Four men converse around a table
INTERVIEWER: And what do you do for a living, Bob?
BOB: For a living, I work as art editor on a magazine downtown, fortnightly. I'm a painter.
INTERVIEWER: Yeah. Have you seen much of beatniks elsewhere — say, outside Australia?
BOB: Yes, well, I was in San Francisco a little while back and I was having a look at some of the beatniks down there — the ones who congregate around Grant Street and North Beach.
INTERVIEWER: Are they genuine?
BOB: Oh, I suppose they're genuine, yes. Quite a number of them are. Of course, as with any movement, there are a lot of hangers-on.
INTERVIEWER: Must be hard to find a genuine beatnik, tell a genuine beatnik from the artificial variety, I imagine, because there's nothing you can grab hold of, is there?
BOB: There's very little you can grab hold of. The distinction is generally one of talent, I suppose. Or rather the distinction between the beatniks that one has time for and the ones that one just dismisses is one of talent. People like Kerouac and other beat authors one cannot dismiss because, whether you may agree with what they're saying or not, they are saying things of some importance to them and possibly to other people and they are articulate. But the ones that really aren't worth bothering about and the ones that aren't significant and the ones that occupy most of the news space in Sydney, at any rate, are the ones that just are doing nothing but sitting around like Winston Smith being quite a revolutionary in front of a cup of coffee in a coffee shop and doing nothing else.
INTERVIEWER: You think they're fakes in Sydney?
BOB: Fakes.
INTERVIEWER: But, altogether, if beatniks are creative, why don't they find discipline, why don't they have discipline? They seem to have none at all.
BOB: They don't because they're not specifically interested… Well, I wouldn't call beat a creative movement. The thing about beat is that it's a quest for experience. They just like to take in raw experience. They like to dig everything, man, you know. And they like to act like sponges and take everything in. And when they put it out, they don't apply the discipline, and so it comes out in a sort of inchoate, uncoordinated rather all-over-the-place hurrah's nest form.
INTERVIEWER: I can understand this. I'm a bit of a square myself. But what percentage of beatniks would you say, say, in America, the ones you've met in Grand Street and other places down the beach, were genuine?
BOB: Well, again, this word 'genuine', I think it's largely a matter of talent. There are quite a number of them that had a lot of talent.
INTERVIEWER: How do they live?
BOB: Well, they deliberately adopt poverty — many of them because they can't make money anyway. But it's interesting to note there are quite a number of people who are advertising executives during the day and beatniks by night.
INTERVIEWER: Oh, yes.
ADAM: The part-time beat.
BOB: Yeah, the pseudo beats.
INTERVIEWER: A part-time beatnik. That's really something, isn't it?
BOB: Yes, so it is.
INTERVIEWER: What sort of mind would a man have to be a part-time beatnik?
BOB: He's a fellow who feels he doesn't fit in, who likes to have a label to attach himself to. That's the trouble with beat — it's just another label.
INTERVIEWER: You find, like John does probably, that discipline is a very important thing. Inspiration without perspiration is a jellyfish.
BOB: Yeah, it is, it's a jellyfish — formless. Beat's the revolution at the moment of the formless against the mindless. That's the trouble with it.
INTERVIEWER: I wonder whether it'll last. What do you think, Adam?
ADAM: No, well, I don't see it can last because from what I can see there is beat poetry, there is beat novels. I can't see, though, any drama — this is the particular field in which I'm interested in — coming into the beat.
INTERVIEWER: And no beats have ever written a drama.
ADAM: No, well, I can't see it coming either, because they just haven't got the discipline or the coordination, the ability to put on a persona for an audience or to do it night after night. I mean, music and drama are the things I'm interested in. I can't see this disciplined coordination coming into the beatnik generation.
INTERVIEWER: Kerouac, with his novel, has put it all down.
BOB: Yes, but Kerouac's a writer. Kerouac knows, to some extent, how to write, and he has imposed these disciplines upon himself. But the majority of them don't — they prefer to live in a state of pure experience, they just like to dig.
ADAM: This business of absorption versus communication. I mean, the essential thing in the drama or music is communication — I don't think the beats can give that. They can just absorb the experience, but they can't communicate.
BOB: They can give it to one another.
INTERVIEWER: For what purpose? For no purpose?
BOB: Oh, yes, because it's self-fulfilment for themselves.
INTERVIEWER: They've got to go, man.
ADAM: Yes, that's it.
INTERVIEWER: And they travel a lot, of course.
BOB: They travel a lot, some of them. Others just sit in their coffee shops.
INTERVIEWER: You say there's no beat drama at all. They've written nothing for the theatre.
ADAM: No, except for the things like the one-man shows to jazz improvisations, things like this. Well, really, that's not so much communication. I feel it's not involving more than one person, for example.
INTERVIEWER: Yeah. But they do dig, don't they? They do dig some music. They dig Bartok, I think.
ADAM: But they're digging non-beat composers — I mean, people right outside the meeting. They dig poets like Ezra Pound, they dig composers like Schoenberg, for example, but none of these people could be described as beat. They're definitely people outside the movement.
INTERVIEWER: I asked you, Bob, how they lived — I meant, how do they support themselves?
BOB: Well, some of them send their women out to work.
INTERVIEWER: That's very praiseworthy, isn't it?
BOB: I think it's a very sound idea. However, there's also the endless chain of borrowing. I borrow from you, you from him, him from him, him from him, him from me.
INTERVIEWER: I can't see how that'd work out. Can you?
BOB: It works out somehow.
ADAM: Works out in the end. I think that's inevitable.
BOB: Some of them take jobs, of course.
INTERVIEWER: I wonder how long it will take before the beat generation dies out or develops into something else.
BOB: Can't say.
JOHN: I think that we're missing quite an essential point in here. You're saying a lot that these people haven't got the discipline, they won't produce, but this is just our point of view. And I think that it should be made clear that they haven't got the discipline because they are rejecting the discipline. They are aiming, I feel, at an informality in art. And this is a perfectly reasonable view and I think it's going to be an unsuccessful one, but it's one that's worthwhile trying. It's been tried before — it was tried in the '20s. But you must admit that they are getting what they want to get. It's not a lack…
INTERVIEWER: They're emptying themselves. They're emptying themselves and preparing for something else, perhaps.
BOB: This may be so, but it's not exactly informality — it's more a lack of form.
JOHN: Define the difference.
BOB: Well, there's informal writing and there's formless writing. You yourself are probably aware of the distinction. There's a relaxed type of prose which still maintains a form.
JOHN: Right, I couldn't call this formless.
BOB: No, precisely.
ADAM: They deny there's discipline right away, I mean, from the start.
JOHN: Anything which is constructed is formal, by definition.
BOB: Mm, yes.
INTERVIEWER: Could 'beatnikism' — to quote my own word — could beatnikism be an excuse for complete irresponsibility, in many cases?
BOB: It is, in many cases, but mainly in the cases of the hangers-on — the 99% who hang on — not in the 1% who are really concerned with the implications of their philosophy.