Steven Womack

Popular Cultural Media Representations of Beat Culture, or Jack Kerouac Meets Maynard G. Krebs

I was born in the early ’Fifties and came of age during the tumultuous and often terrible decade of the ’Sixties. But before the ’Sixties, I was a child of the television age. Like many young boys of that era, shows like Hopalong Cassidy, The Lone Ranger, Howdy Doody, Amos & Andy, Wagon Train and many others had a subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, influence on what I became as I grew older. As the end of the ’Fifties decade approached, one of my strongest influences from television was the character Maynard G. Krebs, the wonderful Beatnik supporting player on Max Shulman’s The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. Even as a child, I was already beginning to experience a certain disillusionment, even disenchantment, with many aspects of my own life and the world around me. I often felt myself an outsider, so it was no great surprise that I—like thousands, perhaps millions of my generation—identified with television’s depiction of the ultimate outsider, Maynard G. Krebs.

Maynard G. Krebs was television’s reflection of the disillusionment and disenchantment that characterized the Beat Generation. It is widely accepted that the phenomenon of the Beat Generation arose out of a kind of despair that emerged in the wake of the cataclysmic destruction of World War II. While the great majority of the millions of returning veterans in the post-war era came home, married, had families, got jobs and lived their lives, there was a small number of veterans, and even civilians who had not fought, who experienced at least a massive disruption in their lives, and at most unspeakable horror. They began to discover that America somehow didn’t fit their ideas of America anymore. The lives they’d led before the War didn’t work anymore. The young writers who were just beginning to investigate these sensibilities in their own work—Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Philip Whalen, William Burroughs, John C. Holmes—needed something to crystallize their ideas, to bring them into focus. This something was the conception of the BEAT. As Ann Charters, who has made virtually a career of studying Beat writers, especially Jack Kerouac, notes in The Portable Beat Reader, the word beat arose out of a need to focus this disillusionment and malaise: “The discovery of the word ‘beat’ was essential to the formation of a sense of self-definition among the earliest writers making up that cluster that would later call itself members of a ‘Beat Generation’” (xvii). The word itself, then, became a kind of rallying cry for a literary movement.

As history records, Jack Kerouac became the first writer to coin the term “beat” when applied to the new generation of American writers.¹  With the publication of On The Road in 1957, Kerouac quickly emerged as the leading voice of this new generation of writers. In late 1958, Kerouac spoke at Hunter College on the origins of the Beat Generation and in June, 1959, Kerouac adapted his address to an article in Playboy magazine, entitled “The Origins of the Beat Generation.” By then, it was clear he had already developed his lifelong resentment of the way the term was depicted in the mass media. He also outlined his deeply religious, almost mystical, sense of beat sensibilities while complaining that a crucifix he wore in the original cover photo for On The Road had been airbrushed

The story of how Herbert Huncke, a Times Square hustler and junkie, muttered to Kerouac in 1944, “I’m beat” and Kerouac’s subsequent adaptation of the term has been well documented in a variety of sources. Kerouac himself wrote that he first used the term beat generation in a conversation with John Clellon Holmes (author of Go and The Horn) in 1948.

out by the publisher and other publications, with the single exception of The New York Times:

I mean it sincerely, God bless The New York Times for not erasing the crucifix from my picture as though it was something distasteful. As a matter of fact, who’s really beat around here. I mean if you wanta talk of Beat as “beat down” the people who erased the crucifix are really the “beat down” ones. . . . I am not ashamed to wear the crucifix of my Lord. It is because I am Beat, that is, I believe in beatitude and that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son to it. . . . So you people don’t believe in God. So you’re all big smart know-it-all Marxists and Freudians, hey? Why don’t you come back in a million years and tell me all about it, angels? (32)

Kerouac’s obsession with mysticism and Catholicism is only a part of his conception of beat philosophy.

To Kerouac, the Beat Generation had its roots in his own history, back through generations in his own family: “It goes back to the 1880s, when my grandfather Jean-Baptiste Kerouac used to go out on the porch in big thunderstorms and swing his kerosene lamp at the lightning and yell “‘Go ahead, go, if you’re more powerful than I am strike me and put the light out!’” ( 32). And he continues:

The Beat Generation goes back to the wild parties my father used to have. . . . It goes back to the completely senseless babble of the Three Stooges, the ravings of the Marx brothers (the tenderness of Angel Harpo at harp, too). It goes back to the inky ditties of old cartoons—to Laurel and Hardy in the Foreign Legion—to Count Dracula and his smile to Count Dracula shivering and hissing back before the Cross. (32)

