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A BAYLY EXHIBIT REMEMBERS A GENERATION OF HIPSTERS by Matt Lorenz
Something bizarre is happening to the University of Virginia. Jefferson's annals of reason and order are giving way, it seems, to unconscious passions and joy and life at the risk of madness -- to the laws of thermodynamics, if you will, or at least one of them: The entropy of the universe is always increasing. Call it chaos imposed by the "real" world or Dionysian ecstasy or an unconscious Id burgeoning, even bursting, to the surface of the University of Virginia, but something is happening: things like the Psychedelic Sixties exhibit at Alderman Library (merry-prankstering Ken Kesey even came and told us all to smoke more pot), the theme of "Cool" at the Virginia Film Festival, and now, a Beat Generation reunion and photo exhibit at the Bayly Museum with poetry, jazz, and things that aren't usually attended with orange and blue ties. Stephen Margulies couldn't be happier about it. As gallery supervisor and curator of the Bayly, he put together the exhibit called Glory Days: The Beat Generation Photographs of Fred W. McDarrah, which is now open, and convinced McDarrah to attend and discuss his work at 2 p.m. on Sunday, November 1st. He made more calls and got David Amram (a Beat-jazz and world music composer) and Diane di Prima and Ed Sanders -- two poets I excitedly remembered and re-discovered in my Viking Portable Beat Reader -- to reunite and speak and read us their lives in a night of building poetry and jazz choruses at the Culbreth on Saturday, October 31. As a bonus, that night they'll also show the film Pull My Daisy, which was made by Beat poets Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and others. They'll even host a panel discussion on creating art spontaneously earlier that afternoon. (And all this in the same weekend. I'm "beside myself" with ecstasy.) They'll read their poetry, sign their books, and hang out with us toward the end of a century that only 40 years ago polemicized and persecuted them.
I love Stephen Margulies. Not only did he do all this for everyone in the U.Va. community (I often feel for me personally), but he did it the way the Beats would have done it, laughing with passion and poetry and energy and love and lots of run-on sentences. And as a result, his face and bespectacled eyes and light complexion look not a day older than his soul, which is as young as he's ever been. "The reason I actually like the Beats more now than I did when I was 16, when I first discovered them, is that they were self-deprecating," Margulies said. "They were humorous about themselves and put themselves down and didn't get on the mountain and throw rocks at people. They lived in a world in which you exchange poetry the way we exchange votes: Instead of bribing people with votes, you bribe them with your heart, with your genitals, and with your soul." Since Ginsberg and Burroughs died within the last year, and since there's been a recent resurgence of interest in the Beat Generation, and Kerouac's On the Road is now taught in American public schools and sent home as summer reading, and since this raging collection of life-poets and the generation that followed them is fading, not in intensity but in earth-minutes, much of this singing and reading will be done in honor of Ginsberg and Kerouac. It all began with them. It began with the now legendary poetry reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco in 1955 where Allen Ginsberg first read his poem "Howl" (written two weeks before for the occasion) and initiated a bi-coastal movement -- centered in Greenwich Village, on one coast and Berkeley and San Francisco on the other -- that instilled in the American consciousness a new sense of how far literary expression and freedom could go. It began with On the Road or "the book" (as interviewers and critics unceasingly call it) that, with a vision of America as romantic and grandiose as Walt Whitman's, sent a surge of impulsive energy into a generation of youth that sent them packing. That sent Ed Sanders packing in what must have been a whirlwind of energy and inspiration, because after reading On the Road and "Howl," he dropped out of school at the University of Missouri and hitchhiked to New York City to join the Beat Generation. If he hadn't, he'd have the same name, but he probably wouldn't be "Ed Sanders," internationally-known Beat poet, published in my Portable Beat Reader, and arriving in Charlottesville to read his poetry and tell us about his art and life. "I met Allen Ginsberg in 1964, Neal Cassady in '65, and Kerouac around the same time, ditto for Huncke, Burroughs, and Corso," he said. "I was younger than them, and I was closest to Allen. He was the hero of my early youth, then my mentor, then a good friend. I will be performing my 'Song for Allen' during my performance in Virginia." Standing beside a portion of the McDarrah photos, which read like a flipping picture book, Margulies animatedly explains that these particular photos were all taken in one night when, after driving cross country and arriving finally at McDarrah's house, Kerouac and a few others stayed up all night with bottles of gin and pots of coffee and composed a poem together. "I believe in art and poetry with an almost fanatical passion," Margulies said, "but one reason why I like the Beats is that they lived their poetry. They turned their lives into a poem, for better or for worse, taking great risks and great punishments." McDarrah's relationship with the Beats, not simply as an outsider looking in and finding a posed-for-the-public smile, but as a companion and friend, makes the Bayly exhibit that much more intimate and penetrating. "McDarrah was a Beat himself, has wonderful books on the Beats, including some recent ones, and knew them personally," Margulies says. "He was a close friend, he worked with them, helped them produce their poetry, and took photographs of them at the same time. They lived together in every way so that, in a sense, their bodies and souls would flow together." Ed Sanders admits that the radical and invasive lifestyle of his generation had its ups and downs. "The Beats had their flaws, but they celebrated the beauty of the American open road -- the incredible variety of viewscapes, vistas, cities, small towns, lonely roads, packed with compulsive Americans washed ashore from every weird circumstance in the world, literally," he said. Margulies associates the extremes of the Beat persona with the extreme things they've seen and experienced. "Even though one time they were ragged, scruffy, despised, and persecuted, they still had a kind of golden idealism that you almost never see nowadays," he says. "They combine seriousness with silliness and political activity with a kind of idealism that no politics could live up to. And in a way, that's the whole point. It's really soul they're talking about, not ideology." Kerouac, perhaps the least political of the Beats, could also be considered the most intensely idealistic, and this intensity carried over into his dedication to writing books and living poetry. "One thing I've discovered about Kerouac in listening to his tapes is that he doesn't need jazz accompaniment, though he often read with it at his readings," Margulies says. "His voice is jazz, the way he uses language is like scat singing, and the way he recites is almost like a jazz sax. He turns his body into an instrument for jazz." In this self-transfiguring lifestyle, Kerouac lived deeply and relentlessly in everything he did, and it could not last. He died in 1969, after years of intense drinking, at the age of 47. But it didn't always end like this. Ginsberg played a formative role in the political and cultural movements that followed the climax of the Beat Generation, when the beat-hipsters of the 40s and 50s gave way to the beatnik-hippies of the 60s. But even more important than the role he played, he played. He lived with violent equanimity and a now famous sense of personal irony, even into his last year. And the same goes for those Beats still living, Margulies assured. "One thing about Fred McDarrah, Ed Sanders, Diane di Prima, and David Amram, who are all coming down here, is that they're actually more healthy and vital and productive than ever," Margulies said. "They're extremely energetic and send out poetry the way the sun sends out sun-rays. They've proven, under the blows of experience and in the torture-house of reality, that poetry is something that can allow us to survive." But only for those who write it? Come listen and see.
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