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I want to bid you good evening and welcome to the second in the lecture series presented by the Brandeis University Club of New York and I first of all introduce myself Joseph Kaufman dean of students at Brandeis University the subject for tonight's discussion is their generation it is the subject of considerable interest on many college campuses particularly urban universities it is of literary interest of interest as a social phenomenon. And some would consider it as a symptom of the alienation which many young people experience and trying to adapt to the standards of the problems of our society in this anxious age my role will be that of chairman or moderator and since we have gifted spokesmen on the program I will only intrude when it becomes necessary. Is there a Beat Generation our first speaker is a man who has been called the spokesman of the Beat generation although it is my understanding that he dislikes this title is a native of Lowell Massachusetts a former student at Columbia University author of numerous articles and books putting the town in the city on the road. And most recently the Dharma bombs I'm pleased to present Mr Jack Kerouac. Oh. How close. The question is very silly because we should be wondering tonight it is there a world that I can go and talk to five ten twenty minutes about is there a world because there is really no world because sometimes I'm walking on the ground and I see right through the ground and there is no world. And you find out. That they asked me to write an article about the bee generation and it fits right in with the question of the day. It's called The Beat generation and it's the article supposed to be about my relationship. To the beat generation stuff it's a very funny article so I never made a speech already OK this article necessarily have to be about myself and. Not a picture of me on the cover of on the road results in the fact that I had just gotten down from a high mountain where I'd been for two months completely. And usually I wouldn't have a common My hair of course because you have to get right to highway and all that usually want girls to look at you as though you were a man on a wild beast no comma's yet. I'm like Oscar Levant I got home my heart. But my parents friend Greg course all been the shark. And took pics that was hanging from a chain said well listen we're. Back so I spent several days around San Francisco going around with him and others like that the parties are parts jam sessions bars churches. Talking portrayed the streets walking talking God in the streets at one point a strange man he said what rights he got to wear that my own gang of musicians and poets told him to call back in a million years and. Recently Ben Hecht said to me on T.V. Frank speak out your mind what's wrong in this country why is everybody afraid. Was he talking to me. And I want to pick up my mind against people you sneeringly brought up. The Pope people like that eventually that he would sneer at Drew Peterson. The world he wanted this is his idea of freedom because of freedom. My God but the universe is not one vast sea of compassion actually a veritable holy honey beneath all the show of personality and. In fact who knows but that it isn't the solitude of the oneness of the essence of everything. The solitude of the actual oneness of the unborn of the unborn essence of everything. The troop you are forever hood that big blank potential that can read forth anything it wants from its pure store that blazing bliss my thirty five with. The transcendental diamond compassion this is two. Years old. Why should I attack what I love out of life this is be live your lives. Love your life. And when they come in stone you at least you will have a glass house. But that while they can picture of me and cover of the book on the road where I look so beat goes back much further nine hundred forty eight when John Cleland author of the one good book the one and I was sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the last generation subsequent extension and I said you know John this is really a Beat Generation and he said that's it that's right maybe since I'm supposed to be the spokesman of the Beat Generation I am only the originator of the term and around at the time of the generation it should be pointed out that all this guts. Right back to my ancestors this is still this paranoid. Back to. The most independent group of nobles and all over Europe and kept fighting like in France the last war although a big one posing in the merchant ship snorted when I told them my answers were Britons in Cornwall Britain likely to swoop down steal your nets. Right Breton white Irishman. Mad boy does make a difference there is no doubt about the Beat generation at least the core of it might be being a swinging group of new American men intent on Joy irresponsibility who would have a dying man or an empty road. And the beat generation goes back to the wild parties my father having nineteen twenty in the one nine hundred thirty S. New England that was so fantastically loud nobody could sleep for blocks around and the cops come they always give me a drink. It was back to the wild and reading childhood of playing the shadow on the wind swept trees of New England Refel autumn