In the Presence of Absence: The Beat Goes On

In a New York Times Magazine article of November 16, 1952, called “This is the Beat Generation,” author John Clellen Holmes-who made the term Beat Generation more widely known through that article-said, “The problem of modern life is essentially a spiritual problem” (Holmes, 1952). To be beat is to be beaten down (absence), and to be beat as in beatitude is to be spiritually alive (present). This oxymoron with its Janus face of defeat and elevation, this condition of madness and transcendence, raises many questions. Were the beats sociopathic or spiritual? Were they, in Richard Hofstadter's 1963 book, a cult of alienation and moral nihilism, or were they, in his words, “adolescent, romantic anarchists with an infantile disorder” (Hofstadter, 1963, p. 420)? John Clellen Holmes saw them as “less violent, more spiritual.” Were they “motorcycle thugs, bohemian drug addicts with no responsibility or political involvement” (Gold, 1958, p. 84), or mystics on a spiritual quest to defy materialism and sexual repression; dropouts who lived in voluntary poverty, poets and philosophers who, in Nietzsche's words, were beyond good and evil as a positive world-affirming act?

One day when I was 17-popular in my high school with a clique of five girlfriends who pledged to be “friends for life”-I opened a book I had taken out from the library. It was Jean Paul Sartre's Nausea. As I looked out of the window of my second-floor bedroom in the quiet suburb of Maplewood, New Jersey, and saw the tree on the front lawn just as Sartre had done in Nausea, I saw, as he did, the gut-wrenching eternal presence of the meaninglessness of life. Did I mean life in the late 1950s, life in suburbia, life in Eisenhower's America, life as a 17-year-old with a set of matching cashmere sweaters and skirts, and a father who was a psychoanalyst and a mother who had a decorator, a hairdresser, and off-white wall-to-wall carpeting throughout the house? Or did I mean life per se? When I read On the Road and How