Beat Poets of Venice West
By Ann Arens (from research and personal
experience by Grace Godlin)
Across the
country, suburbs comprised of cookie cutter houses were proliferating and
pent-up consumerism was running rampant after the end of WWII. It was the 1950s,
the era of ultimate conformity. At the same time, small groups of poets,
artists, and musicians were coming together in New York, San Francisco, and
slightly later in Venice, California, with a lifestyle that flew in the face of
these widely prevailing values. They were known collectively as the Beats or
Beatniks, and when they came to national attention they were ridiculed and
satirized for their bongo playing, excess of hair, spacey (“like wow
man”) language, and confrontational poetry.
Los Angeles native, Grace Godlin, a 27-year
resident of the Canal community, recently started a personal journey of
re-discovery of the Venice Beats. Her playground growing up was Venice Beach.
Later as a college student she visited The Gas House, a Venice coffee house that
was a Beat hangout.
“When I was
young I was attracted to the iconoclastic, going against the grain, because
there wasn’t anything like that, and there was this pressure to conform in
the ‘50s. And I did a good job of conforming. I was attracted by the
sensation and the shock, the rebelliousness. The art I saw at The Gas House
wasn’t what I was exposed to in Art 1A at
UCLA.”
In spite of feelings of
being an outsider, Grace was drawn to the exotic scene at the Gas House, which
was located at Market Street and Ocean Front Walk. “It was a brick
building. I remember it being dark and shadowy, and it seemed somewhat menacing
to me. They would have poetry readings or literary discussions. There was a
bathtub in the center of the room, and sometimes there would be people in the
bathtub reading poetry. I remember bongos and the sandals and beards and the
unconventional art all over the
walls.”
Grace kept a low profile,
just ordering her coffee and not lingering for long. “I wanted to be
connected to this movement, but I thought it was too risky. I wish I could have
shed all those inhibitions, but I didn’t. Yet I knew that I was drawn to
these people because they were questioning and not accepting the status quo -
something I didn’t have the courage to do
myself.”
Her recent exploration
has helped Grace flesh out her youthful impressions with more information about
who these poets were and their place in literary history. “Now I’m
looking at it with a more informed view thanks to all the writing that has been
done about this period,” says Grace. “And it’s amusing,
enlightening and absolutely
fascinating.”
Looking beyond
their eccentric facade, the poets and other artists of Venice West stood for a
rejection of middle class life and materialistic values.
“It’s a shuck,” was
a phrase they used to express their
outlook.
“My interpretation of
that phrase,” says Grace Godlin “is that they looked at the media,
at the entertainment industry, at government as manipulative and exploitative.
They were con games to those young poets and artists.”
Social critic Lawrence Lipton
characterized them as ‘disaffiliated’. The anti-middle-class
lifestyle they adapted was an extreme reaction to materialism. Lipton described
it as ‘dedicated to
poverty’.
Lawrence Lipton, a
controversial character of the Venice West scene had written
“who-done-it” novels in Chicago and then moved to Santa Monica to
write film and radio scripts. Himself also a poet, Lipton moved to a cheaper
address in Venice and gathered around him a group of young struggling poets and
musicians.
The Sunday afternoon salons
at his Craftsman house at 20 Park Avenue featured poetry and discussions about
literature, jazz, and art that lasted into the evening and even ended up on the
beach overnight. The salons would evolve into the Venice West
poets.
Older and better educated than
the young poets, Lipton saw himself as mentor to the group. At the same time, he
was taping their conversations and preparing to write a book. “It was
almost like Margaret Mead doing her studies of Samoa,” comments
Grace.
Lipton felt the Venice West
poets deserved to be recognized on the same level as the East Coast Beat poets,
such as Alan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs, as well as San
Francisco Beats Kenneth Rexroth and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. But the resulting
book, The Holy Barbarians seemed to many to be more exploitation than serious
study of the group and Lipton was regarded as a promoter and pontificator. A far
better book, according to Grace, is Venice West: The Beat Generation in Southern
California by John Arthur Maynard, which takes a critical look at Lawrence
Lipton and focuses more on the poets themselves and what brought about the
movement.
“You live your
life,” says Grace “and your life IS your
philosophy.”
“A lot of the
writers didn’t seem to think very deeply about a lot of this,” she
continues. “Maybe that was a part of the Beat attitude as well. It was for
the moment, much more
instinctive.”
And why did they
end up in Venice? “The rents were cheap,” says Grace “and the
area had a history of being tolerant about a lot of eccentricities. And also the
climate, the beach. This was a poor person’s beach community. You could
live here cheaply. So since so many of them wanted to dedicate themselves to
their writing and their composing or painting, Venice allowed them an
opportunity to do that without having to work eight hours a day at a
conventional job.
Stuart Perkoff, a
transplant from the Midwest, was the poet leader of the group. Other poets
frequently mention his impact and his guidance. Perkoff established the Venice
West Coffee House on Dudley as a hangout for artists and a way to make a modest
living without actually
working.
“He was able to do that
for a while,” says Grace, “but you can only sell so much
coffee.”
Ironically, the Beats,
who turned their backs on such aspects of society as the mainstream media became
its focus after the publication of The Holy Barbarians. In Venice West, John
Arthur Maynard recalls a time when, from the vantage point of a walk street
rooftop, a group of the Beat poets watch as a tour bus stops and a mass of
tourists spreads out all over Speedway in search of Beatniks. “They
thought their little artists’ paradise was being invaded, and they
resented that,” says Grace.
Also
alarmed by the unwanted notoriety, local “concerned citizens” and
business interests joined forces to try to eliminate what they perceived as an
unsavory element. They were able to get the police commission to investigate
whether the Gas House had the proper entertainment licenses. Eventually, it was
demolished in 1962.
“I want to
honor these writers,” says Grace Godlin of the poets and artists of Venice
West, who never achieved the recognition of their counterparts in New York and
San Francisco. “They were struggling to find their voice in a time that
was stultifying as far as pressures to conform. Whether or not they were great
writers is for others to determine. I think the act of doing what they did is
worth honoring. They contributed to the literary and cultural history of our
city.”
Reprinted with permission
from VOCAL, the Newsletter of Voice of the Canals (VOC), the resident
association of the Venice Canal Community.
Posted: Sat
- July 1, 2006 at 05:12 AM