In his essay “Herman Melville as the ‘Hip’ Icon for the Beat Generation,” Mark Dunphy draws what, after having read it, seems to be the obvious comparison between Melville’s work and that of the Beat generation. Melville’s style, both in writing and in life, set him far apart from his contemporaries, Dunphy begins, and explains how Edith Wharton, a distant cousin, even ignored his work and took him to be “what we might now call a mid-nineteenth century beatnik” (92). It wasn’t simply his “deplorable Bohemianism” (92) that excluded him, but the fact that, as Dunphy explains, he was actually born into very good stock. He ought to have been among the highest classes, like Wharton herself. While his liberal views gave his contemporaries a sour taste in their mouths, he gave the Beats inspiration with the way he, as Dunphy puts it, “castigates conventionality” (93).
Dunphy quotes Kerouac who stated about Melville’s character, Bartleby from his famous story, “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street” saying that Beat “meant characters of special spirituality who didn’t gang up but were solitary Bartlebies staring out at the dead wall window of civilization” (94). This quote puts Melville at the very center of what Kerouac and his contemporaries were doing, and Dunphy goes on to expose the myriad ways in which this was true through the conversation the Beats were having among themselves. He mentions a letter Kerouac writes to Neal Cassidy, revealing sympathy for the “screwing” Melville got in response to Moby-Dick–how it exhausted him. Kerouac apparently related with this feeling. According to Ann Charters, a Kerouac biographer, reading Moby-Dick led to a kind of revelation about his own On the Road when he realized Melville “was writing the autobiography of his self-image” (95) not of himself.
Ginsberg also enters Dunphy’s conversation, as he was also in correspondence with Cassidy on this topic, as well as with Carl Solomon in the time they shared at Columbia Psychiatric where they were reported spending much of their time reading Melville to one another. Kerouac and Holmes reported to have “shared certain things together. We read Melville together” (96). The fact that Holmes felt it was worth mentioning points to this experience as pivotal; important; weighted. A. Walton Lee, another important Beat scholar identifies the beats as a “new-born American Romanticism” (96), participants in a new American Renaissance, that was linked “in temper to Melville and Whitman” (96). Ginsberg even attributes his breath-poetics to Melville’s influence, as Dunphy notes, in his “Notes Written on Finally Recording Howl” as his “Hebraic-Melvillian bardic breath” (96).
Dunphy concludes the article with strong and beautiful language, noting that, even one-hundred years later, the Beats considered Melville to be a sort of Founding Father of the Beat generation. “All the leading Beat writers” Dunphy notes,” both beatified Melville’s life and work because they resonated with Melville’s having been, like themselves, HIP, in nature, all the way down to the bowels of his soul” (97).
I found Dunphy’s essay interesting, and prescient to our topics in the beat-sy schools of poetry we’ve been reading. The article was insightful though acted more as a survey of what scholars have said about the topic of Melville as a Beat-influencer than one that represented any of his own opinions or theories on the matter. It was published in A Journal of Melville Studies, which leads me to believe that perhaps this is a conversation that isn’t had in the circle of Melville scholars, and is therefor why this article was published there.
This reading led to more questions about the spiritual makeup of Beat poets, as well as Melville. The article has Melville quoting that he defies etiquette and ceremony, “except the Christian ones of charity and honesty” (93). I think the Beats would agree with this line of reasoning, but also embrace Eastern spirituality, whereas in Melville’s work other religions aren’t exactly normalized but looked upon as other.
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