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Dr. Heilbrunn is perhaps a little harder on the people he calls beatniks and fringies than they altogether deserve. They do have their musicians, their phophets, and their poets, of whom Mr. Allen Ginsburg is, I take it, a far from negligible example. But if he is hard on them, Dr. Heilbrunn is not unlike everyone else—except that he takes the trouble to try to understand the beatnik. Few groups in our society, it seems, irritate us as do the “beats.” Why?
Perhaps we find a clue in Dr. Heilbrunn's paper itself. I am not familiar with the language of the beatnik except for a few examples of doubtful authenticity in jokes and popular articles. Dr. Heilbrunn tells us that it is “coded by the flippant assignment of unexpected meanings to ordinary words.” But Dr. Heilbrunn could not better have described the style he himself employs in the introduction to his present paper. It looks, in fact, as if he, like most of the rest of us, is sufficiently fascinated by the fringies to emulate them. For not only does the beatnik parody and caricature the rest of society with its addictions, its confusions about sex, its experiments with dress, in many
of which he is simply going the rest of us one better, but we respectable citizens are, I think, also imitating him, as Dr. Heilbrunn a little does; we are seduced into adopting some of his speech, his dress (including the boots), and his view of life. And we dislike the beatnik so heartily partly because he fascinates us, we see ourselves in him, and we are drawn against our wills to adopt some of his ways.
This ambivalent attitude reminds one of Dr. Adelaide Johnson's observation that one reason children become delinquent is that their parents are unwittingly telling them to do so, and even showing them how; they are acting out their parents' own unacceptable impulses. That we can say the same of the beatniks is suggested by Dr. Heilbrunn's case reports and my own limited experience with such patients. We may go even further and su