Fifties (50 page)

But slowly things were beginning to open up. Gil Millstein, a talented and eccentric young editor and writer at
The New York Times Book Review,
called Holmes and asked him, “What in the hell is this whole ‘Beat Generation’ thing? What is this? Come in and let’s talk about it.” The result of their conversation was a piece on the Beat Generation in the
Times Magazine
in November 1952. Under Cowley’s auspices two sections of
On the Road
were published, one in the
Paris Review
and the other by Arabelle Porter at
New World Writing,
an important forum for experimental writing in those days.

At almost the same time Ginsberg’s career began to advance. He had gone to San Francisco to be near Neal Cassady. At that moment San Francisco was becoming the West Coast center of Beat culture. Its literary headquarters was the City Lights Bookstore. Named after the great Chaplin movie, it was the first bookstore in the country devoted to quality paperbacks. City Lights stayed open until midnight during the week and until 2
A.M.
on weekends. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, one of the owners, was a considerable poet himself and he also wanted to tie the bookstore to a publishing venture. In August 1955, he published the first of his Pocket Poets series.

That year Ginsberg had reached a critical moment in his life. It was time, he decided, to stop being an ingenue; he was twenty-nine, and he was tired of holding on to such casual jobs as market researcher, trying to find out which was likely to be the more successful advertising campaign for a toothpaste: “Ipana makes your teeth sparkle,” or “Ipana makes your teeth glamorous.” He wrote Kerouac, “I am passing, like all others, out of youth, into the world ... faced with financial problems that must be solved. How the hell are we going to get the $s to get to Europe, and when that $’s gone, what are we going to do? How can we live with no future abuilding? That’s what’s bothering me.” That summer he started to attend graduate classes at Berkeley for a master’s degree in English. He sent a copy of one of his poems to Kenneth Rexroth, a major figure in the San Francisco poetry world, who wrote him back that he had gone to Columbia too long and that his work was too formal—in effect, he was telling Ginsberg he had not yet found his voice.

Ginsberg decided that Rexroth was right; he would just let go, not think of a
poem
as such, but let his thoughts and feelings pour out. The result was poetry as if done to the rhythms and phrases of modern jazz, in his own words, “a tragic custard-pie comedy of wild
phrasing, meaningless images for the beauty of abstract poetry of mind, running along, making awkward combination (of images) like Charlie Chaplin’s walk, long saxophone-line chorus lines I knew Kerouac would hear
sound
of—taking off from his own inspired prose line, really a new poetry.” (In hindsight, there seems more than a passing kinship to the poems of Walt Whitman.) Ferlinghetti agreed to publish it, and Ginsberg, thrilled, wrote Kerouac joyously, “City Lights Bookstore here ... will put out ‘Howl’ (under that title) next year, one booklet for that poem, nothing else, it will fill a booklet.”

So it was that on October 13, 1955 Allen Ginsberg gave his historic reading of “Howl” at Gallery Six, a converted auto repair shop. The first line, now one of the most famous in American poetry, was a veritable Beat anthem: “I saw the best minds of my generation/destroyed by madness/starving, mystical, naked,/who dragged themselves thru the angry streets at/dawn looking for a negro fix ...” Ginsberg was dazzling as a performer that night. Kerouac was in the audience, with a bottle of jug wine, cheering Ginsberg on, shouting, “
Go, go,
” throughout the evening. “It had,” Ted Morgan later wrote, “an absolutely compelling incantatory quality, and seemed to be a manifesto for all the misfits of the fifties, the rejected, the deviants, the criminals, and the insane, who could unite under his banner.” “Ginsberg,” a joyous Kerouac told him afterward. “This poem will make you famous in San Francisco.” “No,” Kenneth Rexroth said. “This poem will make you famous from bridge to bridge.” Ferlinghetti sent Ginsberg a cable paraphrasing what Emerson had said to Whitman after reading “Leaves of Grass”: “I greet you at the start of a great career.”