Refel leaf. And a howl of the moon man on the sand bank totally caught up in the tree he was an older guy fifteen the maniacal laugh of certain neighborhood boys and cracking the furious humor of old games playing basketball along after dark and. Good battles crazy days before World War two teenagers drink beer and financial ballroom to work off the hangover from baseball and sadly. Followed by a diet book and our father's war straw hats like that. Goes back to the completely senseless senseless babble of the Three Stooges. The ravings of the Marx Brothers the tenderness of Angel Harpo at heart to in fact there is a poem I've written about. How I always love you all Harpo but it just seemed like an angel the last time and played the great harp of go when did you steal the software and bug spray the guests when your brother friend rain in your sunny. When did you change your last blonde across the millionairesses Ron with a bait hook on a line patrolling for your bicycle I want to last you out of puff your white flower face with a fish barrel covered. Harpo's that lion I saw you with how did you treat the midget and the giant Harpo in your recent nightclub appearance in New Orleans where you won't. Pull them out did you still emerge from your pockets another on the wrists with your power of silence and then. As a guy in India you know places he's made a vow of silence was barefoot and there's nothing but hot showers showers possible. So this all goes back to the. Felix the Cat the irrational brick. To Laurel and Hardy in the Foreign Legion to the call them horrifying the persecutors of the ghetto. The quiet sage in the movie about India I'm concerned about the plot said. That the giggling old owl Chinaman trotting down the sidewalk of. Course back to the holy old a rabbi warning the Bloods parameter and here. You have to warn. You. Now this is university we're here to teach right now I don't think that I can teach anything to any of you any more than teach me because the Lord said that the attainment of enlightenment is neither to be considered. A low state everybody equally attained because everybody equally knows as I'm getting Burke says that lightning strikes in the blue sky. To everybody. That. I dedicate this poem. When I read the poem. No not in. Any way at all your minds and I'm out of my mind and you're out of mind and I'm out of my mind let's not make any noise not make it like Boyd. But one final point. I have to finish my thing my dad I went out and beat your head in. Unless you beat my head. This poem I dedicate to human suffering and human salvation you know listening to those loves multitudinous. I told you out you for Love's mother lovers multitudinous boneyard of the cage the spilled milk of human. Destruction of silk kerchiefs by dust storm caressed of heroes blind folded posts murder victims admitted to this life skeletons bartering fingers and joints the quivering meat of the elephants of kindness being torn apart by all. Conceptions of delicate kneecaps fear of rats dripping with bacteria Golgotha called the hope. The hope that believes of autumn against the would have both. Seahorses delicate imagery of. Sentimental I love you no more death by long exposures defilement frightening ravishing mysterious beings concealing their sex pieces of the Buddha material frozen slice microscopically and more to the north. The seventh God it's more than the sands and it's like kissing my kitten in the belly the softness that there are of the world war that will get. Yes I know that. Thank you Jack Kerouac. Three other speakers will address themselves to this topic Our next speaker was born in London England educated at Oxford University is considered the novelist spokesman for England's angry young man another appellation author of Lucky Jim among other publications and presently a visiting fellow with the rank of lecturer at Princeton University and its creative writing program I am very pleased to present Mr Kingsley Amos. For. Ladies and gentlemen it's a very difficult often I must correct. I take it that my main function here if I have wonderful is to bring you news from England where there's a good deal of curiosity about America's Beat Generation both as a literary movement if it is that and a social phenomenon and emergent group and psychological novelty if it's any of. The prettiest don't know their way around this thing and to that extent I'm typically British and so I hope to learn something tonight I've already learnt something. As well as if possible imparting something. But anyway louder or near anyway an impression is going up on both sides of the Atlantic that the American Beat Generation considered for the sake of argument as a group of writers have opened a branch office in England or according to some accounts of enters into a kind of spiritual and moral amalgamation with an already existing concern the angry young men and so we find this and solitary the Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men simply appearing here and it has. Been pretty modest collations and best places to magic. And we find in the Detroit Free Press to all appearance a test of reasonable literacy and sound mind explaining to his readers that America's angry young men call themselves the Beat Generation so nice to have it put around that way and