Baldwin did not share Mailerâs fascination with the Beats and their âpsychopathologyâ. He had met Kerouac at parties during return visits from Paris in the mid-1950s, but took little interest in him. He was personally fond of Ginsberg, but was cautious of Burroughs and his liking for guns and drugs, and he differed from Mailer over Naked Lunch: âItâs not a book,â his later impromptu judgment on Burroughsâs novel went, âitâs a convulsion!â.
Baldwinâs general view of beatniks was that their hipness and their cool were artificial. How, he reasoned, could it be otherwise? How could they know what âhipâ really meant? What did they know of what it cost to be âcoolâ? When their ersatz bohemianism failed them, they would simply go home and âtake over the family businessâ (a deliberate hyperbole, probably inspired by the knowledge that Burroughs was in line to inherit his familyâs adding-machine business). The privileges which the young whites rejected â voting rights, education rights â were the same things being fought for at the very moment, at a cost of lives, by Negros in the South. Beatniks and hipsters who chattered on about âthe black manâs codeâ and the âexistential synapses of the Negroâ should have had the decency to sound embarrassed when reminded of it.
What Baldwin resented was what most beguiled Mailer: the way in which hipsters appropriated and exploited the souls of black folk, without proper respect for the experience of the people in questionâ they wanted âsoulâ without considering the history that distilled it. No beatnik had been denied a place to live in New York, or anywhere else in his native land, because of his race. If Allen Ginsberg was ejected from his home, or from his college, or from a cocktail party or a restaurant, or had to leave the country, it was because he had declined to accept society on its terms, not the other way around. From the point of view of Baldwin, or Richard Wright, or Langston Hughes, - each of whom had found a peace of mind abroad that they could not expect at home â this was a luxury never to be experienced, and therefore contemptible. The black manâs survival depended on gauging the temper of the status quo and co-existing with it, progressing down every path a step at a time, to see how far he could go and how much society would take. The drop-outs had drawn the mark of Cain on themselves; the black man had been born with it, in a society which repudiated him.
If it was the wish of the Beats, the beatniks, the hipsters, and so on, to reject and revolt, there was nothing Baldwin could do to stop them; but it was asking too much that he endorse their adoption of his âcodeâ.Â
Shortly after he attended his friend Cordierâs Death of the Beat Generation party in New York, Baldwin began work on an essay about Mailer. In it he quoted a passage from Kerouacâs novel On the Road:
At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver coloured section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night. I wish I were a Denver Mexican or even a poor overworked J*p, anything but what I so drearily was, a âwhite manâ disillusioned. All my life Iâd had white ambitionsâŚ.I passed the dark porches of Mexican and Negro homes; soft voices were there, occasionally the dusty knee of some mysterious sensual gal; and dark faces of the men behind rose arbours. Little children sat like sages in ancient rock chairs
After repeating Kerouacâs words, Baldwin followed through with the perfect counter-punch: âThis is absolute nonsense, of course, objectively considered, and offensive nonsense at that: I would hate to be in Kerouacâs shoes if he should ever be mad enough to read this aloud from the stage of Harlemâs Apollo Theatre.