It was not merely a triumph for Ginsberg, it was a larger victory as well for the Beats. Ginsberg, always generous, pushed Malcolm Cowley again on Kerouac, and in December 1955 Viking decided to publish
On the Road,
eventually bringing it out in 1957.
On the Road
offered a new vision of American life, from its hip opening sentence: “I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead.” It was to be a celebration of an alternative life-style. What Kerouac did, wrote Ted Morgan, “was to assert possession of a birth right—not through ownership, but through mobility. The book was a pamphlet of lyrical instructions for crisscrossing the great American landscape, geographical and spiritual.”

The old order tried to strike back. In May 1957, two officers of the San Francisco police, acting on orders from Captain William Hanrahan, walked into the City Lights store and bought a copy of “Howl.” They also had a warrant for the arrest of Ferlinghetti and the store’s manager. But Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti could already call on powerful supporters. There had been a positive review in
The New York Times
by the influential critic Richard Eberhart, and there was an introduction to the poem by William Carlos Williams, a towering traditional poet. All sorts of well-known figures in the world of letters were ready to testify to the poem’s importance, power, and legitimacy. In October 1957, Judge W. J. Clayton Horn decided that “Howl” was not obscene. Quite the contrary: “The first part of ‘Howl’ presents a picture of a nightmare world; the second part is an indictment of those elements of modern society destructive of the best qualities of human nature; such elements are predominantly identified as materialism, conformity, and the mechanization leading to war.... It ends with a plea for holy living ...”

It was all beginning to come their way—publishing contracts, requests to write for magazines, lecture offers for the unheard-of sum of five hundred dollars a night. Kerouac ultimately found fame hard and destructive, ending his life in a cloud of alcoholic rage and bitterness, but Ginsberg, who had felt so ugly and unattractive as a boy, loved flirting with success. Their success, above all, was a sure sign that the old order was changing. The walls were tumbling down.

TWO

TWENTY-THREE

I
SOLATIONISM AS AN END
in itself was finished. The Republican party had put on its international face and had chosen the man most identified with collective security and involvement with Europe as its leader. And yet internationalism—in the true sense of involvement in the world—was less the driving force than an international policy geared up to contain Communism.

The division within the Republican party, though, did not end with Eisenhower’s election. There were many in the Republican party who had gone along with the decision to nominate Eisenhower only because victory, any victory, was preferable to the sixth Republican defeat in a row. But that did not mean they
liked
Ike. They regarded him, Ike himself sometimes felt, as a figurehead, a sort of pretty girl with no mind of her own. At his first meeting with Republican professionals, in August 1952, Sherman Adams had seen a hard
look cross Ike’s face, and Adams knew the candidate was becoming increasingly irritated with their condescension. When the others left the room, Adams asked what was the matter. “All they talked about was how they would win with my popularity. Nobody said I had a brain in my head,” Eisenhower answered. It was, in fact, Eisenhower’s independence and the fact that he was new on the political scene that made him an ideal candidate: He served as healer to a badly divided and frightened nation.

Richard Nixon was assigned the job of reconciling the irreconcilable within the Republican Party. Dewey had recognized in him the ability to balance the internationalism of the Eastern wing with the anti-Communism and conservatism of the old isolationist wing. His economic policies were essentially Republican centrist leaning toward liberal. If there were occasional doubts about him in some of the old isolationist circles—a belief that he had sold out to the Eastern wing or that he was too pragmatic—then he immediately set out to silence such criticism by being a party workhorse, by going out and making endless speeches at county Republican dinners, by collecting due bills, becoming the ultimate party loyalist. In that he was successful, but the end result was that the contradictions of the Grand Old Party became his own.

If there was any politician in America who reflected the Cold War and what it did to the country, it was Richard Nixon—the man and the era were made for each other. The anger and resentment that were a critical part of his temperament were not unlike the tensions running through the nation as its new anxieties grew. He himself seized on the anti-Communist issue earlier and more tenaciously than any other centrist politician in the country. In fact that was why he had been put on the ticket in the first place. His first congressional race in 1946, against a pleasant liberal incumbent named Jerry Voorhis, was marked by red-baiting so savage that it took Voorhis completely by surprise. Upon getting elected, Nixon wasted no time in asking for membership in the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was the committee member who first spotted the contradictions in Hiss’s seemingly impeccable case; in later years he was inclined to think of the case as one of his greatest victories, in which he had challenged and defeated a man who was not what he seemed, and represented the hated Eastern establishment.

