Discussion of Gert Heilbrunn's Article, How “Cool” is the Beatnik?

I hope the disrespect which the title seems to indicate may be forgiven, for it is intended to make a dramatic didactic point. “Nigra” is a term in the coinage of insult for black Americans. No one who cared about them would knowingly use it. “Kike” is in the currency of contempt for a Jew. Kind people would not use it intentionally, and unwitting use would hardly be expected from an expert in the field. “Beatnik”—the key term of the good Doctor Heilbrunn's “How ‘Cool’ is the Beatnik?”—has just that status: insult to the group referred to. And not even good folk-insult, but an epithet coined for the purpose: a smart-alec invention of “Time” magazine, compounded out of “Beat” (a self-attribution) and a Yiddish diminutive and contemptive, “nik,” as in No-Good-nik or Nudnik (a nothing!). Even at the time of the coinage, the mass put-down, anyone but a “Time”-nik knew that something of tremendous social significance and powerful spiritual force was moving among the young who adopted or accepted the label “Beat.”

But if I bypass the bad beginning and substitute for my title the more respectful “How Informed is the Doctor?” and for his title, “How ‘Cool’ is the Beat?” I am still at a loss for a point of departure. For, first, being “Beat” had two quite different meanings in two recent ten-year periods; and so did, coincidentally, being “cool”; and at no time was being the one an ingredient or aim of being the other, or, indeed, comfortably compatible. So the question, even as politely amended, has all the air of “How courtly are the ‘Hell's Angels‘?” Neither on their self-definition nor on our expectations

should we anticipate such a conjunction.

One would not wish to make so much of the problems posed by the title if there were some other way to determine just what is the population Dr. Heilbrunn aims to pick out for description, and then to test the description by a confrontation with adequate experience. But how to proceed? By objective signs? Or