Kerouac goes on at some length in this fashion, but what he is intending to convey is a sense of spontaneous joy, of mystical rapture, of heat and coolness simultaneously mixed in a stream-of-consciousness rhapsody of life experienced in a different fashion than anything ever seen before. He acknowledges in the Playboy article as well that in many ways “beat” is as much style as anything else: “The word ‘beat’ originally meant poor, down and out, deadbeat, on the bum, sad, sleeping in subways. Now that the word is belonging officially it is being made to stretch to include people who do not sleep in subways, but have a certain new gesture, or attitude, which I can only describe as a new more. ‘Beat Generation’ has simply become the slogan or label for a revolution in manners in America” (42). Kerouac viewed Beat philosophy and Beat culture as a way of living, of perceiving, of responding to the world around him.

He also considered his conception of Beat philosophy and culture widely misinterpreted in the popular media, a misinterpretation that drove him to rage: “. . . so then what horror I felt in 1957 and later 1958 naturally to suddenly see ‘Beat’ being taken up by everybody, press and TV and Hollywood borscht circuit to include the ‘juvenile delinquency’ shot and the horrors of a mad teeming billyclub New York and L.A. and they began to call that Beat, that beatific . . .” (42, 79). Kerouac ends his rant with a warning to all who would pervert the divine mysticism of Beat philosophy with worldly corruption:

But yet, but yet, woe, woe unto those who think that the Beat Generation means crime, delinquency, immorality, amorality . . . woe unto those who attack it on the grounds that they simply don’t understand history and the yearning of human souls . . . woe in fact unto those who those who make evil movies about the Beat Generation where innocent housewives are raped by beatniks! . . . woe unto those who spit on the Beat Generation, the wind’ll blow it back. (79)

Yet other commentators were already coming to different conclusions about the Beat Generation. The same year Kerouac wrote his Playboy article, Norman Mailer published Advertisements for Myself, a collection of work that included his essay, “The White Negro,” which had originally been published in 1957 as a pamphlet by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Press. In this essay, Mailer paints a portrait of post World War II America that is catastrophically and apocalyptically bleak. Against the despair of this modern wasteland, Mailer paints a portrait that is the antithesis of Kerouac’s beatific, divinely inspired, joyous mysticism:

It is on this bleak scene that a phenomenon has appeared: the American existentialist—the hipster, the man who knows that if our collective condition is to live with instant death by atomic war, relatively quick death by the State as l’univers concentrationnaire, or with a slow death by conformity with every creative and rebellious instinct stifled . . . [I]f the fate of twentieth century man is to live with death from adolescence to premature senescence, why then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self. In short, whether the life is criminal or not, the decision is to encourage the psychopath in oneself. (212)

Clearly, Mailer views the “hipster” as a dangerous creature, with the potential for great violence on a number of levels. And while Mailer does share some of Kerouac’s mystical and religious aspects of Beat philosophy, the two men were about as far apart on their conception of a Beat perspective as any two writers of that age.

Against these two differing views, the media dealt with this growing movement in a variety of ways. Television and film, especially, jumped into the game early on, depicting characters as far apart as Marlon Brando’s Johnny in the 1953 film, The Wild One, and Ed Byrne’s offbeat parking lot attendant, Gerald Lloyd (Kookie) Kookson III in ABC’s 77 Sunset Strip. But by far the most enduring character to enter the public consciousness through the mass media was Bob Denver’s Maynard G. Krebs on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (the “G” stood for Walter; he was named after his aunt). The television show, which had a 142-episode run over five years, made a lasting impression on American popular culture. Today, hundreds of web sites celebrate, study, and remember the program.

In 1996, Dr. Edmond Chibeau of the Department of Communications at Eastern Connecticut State University, presented a study of the program to the University Film And Video Association’s annual conference at Chapman University. In this study, Dr. Chibeau summarizes the essence of the character of Maynard G. Krebs:

Maynard G. Krebs is an example of the out-of-synch bohemian, speaking the language of youth and eschewing the value of the parental generation in favor of a teenage subculture which seemed to spring up by itself, and to be understood without explanation by a certain segment of the population. . . . Maynard has both the outward accouterments of a beatnik, goatee, baggy sweat shirt, bop lingo, and slouching walk; and the inner qualities of a gone cat. He is out of step, questions the work ethics of Dobie’s parents (an ethic shared by the parents of most of the audience members); and is attached to his friend Dobie with much the same dedication that Allen Ginsberg is dedicated to Jack Kerouac. (3- 4)

Whenever caught misbehaving, or when he and Dobie had failed at yet another scheme to find the right girl for Dobie, Maynard’s innate charm and easygoing hip coolness always got him out of serious trouble. Maynard loved jazz and bebop (The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis is perhaps the only sitcom in American history that regularly mentioned Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk). And while Chibeau understates Maynard’s rejection of the work ethic (Denver’s raised voice yelping Work! whenever the word came up was a constant running gag), Maynard somehow manages to stay in school without ever opening a book or doing a bit of homework. There’s a charming quirkiness and appeal to the character. He goes to see the same movie over and over again—The Monster That Devoured Cleveland—and his other favorite activity is watching the wrecking ball smash the “Old Endicott Building,” which seemed to require repeated demolition over the course of several episodes.

