Pekar’s “The Beats: A Graphic History” is compelling
by Jeremy Frank, Staff Writer
As one of the most widely recognized groups of writers and artists in American history, the Beat generation has over time undergone a high degree of mythic canonization; indeed for many they serve as the archetypes for creative and social rebelliousness. It's all too easy to lose the human side of their stories amidst the sex, drugs and jazz (their primary musical motivator) for which they are famous. Fortunately, Harvey Pekar and Paul Buhle's new book "The Beats: A Graphic History" does an excellent job of bringing these countercultural idols back down into the realm of flesh and blood.
The book is divided into two sections, the first of which tells the interweaving stories of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. The second section spends time exploring and bringing to light some of the more obscure beats, such as D.A. Levy, Diane Di Prima, Slim Brundage and numerous others. The section on Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs is rendered in stark, plain language, which matches the vaguely paranoid, heavily noir-ish black and whites of Ed Piskor's illustrations. As with any graphic history, much has been truncated and whittled down about these three men's lives. Yet each story is remarkable in that it manages to convey each of these three men in a way which casts an extremely down-to-earth, critical look at their lives and decisions.
Kerouac, we learn, despite his numerous affairs with other men and women of color could be quite racist and deeply homophobic. Perhaps more surprisingly, towards the end of his life, he retired to the suburbs (the most supremely un-Beat-like of locations) and became a fan of Eisenhower's laissez -faire-era domesticity. Ginsberg openly endorsed pedophilia; Burroughs was a blatant misogynist who robbed people at gunpoint while living in New York in order to make money, in addition to murdering his wife while playing a drunken game of William Tell. This is not the work of some cloying fan boy: Pekar's matter-of- fact, boilerplate prose delves unflinchingly into the very worst aspects of three very different lives. He shows them as the often depressed, deeply flawed, fragile people that they were, rather than as the irreproachable mad-geniuses that their reputation often presents them as.
The second section of the book however, is the real standout. It contains portraits of 16 of the less well-remembered writers, more regional members of the Beat generation and the important contributions which they made to American art and culture. These portraits are short, some clocking in at only two pages in length, the art work in them often beautifully abstract. These brief vignettes showcase a range of talents and voices that provide the real context for what the Beat generation is and how it formed through a network of friendships and collaborations that stretched across the country. The book also contains several graphic essays about locations such as the famed Six Gallery, where Ginsberg read "Howl" for the first time. A particularly scathing piece called "Beatnik Chicks" reveals the often tragic, perennially ignored women who produced work in the Beat generation but who have constantly stood in the shadows of the more outrageous male members of the movement.
At a little under 200 pages, "The Beats: A Graphic History" is by no means a definitive statement about the movement and the individuals in it. However, given its brevity it does provide a tremendous amount of non-sugar-coated biographic and contextual information in a form that is visually arresting. Much like the historical figures in the book did, Pekar, Buhle and the rest of the artists break down the prevailing myths which cling to these men and women, and show the vitality and creativity underneath which permanently shifted so much of American culture.
Volume: 129
Issue: 15
Section: AE
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