‘In the warm New York 4 o’clock light’: Hypnotic Love for the Beat Urban
Photograph by Bruce Davidson / Magnum
Sokol Books, 239A Fulham Road. Late for my first ever ballet lesson, it was while perched in the passenger seat of my mother’s Citroën Saxo that I first heard the word “rubbernecking”. There had been a crash on the corner of Old Church Street and, while passing by, I had been cautioned to ‘Stop staring.’ I specify the exact location of this memory – outside the front of this small bookshop with a Punch and Judy-esque striped awning – to fabricate a link between literature and warped wonderment.
Burt Glinn photographing Earl Bostic at Blackhawk, San Francisco, 1960
©️ Burt Glinn | Magnum Photos
In the image above, we see a similar red and yellow pattern to the canopy of Sokol Books, but relocated geographically and temporally: Blackhawk nightclub, San Francisco, 1960. Rubbernecking and the Beat Generation, let us observe…
…America, ‘When will you take your clothes off? / When will you look at yourself through the grave?’ It was the rapidly augmenting urbanism of the 1950s in the states that hypnotised Beat authors and poets who stared on, repulsed, seduced, in equal measure, by the seedy streets of New York, the neon supermarkets of California, and the City Lights of San Francisco’s book store.
The cold sweats of dissertation days back in December, feverishly deliberating which literary movement I wanted to delve into, led me to buy a copy of A Coney Island of the Mind. The first three poems of Ferlinghetti’s collection commence with the sensory experience of sight – ‘we seem to see’, ‘we saw’, ‘The poet’s eye obscenely seeing’. This establishes a theme that courses throughout much of the Beat oeuvre, with Ferlinghetti and his contemporaries unable to tear their gazes from this ‘concrete continent / spaced with bland billboards / illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness’.
In the second poem of his collection, Ferlinghetti drags his reader on a modern odyssey, taking the template of Homer’s epic poem, and applying it to 1950s US society. I think one section that stands out, or perhaps calls out, is the depiction of ‘patriotic maidens […] wailing after us / and while we lashed ourselves to the masts / and stopt our ears with chewing gum’. Where the mythological sirens of Ancient Greece once attempted to enthral Odysseus, now it is the howling sirens of police cars in American cities that crave and successfully command the attention of lustful creatives.
The speaker of the third poem of A Coney Island of the Mind stoops to see ‘the surface of the round world / with its drunk rooftops / and wooden oiseaux on clotheslines’. Let us then move to look at Ginsberg’s ‘Sad Self’ who, despondent, recalls, ‘Sometimes when my eyes are red / I go up on top of the RCA Building / and gaze at my world, Manhattan—’. So distant, so intimate. Assuming an aerial position, allowing them to obtain a panoramic view of their cityscapes, feigning a sort of separability, these poets secretly gorge themselves on these urban sights. From stumbling, inebriated rooftops and the ‘machine’ of Brooklyn, right down to the intricacies of a petite bird-shaped clothes peg, or the ‘ants’ that live in Paterson; the eyes of Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg forever focused on ‘the strange suburban shores / of that great [America]’.
Considering this idea of fixation, obsession on a much more literal level, William Burroughs, in Junky, maps heroin addiction onto the blueprints of Broadway. It is Manhattan that is narcotic – junk is personified, cast simply as an aimless victim of this intoxicating city, a ‘ghost in daylight’ who ‘roams up and down the block, sometimes half-crossing Broadway to rest on one of the island benches.’
Cricked necks fixed the faces of the Beats firmly in the direction of soiled cities which sprawled before them. This increasingly urban America of the mid twentieth century was a ‘kissproof world’ that was both ferociously loved and passionately lambasted by the best minds of its generation.
Tilly is a third year undergraduate student of English Literature at Durham University. Despite being a heroically slow reader, Tilly has loved her degree and hopes to apply it to a role in journalism or communications in the near future.