Described as a “cluster novel,” Tales of Beatnik Glory
illustrates the lives of those who roamed the Beat
streets of 1960s New York. Taking a hindsight vision of the Beat Generation as it melded slowly into
hippiedom, edward sanders investigates a time
when poetry and folk singing were radical acts and
everyone, from university professors to distraught
mothers-in-law, came face to face with the “deviants” of the “rucksack revolution.” As he writes in
“The Filmmaker,” “With a generation readily present
who viewed their lives as on a set, there was no need
to hunt afar for actors and actresses. What a cast of
characters was roaming the village streets of 1962!”
Sanders writes in “The Poetry Reading,” the
novel’s opening story, that “it was impossible for
the pulse-grabbers at the throat of culture to deny
the beats.” They became a palpable force during the
1950s and 1960s in cities like New York where rebellion against all forms of social control was the norm
of the day. From protests against injustices such as
racism and war to illicit drug use and free love,
Sanders maps the “scene” in its often bizarre and
hilarious transformations where the main propulsion, he writes, “came from a desperate search for
some indication that the universe was more than a
berserk sewer.”
A master of satire, Sanders pokes fun equally
at authority figures and at his Beat characters. In
“The Mother-in-Law” the denizens of the “beat
scene” miss “no poetry reading, no art show, no
concert in an obscure loft, no lecture, no event of
sufficiently rebellious nature,” and when looking
for an apartment, a prime consideration was “how
long the door would hold up in a dope raid.” Thus,
from the authorities who would not allow poetry in
a café without a cabaret license to the “weekend
beatniks” who would “pay a pretty penny for genuine flip-out garb,” to the “microfilmed transcriptions” of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
Poetry Operations Division, Sanders surrounds the
era in an aura of the ridiculous. In “The Cube of
Potato Soaring through Vastness,” Sanders even
chronicles a university conference on “The Death
of the Beat Generation,” a typical academic farce
of co-option at which Sanders’s book flatly sticks
its tongue out.
Yet, in the midst of the fun, Sanders does not
shy away from the sensitive subjects of the time.
For every Beat accomplishment, for every social
more that was wounded, there was a victim of oppression and excess, an amphetamine-wasted body,
bragging “I lose trillions of cells everyday, man,
grooo-VY,” or shrieking as does Uncle Thrills, one
of the novel’s many strung out junkies, “I’ve puked
my life away here, I tell you. . . .”
In “A Book of Verse,” the novel comes full
circle. Sanders autobiographically describes his first
run-in with allen ginsberg’s “howl,” describing the shock it delivered to his placid, midwestern
worldview. The novel ends with Sanders leaving
for New York to become a poet, pointing the reader
right back to page one.
Jennifer Cooper