By Matty Timmis
I’ve been obsessed with the idea of a ‘beatnik’, whatever that means, for quite a long time now. It started when I was fourteen; slinking through the sprayed and spattered side streets of a less than gentrified slice of Bristol, I stumbled upon a slightly ramshackle second hand bookshop. Already feeling emboldened by my adventure to a less than reputable part of town, and very much in the throes of the grease, grumpiness and cliched angst implicit in that stage of a middle class teenager’s life, I ventured valiantly forth. Creeping round the crumbling shelves, skimming the dog eared and moth eaten spines of reams of volumes of obsolete and puerile knowledge, I was about to capitulate to my budding reality of internet, xbox and wanking, so drab and musty was the poky shop.
But just as the vibrato of my yawn threatened to become too much to stifle, I saw it. Jack Kerouac’s On The Road. True to its nature it was lying down, sprawled out amongst an orgy of terse and commanding leather bound editions, boxed together, standing to their intellectual attention. The cover was black on the top half, and beneath was a stripe of mauve or violet, a deep hue on a shot taken seemingly from the underside of a car, mountains beckoning in the distance, the very white lines of the road bleary, leering dangerously close to the camera. My interests were piqued immediately, even the name ‘Kerouac’ had a charmingly melancholic timbre in the roof of my mouth (as a side note if I were ever to have a kid I think their name, or at least their middle name, would have to be Kerouac).
On the back a review: “the bible of the beat generation”. I needed no further enticement. The very idea of a bible for a generation, whatever that generation, “the beat generation”, entailed, was incredibly seductive in its certitude, its belief in its wholly comprehensive nature. Then I think I was beginning to feel the prickles of awareness that quiver through one’s mind when they become aware of the vast and transient community of the generation they pass through life with. Even the name of that generation sounded cool, ‘beat’, without any preconceived notions yet already connoting a down and out nature complimented by the snappy and upbeat cadence of the central vowels, inflecting it with a strange optimism.
I can’t remember if I bought it or nicked it, more likely than not I did buy it; I wasn’t as cool then as I now like to imagine. I set to work on it immediately, unusually sincerely, in the nearby park.
For the benefit of all those who, shamefully, are not familiar with the text, it centres round two friends criss crossing 50s America with minds relentlessly open; drinking, taking drugs, sleeping with women, and listening to jazz, transcribed in an endlessly fascinating “first thought best thought” prose, a style Truman Capote snidely described as “not writing but typing”. This was heady stuff for a sheltered young teenager, the kind of thing that really makes you dream, really makes you compare your prosaic life with the unrestrained energy leaping from the page. Pretty much immediately I set about trying to transform my pampered middle England life into the life of a bohemian, a free spirit, a beatnik.
Without cars, drugs, alcohol, girls, or the vast expanses of 1950s America however, it seemed slightly difficult to pinpoint precisely what it meant to be a beatnik. I felt pretty far away, in my suburban semi detached home, from the wild adventurers reeling through my mind. What does it mean to be a beatnik has quietly niggled at me since.
Webster’s dictionary defines Beatnik as thus:
“Beatnik (noun): : a person who participated in a social movement of the 1950s and early 1960s which stressed artistic self-expression and the rejection of the mores of conventional society’
Broadly: ‘a usually young and artistic person who rejects the mores of conventional society”
Well, the more technical definition is a bit lost on me, not least because, through my own misfortune, I don’t exist in either the 1950s or 1960s. Whilst I am certainly now older than I was when this question first occupied my mind, I would still describe myself as ‘young’, I would even say, at a slightly indulgent stretch, that I am artistic. Do I reject the ‘mores of conventional society’? Well readers I can disclose that I have not only tattoos and an earring, but a nose ring too, making me a veritable bastion of the counterculture.
Frankly though, I’m uncomfortable with the constraints of this definition. If nothing else, I don’t believe for a second that the nerds and virgins who write the entries in those things have the faintest idea of how to define something so culturally distinct from themselves. Beatnik by the dictionary is almost an anathema – it cannot be carved out from the parameters of such a rigorous and inflexible book, it is too wrapped up in desire and freedom, curiosity and hope – faith in the strange journeys we can stumble into.
So after a summer of fairly gentile bumming around western Europe I flew to Munich to meet two of my closest university friends. As is ever the case with a ludicrously skimpy travel budget, my journey there in itself was absurd, involving a creaking old absinthe bar, two dutch girls and a very uncomfortable park bench. That, however, is besides the point. I was still a civilian then, before my supposed ascension to the hallowed grounds of the true beatnik.
This then is the story of the closest I ever got to my teenage dream, where for a second I thought I really might be a beatnik.