we find me here tonight. Now I can't discuss Mr Kerouac or his associates with any pretense of. Or or impartiality but I can say something about people. Well is that an angry young man generation is there a group of writers dedicated to protesting about the stagnation of contemporary English life the frustration imposed on everything original and creative the abandonment of role model effort Alternatively if you don't like the angry young man idea very well is that a bunch of chaps complaining in presence of US about the way they've been treated being nasty about the queen and so on. Instead of getting down to a decent job of work. However you care to phrase the question realises the same. No. There is no movement of this kind in England the idea that there is has been a creation of literary middlemen journalists in desperate search of something that will draw more than a yawn from the editors battered countenances and conceivably a flicker of interest from readers of the middle pages or part of it you can trace if you really amassed to the cult are you for that everybody is supposed to have in England as well as here and certainly something of the kind of been needed to explain the selection of the middle word in angry young men I'd have you know that I'm better preserve than most of them. But. To attribute use to a set of people averaging about thirty five years old seems a bit odd even if it's kindly meant. That more or less dispose of the young part as regards the man is that aspect here at least I should like to feel I have a claim of sorts. Together with so many of my contemporaries. And more debatable than that perhaps is the angry thing are people angry about the condition of Great Britain are there writers who take their stand on such anger Well it is one John Osborne whose first play look back in anger made a tremendous sensational it was first produced in London about two and a half years ago and in this the here Jimmy Porter did make something analogous to the series of complaints about present day Britain that I just catalogue stagnation frustration and so on. Porter was widely taken as the voice of a generation but I don't feel it was anybody's voice much except Osborne's which is as it should be I don't feel either you see the thing that really is the hope is stacked in place the people make it out to be naive and say there's more opportunity more the billeted and the rest of it in a better society now than at any time since the war and perhaps further back than that still tended to be angry about of course there always has been and in a society you care to name and discontent of the way things are run apart from being jolly healthy and all that is permanent in Western civilization as some of the forms of it change and I said just now that I was born as angry that's his privilege and his distinction and if it is that if all the other writers have been found all together under the angry young man label were laid into a and I can't think of one who consider him consider himself part of a movement literary or social or ideological or psychopathic. Angry or protesting or destructive or psychopathic whatever you like and all these people good and bad are doing what writers have always done and this. Is what it says here anyway this is what I thought might be applicable to the beat generation as well they're all working as best they can in their own way and if they were trying to have any value it will have the kind of value that imaginative writing is always had as a series of statements about human character and human relations of course they've backgrounds contemporary within it. Can't be and can't afford to be anything else. If characters were checked shirts and jeans this tells us something about them whatever it may say about a check shirt and jeans ethos or way of life or out local ideal or neurosis or generation is entirely safe and. This is the right way to look at things and it seems pretty obviously that to me how is the impression grown up that there really is for instance an angry young man movement it's because of the literary middleman that I mentioned a few minutes ago it's characteristic of the journalistic approach to put people in pigeon holes and save the reader trouble and exertion. It's easier to have novels and plays pre-digested than to face the grueling task of making up and mind about them because works of art have an annoying habit of being different from one another. And requiring a fresh effort every time you start on one how much more comfortable to find out in advance but a whole lot of them are really all the same they're all angry or beat or something or other but this kind of treatment may lead to a temporary increase in sales and a brief burst of notoriety but when the bell tolls it will probably told pretty hard not to feel more and satisfactory modes of locomotion than a motoring and decrepit bandwagon which is the state they'll get into after the first couple of years again as usual the bandwagon goes on being enlarged even while it's falling to pieces and it seems that everybody under the sun is being shut out of this one in England anyway. Anybody under pensionable age who can hold a pen is being. Propelled into the act. And the National Front is a broadening all the time and any day I expect to see for a