Cold War Correspondents: Ginsberg, Kerouac, Cassady, and the Political Economy of Beat Letters - Allen Ginsberg - Jack Kerouac - Neal Cassady - Brief Article

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 2000 by Oliver Harris

To bring our narratives together, and to enable one to be read through the other, it might be said that where the Rosenbergs were found guilty of living their personal lives as political allegories, the Beats became notorious for seeing the details of theirs as symbolic cultural texts. But if it's true to say that Cold War ideology reduced the political to the personal--in the sense that dissent equaled deviance--it won't do to generalize that the "Beats' spontaneous, free-wheeling writing publicized their personal existence, and made it political" (Farrell 66). To say that the Beats--to prolong another generalization--invaded a well-policed public world with their wildly spontaneous private writing is to reify a categorical distinction that will not hold. Such a private/public binary misrepresents the complexities of and contradictions within Beat experience and aesthetic practice, misunderstands the historically specific interpenetration of politics and culture, and ignores what Derrida identified as a gen eral "crise de la destination" for which the letter is emblematic. If, as Ginsberg claimed, private behavior was not only the basis of their "cultural breakthrough" but also "the ultimate politics" (qtd. in Miles, Ginsberg 531), then it is fully understandable why the letter should occupy a vital, but not always visible, space in Beat cultural politics.

Historically linked to the romantic idealization of spontaneity (see Perry 77), for the Beats the letter represented a technology of self-expression and intimate communication opposed to the impersonal relations of commodity exchange and the controlled uniformity of modern mass media. Put another way, the value of Beat letters is the product of their position as not just unpublished but unpublishable writers: the likes of Ginsberg and Kerouac invested essential energy in correspondence during the early Cold War years, when their social marginality was also economic and cultural. For those undesirables denied voice or place by Cold War discourses, the letter embodied postwar American dreams of an alternative personal and social space. As William Decker observes, "the claiming of confidential, intimate, utopian space figures among the letter's genre-specific themes" (177). But Decker's frame of reference is nineteenth-century American letters, and the cultural meaning of this theme is historically contingent. [3] The defining fiction of the letter may sustain, as another critic of the epistolary phrases it, "our belief in the immediacy of truth and the communicability of lived experience" (Cousineau 28), but private letter exchanges always implicate technologies and economies of communication and desire at work in the wider social body. Cultural codes speak private desires: privacy is a fiction delivered by the post, and in the Cold War context spontaneity turns strategic, and secrecy tempts deceit as well as surveillance. As a result, dreams of a utopian alternative were compromised in both the most local and in the largest of terms.