The Typewriter is Holy by Bill Morgan Free Press HK$224
This book about the Beat Generation poets and novelists plays out like an intellectual soap opera.
Author Bill Morgan, an archivist and researcher, pays scant attention to the works of the protagonists. He prefers to focus on their frequent sexual couplings - often with each other - their drug abuse and their alcoholism. It is an account rather than a history, so it offers little analysis of how the lives of the subjects influenced their work. But the lurid, rambling tales of Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs et al make for entertaining reading.
Whether the Beats constituted a literary movement in the 1950s has often been debated. They were few, and their works were strikingly different in style and content. Burroughs' famed 'cut-up' method of writing - he worked by assembling cut-up pieces of text from newspapers and books - had little in common with Kerouac's stream-of-consciousness commentaries or Allen Ginsberg's spiritual poetry. Neal Cassady, one of the most important Beats, never produced any work at all.
It was the press who accorded the group of friends the status of a movement after the long-awaited success of Kerouac's debut novel On the Road. The writers themselves thought they were reinventing American literature. But the papers focused on their free-loving ways, their drug use, their many run-ins with the law and their anti-establishment stance.
Morgan defines the Beats as the group of friends who collected around Ginsberg, described here as 'the vortex of the Beat phenomenon'. While others have used the same argument in respect to Kerouac, it's a fair starting point. The author then moves forward chronologically to set out their successes and misdemeanours. The bulk of the book focuses on the big four of the group - Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg and Cassady. But less famous players such as Gregory Corso are given space.