virus Pasternak pressed into service. Isn't particularly young but he is a man fairly angry. And right about France where I sat down who isn't a mad. Or angry but is young and I suppose she is a bit reliving the feat when you come to think of it what with all that Scotch and all the sports cars. And already lots of people who can't hold a pen and have the the dreaded label stuck on them any American who likes Marlon Brown and. Any Englishman who doesn't mind John Osborne. Any Frenchman who listens to Sydney Besh am traditional jazz and soon of course any Swede who listens to Gerry Mulligan on modern jazz any Russian ever cast longing eyes on an American shirt and any citizen of the Republic of India who likes to drink. A label can be put up with right it's merely inaccurate the time to throw it away is when it's so all inclusive as to be meaningless there is no angry young man movement the may conceivably be of Beat Generation but I very much doubt it thank. You enough. At. Thank you very much Kingsley Amis our third speaker. Is editor of The New York Post and has been since nine hundred forty nine is a graduate of Columbia University where he was editor of the Columbia Spectator former editor of The Nation author of numerous articles and books including revolt on the campus labor Baron and age of suspicion he has also addressed the senior class at Brandeis within the last two years I am pleased to present this to James Wexler. Despite in this symposium because. I guess that I am one of the few on reconstructed radicals of my generation and much of what has happened in the last twenty twenty five years has challenged many of the things that I believe in deeply and yet on the other hand my basic sense about what I care about in the world what I fight for what I believe in is remarkably unaltered I have to say to you that with due respect or Mr Carro act that I I see no really major point and the kind of organized confusion is a life is complicated enough without trying to make it a palm. And yet to May The astonishing thing after all these years of of our time in our century which have been cruel and difficult years is that we can still find find myself so far as Pasternak and he is only in name a symbol that all over the world there does seem to be a sense of survival. Of human values and decency which same the mate to be the only things that give meaning to life and sad as things have been on many areas and I do not consider the Herman Rockefeller race one of the larger tragedies of work time. It seems to me that the impressive fact. Is that there are survivors and that there recur and there is renewed among young kids all over the world in the sense that there are values of decency worth fighting for and even giving one's life for there was a very young man named Felix Cohen who died when he was forty six and he was the son of Maurice Raphael calmly wrote a great essay which has meant a great deal to me in my life in which he argued that the astonishing thing about our world is that given all the for violin the turmoil in the sadness it does seem to be true that certain ethical values do re-emerge am the children grow up sensing them and understanding I do not happen to be a religious man in a conventional sense but I guess I do have the sense that what gives meaning to life is the survival of these values and so it is that there are people all the time all over the world who when they see cruelty going to injustice and intolerance and bigotry off the rest many things to fight against these incredible conditions now I know there is a view that this is probably because they were dropped on their heads when they were small child. But I thought that I ought to cast rats at that point rather well when he said that if we really believe that the only people who have an additional instincts in the world of those who are drop them they had their babies it's very hard to make any sense out of life and the fact the matter is that course we don't know what it is that makes each one of us believe or care strongly about anything but I find it rather hard to believe that that what gives survival and continuity to the best things in the human tradition must necessarily reflect the disordered sex life of one's parents I think that there are there are values that have transcended the difficult and complicated conditions of human existence and I guess I think that it is a sad thing about America now but that what is regarded as the Great Revolt in the great representation of the then an orthodoxy is what is called The Beat Generation because I guess it has very little meaning a million after listening to it spokesman tonight I must say that I find myself. Groping in the darkest fusions the what the hell is about. There is the right for thank God for all of us to scream and shout and do anything we damn plays in public there is also I think the responsibility for us to try to give two to the people in our society some sense of what matters and what is important and what we care about people say so often that there are no issues any longer that everything was settled by the New Deal in the fair deal. But there really aren't any great differences in political life and to some extent that's true and yet we live in a time when there are two things that seeing the made to be