen by many who took a stereotyped caricature back home with them.

Coming from a northeastern college to a Sausalito houseboat, I was amazed by the hippies in California, who didn’t care where you were from or what you wore. I realized that was the essence of hippiedom, not black stockings and long straight hair and guitars.

Love the literature too. Remember that Jack Kerouac said in On the Road that we could have peace overnight. I always thought Salinger was influenced by the Beats too, although he is classified with the postwar Jewish writers: all those Zen stories in his later work and he surely had a grasp of the core of it and how it was congruent with Christianity.

I knew Ginsberg briefly in the eighties. He was a sweetheart but took no guff from the small-minded: You can come to my party but don’t bring books for me to sign so they will double in value. Most of what we know about the Beats is through a glass darkly at this point, but there was something real and true and world-changing at the core of both hippiedom and the Beat spirit.

I always thought Salinger was influenced by the Beats too, although he is classified with the postwar Jewish writers: all those Zen stories in his later work and he surely had a grasp of the core of it and how it was congruent with Christianity.

Thanks for the reply. I suspect Salinger came to his interest in Eastern religions on his own, since he was an older, more established writer when Kerouac and Ginsberg were still struggling and the works he read weren't always the same as the ones Kerouac or Ginsberg studied, but Salinger and the Beats were definitely moving in the same current in the 1950s.

I'm of two minds about the Beats. They really spoke to something in people at a certain point in life, and they still do. But it's not necessarily something you can build a society on. In a way their interest in Eastern religion was fitting, since those religions also talk about different stages of life requiring different actions and responses.

I thought of adding a statement to my post that I certainly don’t agree with the immorality involved in both the hippie and Beat movements. I’m glad you mentioned the Jesus Freaks. That was a good outgrowth from the tree. The blanket antiwar sentiment and the free love idea not so much.

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