Harry Redl : Portraits of the Beat Generation
San Francisco Rennaisance 1958
Harry Redl self-portrait
The Vancouver Sun June 19, 1999
The Beats family album
by Alex Rose
Harry Redl has a keen eye for cultural dissonance. An Austrian serving with the German navy in the Baltic Sea, Redl was captured by the Americans in 1945. After the war, he emigrated to Canada, taking various jobs in Vancouver as a waiter, logger and shipping clerk. In 1956, hoping to freelance as a photographer for Life magazine, he bussed to San Francisco, ground zero for the Beat generation.
Redl was astonished by the energy swirling around him there, and stayed to set up a studio in North Beach, where he befriended and photographed the angel-headed geniuses who, rejecting the button-down consumerism of post-war North America, shook literary culture from its hallucinatory yawn.
Feverishly brandishing his $100 Rolleiflex, Redl was to take more than 8,000 photographs over the next three years (1957-60). His black-and-white portraits - natural light and natural settings – document the now-famous post-war bohemians and their maudite style of living. Today, living in West Vancouver, as U.S. universities ponder the purchase of his near-definitive archive, Redl remains an undiscovered gem to most of the apparatchiks in Canada's cultural establishment.
In 1957, Redl sneaked his camera into the visitor's room at San Quentin to snap off six frames of a wary Neal Cassady, who was serving three years for possession of marijuana. Cassady was no intellectual, Redl recalls. "He was the bisexual bad boy of the Beat Generation - a good-looking truck driver and conman who liked to fuck."
Cassady was the muse who had driven Jack Kerouac to his typewriter to depict the exploits of his fascinatingly inchoate friend. Kerouac's book On the Road brought Cassady into the mythical pantheon as "that mad Ahab at the wheel" who compelled a generation to do the same. Redl recalls how the cult picked up elements of jazz, the drug culture and the normal rituals of adolescent seeking and even grudgingly admitted to its ranks a few young women (then called "chicks") wearing black turtlenecks and sandals.
The poet Allen Ginsberg and Kerouac competed with each other for Cassady's bed. Madly in love, Ginsberg won out and said so in his poem The Green Automobile, "honking my horn at his [Cassady's] manly gate." Seen through Redl's viewfinder, Cassady was manipulative, selfish and sexually aggressive with women. In a time long before AIDS, he slept with hundreds of partners, male and female.
Redl soon met poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose bookstore, City Lights, published Ginsberg's first book, Howl (1956), an angry indictment of America's false hopes and broken promises. Howl was seized by the U.S. government under obscenity charges, but the charges eventually were dropped. Redl documented the controversy that brought international attention to Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti as sales of the book swelled to the tens of thousands. Redl was there to capture it all: the down-at-heels mysticism, the love of spontaneity, the bisexual melange, the conviction that the crazy have insight and the sober are blind.
It was a sky with new stars in it, Redl says of a time before television upstaged the big picture magazines, and photojournalism was still a visual medium to reckon with. Redl and a new generation of photographers began to document another, more disturbing side of the North America psyche.
Reading poems about poverty, despair and all kinds of longing at The Place coffee shop on San Francisco's Grant Street, the Beats clamoured, Rimbaud-like, after the wisdom they were convinced they would discover if only they could strip literary culture of its piety and artifice. Ginsberg's doctrine of "first thought, best thought" encouraged him to see as poems all sorts of prose jottings and notebook scribblings, and his belief that poetry ought to provide seamless transcriptions of the mind encouraged him to publish the jottings and scribbles. Far more than window dressing for youthful rebellion, the Beats utilized a new kind of free verse - accompanied by jazz - to proclaim the virtues of sex, drugs and Buddhism. Not surprisingly, they offended the literary gatekeepers of the time. Even today, Harold Bloom's The Western Canon has but two passing references to Ginsberg, who died in 1997; none for Kerouac and the Beats.
"Back in those days, Ginsberg was rail-thin," Redl recalls. "Allen was such an honorable man, filled with compassion and caring, so convinced of the genius of his friends that he dragged them on to the stage with him – so they could make a living." In retrospect, Redl believes, the Beats rejuvenated literature by returning to the oral tradition. "When Ginsberg stood up and read his poems – ‘such vitality, such rhythm’ – people sat up in their seats. That many of their poems were explicitly about God and sex didn't hurt either.'
No, indeed. Overnight a legion of followers arose in cities across North America. There were astute observers, as well. Readings at New York's Village Vanguard in 1956 attracted a young Canadian student named Leonard Cohen, then studying at Columbia University. One year later, he was on stage at Dunn's Steak House in downtown Montreal putting his own poems to music, writing astringently morose ballads about love and death in a deep, rough-hewn voice that would change pop music forever.
If the political sensibility that flowed from Ginsberg's circle to the mass counterculture of the 1960s and 70s seems inevitable in hindsight, a Santa Ana brushfire, Redl tempers some overheated media accounts with an I-was-there sobriety. "Above all, these were serious writers and poets, straight-forward practitioners of their craft." Just as well. Because promiscuity, recklessness and madness do not necessarily equate with sunny enlightenment. At least not for Kerouac who, despite his new-found fame, drifted with his clinging mother on an oedipal ice flow, slumping into mind-numbing self-absorption.
Old friends shook their heads at the fat and surly recluse who seldom ventured out of the house unless to trade punches at the local bar. When Cassady landed in jail, Kerouac refused to send bail money. "I'm no psychiatrist but I think Kerouac was afraid of the feelings he had for Cassady" Redl says. "It must have tormented him that all his favorite people were all homosexuals, yet he lived with his mother." Cassady died in 1968 at age 42. His hopped-up heart exploded as he ran alongside a train in Mexico. Kerouac himself would die two years later, at 47, of complications from alcoholism.
Today, if much Beat writing appears lame, self-referential and just too sticky and onanistic, consider: there is no guarantee that each generation will produce a major writer. (Besides WH. Auden, try naming another British poet of the 1930s who said anything insightful about that troubled time.) What continues to survive in the best Beat writing is the sensitive and smart impulse to magically catch the world through language as it flies.
And, judging by a blitzkrieg of new book titles and Internet sites, the Beats speak to a new generation of youthful rebels struggling to find sex, hope and spiritual meaning in a culture predicated on the deification of money and celebrity and the chimera of a technological utopia.
Now, brooding in his townhouse by the edge of the sea, the 72year-old Redl notes that Stanford University recently paid almost $1 million for the Ginsberg cache of letters, poems and textual scraps. For a smaller sum, the same university also considered the purchase of the Redl archive, later putting the project on hold. Despite a recent spate of showings in small West Coast galleries (mirroring renewed public interest in the Beats) Redl remains largely invisible to many Canadian curators, perhaps confused by the fact that almost all his Beat portraits are of Americans. With sneering vituperation, Redl recounts the politically correct parochialism of the North Vancouver gallery director who, after leafing through the archive, had the audacity to ask: "Beautiful work. But have you got any more Canadians?"
Redl wonders ruefully whether to sharpen his marketing skills down south, maybe in Seattle. But not for long; he and wife Violet love Vancouver. "Besides, I've done some of that stuff - I've got a Web site," he says with a burr of the Hapsburg lisp he still retains. "I'd have to go out every morning and sell my prints like a peddler -something I simply refuse to do."
Texts
Artist's Statement
Georgia Straight
Simon Fraser News
Vancouver Province
Vancouver Sun