| There was a different kind of poetry and there was often wild free jazz, and there was both the desire and the occasion for people to jump up and shout. |
| I was a Teddy boy at school. When I got to art college, within about ten seconds, I realised that Teddy boys didn't go to art college. In fact they were people whose hair went in the opposite direction. |
| As Abrams had noticed, teenage culture in the fifties was overwhelmingly working-class. It was the fifteen-year-old school-leavers from the secondary moderns who had the money to spend on smart clothes and pop records. The children of the middle classes, plodding on through grammar school towards a place at college, felt rather left out. |
| This generation of the brightest and best was prey to a mood which was partly the urge to cry sour grapes at the affluent society, and partly a genuine impatience with the stuffy materialism of Macmillan's Britain. Their relative poverty in the midst of plenty alienated them not only from their working-class contemporaries but also from their doing-very-nicely-thank-you parents, who were buying cars, fridges and washing-machines and urging their children to knuckle down and 'get their qualifications' so that in due course they too could have fitted carpets. |
| The generation gap was further widened by the educational process itself; these sixth-formers were learning about things of which their mums and dads were ignorant. They were liable to come home and babble at the tea-table about T. S. Eliot, Salvador Dali, Jean-Paul Sartre or Leon Trotsky. They poked fun at Dixon of Dock Green and sneered at the new cocktail cabinet. They asked awkward questions about the sagacity of the Daily Express, the importance of wearing a collar and tie and the existence of God. |
| The sensitive seventeen-year-old, feeling the alienation which is a normal part of teenage experience, but feeling it more acutely because of this economic and cultural isolation, was ready for a new philosophy. As it happened, there was one to hand. |
| It had been thrown together during the early fifties by a loosely-knit group of American writers collectively known as the 'Beat Generation', but the appeal of poets Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and of novelists Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, had more to do with life-style than with literature. It had to do with aimless travel, non-conformism and the search for the 'ultimate high', which it was hoped might be obtained through Zen Buddhism, saxophones, sex, drink, dope, bongo-drums, growing a beard or any combination thereof. |
| The young British intellectual and the American beatnik were facing much the same problem. Both were in revolt against a national mood of smug consumerism; both were fascinated by a hedonistic and unselfconscious lifestyle they could never share: in the British case, that of the working-class teenager; in the American case, that of the 'hip' negro. |
| Norman Mailer, in a footnote to his classic analysis, The White Negro, draws a distinction between the hipster and the beatnik, but by the time the influences had crossed the Atlantic they were thoroughly muddled. Only the purists worried about clicking their fingers on the off-beat, when and when not to wear 'shades' and which drugs you should pretend to be addicted to. The basic drive was really all that mattered, the perennial hunger of the intellectual, 'sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought', to achieve self-forgetfulness in some mind-blasting cosmic orgasm. |
| Moreover the stew was further enriched by the addition of Parisian flavourings. Paris, after all, had been the traditional home of bohemianism and now it had acquired an intellectually-respectable philosophy called existentialism. Everybody knew somebody who claimed to understand it, but all that most of its adherents needed to know about it was that it approved of casual sex, Gauloises and Juliette Greco. |
 |
| / can remember Juliette Greco particularly. I rather fancied looking like Juliette Greco. I had a white fluffy duffle-coat which I used to wear until it practically ran away. I mean you wore the same thing day after day after day. The other thing was black polo-neck sweaters. |
| 'Look Back In Anger' was a big hit at the Royal Court and Jimmy Porter in Osborne's play plays the trumpet a bit and says lines like 'Anyone who hates jazz hates life!' He shouts this at some neighbour who moans about the loudness of his trumpet-playing which actually, whether by accident or design, was not much good. You heard this guy rehearsing and you sympathised somewhat with the complainant, but at that age, lines like that represented the youth rebellion. |
| These Byronic figures, swapping philosophical bons mots in their seedy salons, were also aware (though they might not have admitted it) that their image impressed the hell out of some rather attractive girls. |
| I seemed to go in for 'unsuitable' men. I had a taste for shady characters. They were called 'Bohemians'; they spent their time in the cafes in Soho, sitting round talking, drinking red wine and cups of coffee, and most of them were either painters, musicians or 'writing'. Almost everybody was in the middle of or just about to write a book. They were poseurs actually, but nevertheless they were exciting people to meet and talk to, and they educated me. And the hunger for knowledge that there was around at that time! |
| As well as all this drinking and socialising, there was suddenly the 'sleeping around' bit, and this was the rebellion against your parents, you see. You were against your safe middle-class homes. You were doing all these naughty things... |
| I remember hours of sitting and talking in coffee bars about all the things we saw wrong, and particularly about these - as we saw it - empty people living their lives in their suburban houses, looking after their gardens, going to work every day, coming home every night and doing nothing else. And our conversations in the coffee bars were about putting the world to rights. |
| It was to do with having a beard, wearing thonged sandals and writing poetry. I knew the Prince of the Beatniks. He wrote a book of poems called 'Rave'. It's funny stuff. He sat in this coffee bar in which he had some sort of share, or he was friendly with the owner, and he declaimed poetry. He would start a poem and we would say the next line and he would scribble it down and say 'That's a wonderful line. I'm going to use that.' |
| The American beatniks were devotees of modern jazz, and some of their British imitators acquired the addiction to Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane. |
| In certain kinds of modern jazz, especially in be-bop, it was traditional, when a player was really ‘going’, for the audience to start stamping and shouting 'Go, go, go, man, yeah, wow!', to join in and shout and yawp and screech, and often that sort of orgiastic atmosphere was developed. |
| Older fans of modern jazz despised all that: |
If you were deeply moved you might allow your left earlobe to twitch, but it would be a subtle twitch. |
|
