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In a most readable and graphic style Dr. Heilbrunn paints a pictorial answer to the rhetorical question regarding the thermal state of the Beatnik. However, as one “square” to another, I think he applies his thermometer a little too late. The Beat Scene, as a social phenomenon, is dead.
By the time Kerouac wrote “On The Road” in 1957, and Norman Mailer wrote his essay, “The White Negro,” also in 1957, it was late in the life cycle of the Beat Generation. In Venice West, North Beach and the East Village—the bourgeoisie have preempted Greenwich Village—the psychedelic, free swinging, free-love scene continues with ever-increased momentum, but the social identity of the Hipster and the Beatnik have faded; even their argot is no longer “in.” The high priests of the Beat Generation, Kerouac, Mailer and Ginsberg, who defined and ordained it, and endowed it with a messianic mission, have survived but unfrocked. James Baldwin in 1961 wrote one of its epitaphs. In a scathing article in “Esquire” he returned the patois of the Hipster to its rightful owner, the Negro jazz musician.
Aside, however, from the identity change that Bohemia has been undergoing since the early 60's, various students of the youth mystique have called attention to the vulnerable softness underneath the dire need to keep one's “cool.” Paul Goodman, in his excellent chronicle of adolescence, Growing Up Absurd, explains the answer to Dr. Heilbrunn's question in the very meaning of the word “cool”: “… a man keeps cool in an emergency. If there is always an emergency it must imply that the danger is internal as well as external.
As spoken by a young Beat, it means, “I do not feel out of place, I am not abandoned and afraid, I am not going to burst into tears.”
Even Yevgeny Yevtushenko, following a visit to Greenwich Village, wrote in 1961 in “Girl Beatnik”:
Everything strikes her as false everything—from the Bible to the press, The Montagues exist, and the Capulets but there are no Romeos and Juliets.1
With re