worthy of everything that is within us one the fact there is something called the hydrogen bomb which can caricature and make a mockery of anything that we call civilization and the other is the quest for human equality which has become the dominant and decisive issue of our lifetimes in America and so it never is SAME I'M A really that there is nothing left to fight for or that there was nothing worth arguing about in our society I think that these two issues and there are those but they are secondary and less important are plenty for the next ten twenty or thirty years. And I guess all that I am pleading against is the notion that there is some virtue in a kind of organized confusion as in which says that there is really no meaning left in life I was interested in Mr Carroll around phatic Lee Atwater to Walter pater because I remember when I was Columbia where we read the pall of hard jam like flying and it did seem that this was a pretty damn simple way of solving life's problems Well that was a long time ago and where many of us are much older now I think that the bait generation as a symbol is there if I may say so of do reverence to its partisans in the audience sort of a joke and the issue is not whether there is a Beat Generation but whether there is a civilization that will survive the next decade and I think that a minimum of responsibility and human intelligence required is that we would face that. It is just too easy to run away from the world. If my children were here I would urge them to recognize that there is no involved in that kind of flight and. Will. Our final speaker is an eminent social scientist an anthropologist with born and educated in England came to the United States in one hundred twenty seven received his doctorate at Columbia University has served in many academic capacities occluding chairman of the anthropology department at Rutgers University has been known as an expert on the subject of race and was instrumental in the preparation of the classic UNESCO statement on race a number of years ago is the writer of numerous articles both popular and scholarly and author of the fallacy of race the natural superiority of women and man his first million years I am pleased to present Dr Ashley Montagu. Following Mr Wexler beautiful address for which I could not agree more on. The demonstration I think so beautifully of the fact that many of us tend to equate freedom with libertinism. Whereas I think it is possibly more correctly equated in the words which lot act and so adequately I think describe freedom when he said that freedom is not the liberty to do what you like but the right to be able to do what you Will Forte and some of the value is that Mr Wexler has referred to I think will always remain for human beings of the gods by which they can steer their course through the rather rough shows and shadows of life which they're likely to encounter I have been asked to write down my remarks and that I am not in the habit of reading them I felt that this might be best in that I would enjoy about as much time as everyone would on this program namely about ten minutes and this is what I propose to stick to and in preparing this talk I thought that I might begin in something like the following manner as perhaps the most appropriate ceremonial way of opening my remarks the question is is there a Beat Generation and I would ask in return how Beat can you get not to know the answer to a question like that a cleaner on Holmes to whom Mr correct has referred this evening in a recent article in his squad. That breviary of the fluctuating lead bachelor. Defined to beat as being at the bottom of your personality looking up. Now not to know that there is a Beat generation and what it is suggests an overdetermined concerned with one's own problems that disables one from digging the house of the other cats around one. Such a while even though he lived in the village might not know that so many other couples living there were really trying and that there are plenty of squares in the village besides Washington and charity. But. The ending that I might be thought not to be treating the subject with the seriousness it deserves I decided to forgo this opening. For I would not wish my inflection to be misunderstood as maybe human aid by citing the example often a young man who when exasperated turned to a young beatnik and said to him Do you know what good clean fun is and the beatnik replied No What good is it. I have. As. Raw that amateur observer of the contemporary seeing I've little doubt the existence of something that resembles a Beat Generation I cannot agree with those who maintain that the term strictly applies to a literary school of which Mr Kerouac is the god if not the economist and sister certainly the bee tractors belong to the beat generation but they are only the most particular part of it to be tried to simply and faithfully writing about themselves and others like. The question is whether the beat writers are describing a genuine and widespread phenomenon which just lead to it's a substantial part of a whole generation my answer to that question is that I think they do there is in my opinion a Beat Generation and numerically I believe that it is a quite sizable dimension but quite clearly not everyone who is born within what we