His career, though, was riddled with contradictions. Like many of his conservative colleagues, he had few reservations about implying that some fellow Americans, including perhaps the highest officials in the opposition party, were loyal to a hostile foreign power
and willing to betray their fellow citizens. Yet by the end of his career, he became the man who opened the door to normalized relations with China (perhaps, thought some critics, he was the only politician in America who could do that without being attacked by Richard Nixon), and he was a pal of both the Soviet and Chinese Communist leadership.

If he later surprised many long-standing critics with his trips to Moscow and Peking, he had shown his genuine diplomatic skills much earlier in the way he balanced the demands of the warring factions within his own party. He never asked to be well liked or popular; he asked only to be accepted. There were many Republicans who hated him, particularly in California. Earl Warren feuded with him for years. Even Bill Knowland, the state’s senior senator and an old-fashioned reactionary, despised him. At the 1952 convention, Knowland had remained loyal to Warren despite Nixon’s attempts to help Eisenhower in the California delegation. When Knowland was asked to give a nominating speech for Nixon, he was not pleased: “I have to nominate the dirty son of a bitch,” he told friends.

Nixon bridged the gap because his politics were never about ideology: They were the politics of self. Never popular with either wing, he managed to negotiate a delicate position acceptable to both. He did not bring warmth or friendship to the task; when he made attempts at these, he was, more often than not, stilted and artificial. Instead, he offered a stark choice: If you don’t like me, find someone who is closer to your position and who is also likely to win. If he tilted to either side, it was because that side seemed a little stronger at the moment or seemed to present a more formidable candidate with whom he had to deal. A classic example of this came early in 1960, when he told Barry Goldwater, the conservative Republican leader, that he would advocate a right-to-work plank at the convention; a few weeks later in a secret meeting with Nelson Rockefeller, the liberal Republican leader—then a more formidable national figure than Goldwater—Nixon not only reversed himself but agreed to call for its repeal under the Taft-Hartley act. “The man,” Goldwater noted of Nixon in his personal journal at the time, “is a two-fisted four-square liar.”

Nixon’s unwavering pragmatism did not work with everyone. From the moment he arrived in Washington, he exuded such odor of personal ambition that the old order was offended. Bob Taft never forgave him for helping to tilt the nomination to Ike. But that personal grievance aside, Taft had not liked him anyway—for Nixon
seemed to represent something new and raw in the Senate. To Taft, he was “a little man in a big hurry.” Goldwater later wrote that he was “the most dishonest individual I ever met in my life.” Even J. Edgar Hoover, who was so helpful to Nixon during the Hiss case and whom Nixon worked hard courting, decided early on that Nixon tended to take too much credit for himself. Hoover’s closest aide, Clyde Tolson, wrote in a memo to the director that Nixon “plays both sides against the middle.” Hoover noted on the same memo, “I agree.”

If Nixon set out to be the man who redefined the Republican political center in the post–New Deal, post–Fair Deal age, he did not, nor did any other young Republican politician, dare campaign by suggesting a return to the America that had existed before the New Deal. The phrase “creeping socialism” was about as close as they got to attacking the New Deal on its domestic reforms. Rather, the catchphrases were about a need to return to Americanism. It was better to attack Communism and speak of domestic treason than it was to be specific about reversing the economic redistribution of the New Deal. In fact, Nixon’s essential response to all issues was to raise the specter of Communism: “The commies,” Nixon told the
Chicago Tribune
’s Seymour Korman during his harsh 1950 senatorial campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas, “don’t like it when I smash into Truman for his attempted cover-up of the Hiss case ... but the more the commies yell, the surer I am that I’m waging an honest American campaign.” He was, he liked to say, the number one target of the Communists in America. In those early campaigns, he was, it seemed, a man who needed an enemy and who seemed almost to feel that he functioned best when the world was against him. Such men, almost surely, eventually do get the enemies they so desperately want.