Strangely enough, Maynard seemed almost asexual as well. It was always Dwayne Hickman’s Dobie who was trying to get the girl—often Tuesday Weld’s Thalia Meninger—and it was always the wrong girls who were chasing Dobie—usually Sheila James’s wonderful portrayal of the clearly lesbian Zelda Gilroy. On the few occasions during the five-year run of the show when Maynard had to interact with a girl, the moment was awkward and over as quickly as possible.

Actor Bob Denver took advantage of the fact that neither Max Shulman—who created the show in two books, a Broadway play, a musical, and a movie in addition to the television show—nor the show’s writers had any understanding of Beat culture or the characteristics of the beatnik. In his book, Gilligan, Maynard & Me, he wrote:

This was the late fifties and beatniks were the funkiest things around. I had been to coffeehouses in L.A. where beatniks hung out and they fascinated me. I listened to their beat poetry and jargon. I even tried to wade my way through the beats’ bible, On The Road, by Jack Kerouac. During the first year of playing Maynard, I was allowed to make up my character. Not too many of the writers knew what a Beatnik was like (15)

So at least Denver put forth the effort to bring verisimilitude to the character, even if the clear implication is that he wasn’t able to make it all the way through Kerouac’s book.

But how close was Maynard G. Krebs to the real thing? The answer lies in the reality of any American sitcom of the Fifties, the Sixties, or even today. Television, especially the sitcom, is a reflection of our truest values, not an instigator of them. Television doesn’t cause anything; it merely reflects it back to us. Archie Bunker could not have existed in 1959, the year that marked the publication of Kerouac’s article, Mailer’s book, and the television debut of Shulman’s creation. But by 1970, America had changed and was ready for All In The Family. So the bottom line is that as offbeat and quirky as he was, there was a benign harmlessness to Maynard G. Krebs that went far beyond anything Mailer would have accepted, and for the most part farther than what would have pleased Kerouac. There was a non-threatening aspect to the character that belied the dirty sweatshirt and the Van Dyke beard. The American viewing public wasn’t ready for Dean Moriarity or even Sal Paradise. Maynard might get involved in a humorous, light-hearted, somewhat shallow conflict with Dobie’s parents (played by the wonderful character actors Frank Faylen and Florida Freybus), but when push came to shove, Dobie and Maynard were both in the same world as Herbert T. Gillis.

Toward the end of the series, when Dwayne Hickman and Bob Denver were both getting a little long in the tooth to play teenagers, Dobie and Maynard go off , at various times, both to college and the army. Ultimately, Maynard embraces the middle-class, middle-American values that he appears to reject on the surface. It’s difficult to call him a hypocrite, though, anymore than it was hypocritical of millions of Maynard’s fans to mimic his style and mannerisms. It was all part of an evolving culture, a constantly changing set of values, and succeeding generations of youth seeking to identify with something fresh, new, and as divorced from their parents as possible—a process that continues even today. One generation’s Maynard G. Krebs is another’s Marilyn Manson, but the line between the two is both straight and short.

Steven Womack

Watkins College of Art & Design

The Watkins Film School

Nashville, TN37204

Works Cited

Charters, Ann. The Portable Beat Reader. New York: Viking, 1992.

Chibeau, Edmond, Ph.D., “Dobie Gillis: The Structural Strategy Of Juxtaposing The Teenage Outsider And The Mainstream Sitcom Family.” 1996. A Study Presented at the UFVA Conference at Chapman University and later published on http://www.ecsu.ctstateu.edu/personal/faculty/chibeaue/paper.html.

Denver, Bob. Gilligan, Maynard & Me. New York: Carol Publishing, 1963.

Kerouac, Jack. “The Origins of the Beat Generation.” Playboy, June 1959: 31+.

Mailer, Norman. “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster.” Advertisements for Myself. New York: Putnam, 1959.Rpt. The Time of Our Time. New York: Random, 1998. 211-230.

McNeil, Alex. Total Television: A Comprehensive Guide to Programming from 1948 to the Present. 3rd Ed. New York: Viking, Penguin, 1991.