take to be the conventional number of years for a generation that is the last thirty years give or take five or more years is a member of the Beat Generation and there are many who were born before all who are quite as clearly beatniks. The term Beat Generation at the most and refers to a segment a segment not a whole generation but to a segment of a generation most of whose members were born within the last thirty or so years I am here concerned to discuss by using the word discovered in its Elizabeth and seems the MOX by which the run of the mill beat may be recognized when I think of the type of the beatnik I think of the late young streaming actor James De he was idolized by millions of adolescents for the very reason that he expressed in his appearance mannerisms and attitudes toward life what they felt themselves to be even the manner of Dean's tragic and gratuitous death was entirely consonant with what the beat generation thinks not only of death but of life that it is a kind of Russian Roulette the gun is primed and sooner or later someone is bound to pull the trigger patriotism is definitely one of the distinguishing marks of the beat. Beyond all the old speaking except categorized back cultural rootlessness a detachment from traditional bad news and. Alienation from themselves they've abandoned the old morality in the name of a new morality in the attempt to free themselves from those disorders which traditional morality seem to them to have produced in the world the world of moral chaos the world they never made the world that continuously threatens collective annihilation and which intimations of impending doom are an every day experience the unremitting stresses of which produce the human exhaustion that is the apathy of the contemporary add on the beat generation will have no part of this apathy is strictly for square. The only conformity is to nonconformity hands to be beat is to be extremely individualistic and bent on discovering the world for oneself in a manner which constitutes impressive testimony to the profundity of the moral breakdown that has occurred in the West in his autobiographical novel The subterranean published earlier this year Mr Kerouac puts it all very touching when he writes quote It was just another big crashing in the night and all for nothing waking up. In the morning with a final hangover that said to me too late. And got up and staggered to the door through the debris and opened it and went home and at home I wondered around couldn't stay in the house couldn't stop had to walk as if someone was going to die soon as if I could smell the flowers of death in the air and I went in the South San Francisco railyard and cry and put in short these other children who were failed by their elders in England they became Teddy Boys and became angry young men yeah they become beatniks it will of course be the common response of those who produced this segment of the generation the one I think can Paul be to deny responsibility for them and self-righteous lead to condemn the members of that generation for being what they have been caused to become a generation of confused children and wondering in the night helplessly crying in the wilderness their elders made and Mr Kerik puts it in once more deep in the dark pit of the night under the stars of the world if you are lost you are lost pool no one cares and quote what I am trying to say is that it is not condemnation or content that is called Fall but compassion and understanding that the Beat Generation is not something either to bemoan or disown but a suffering confusion of human beings crying out for sympathetic understanding. The Beat Generation represents the ultimate expression of a civilization who is modeled by you have broken down and in many ways what is even worse a civilization with little paid for conviction in the values that propensity to believe. It's ideal values are one thing but it's a real value is the value is by which it lives are quite another are ideal and real values are in conflict the Sermon on the Mount and the principle of competition are simply not compatible with one another and this fact gives rise to the great type talk receive a society that preaches the one and lives by the other and it gives rise among other things to a D. Marlise ation of the sort which results in. Human beings living in a society in what in which such mutually Eric can silence all such conflicting and false value as the dominant are likely to be confused and confused. Those who subscribe to such values damage not only themselves to wreak havoc upon their children many of whom constitute members of the Beat Generation the beatniks know that there is too much that is wrong with a nonbeing mix but they are totally confused as to why it is that what is wrong is wrong their cult of think is of no help nor is resort to a satanic cults and eastern religion whatever it is they are in revolt against We must take care that the an icky that is so apparent in the Beat Generation is not mistaken for anything then it is namely a signal ob distress a cry. A refusal to accept defeat at the hands of the unloving lovers who made them what they are we owe a debt of gratitude to the beat writers for so forcefully articulating what the less vocal members of this generation feel and think. We've.