Mailer’s Hipster Meets Thompson’s Bikers: White Negroes on Wheels

In 1957, Norman Mailer published an essay in Dissent called “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster” in which he addressed the existential crisis Americans experienced in the wake of the two great horrors of the twentieth century: the mass exterminations of concentration camps and the use of atomic weapons. In the aftermath of such senseless and horrific violence, he announced that

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 . . . 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 set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self. . . . (277)

Mailer biographer J. Michael Lennon recalls that “The White Negro” became the “intellectual manifesto” of the Beat Generation, as Kerouac’s On the Road represented the mythical roadmap and Ginsberg’s Howl the poetic testament (239).¹ The hipster, as John Leland shows, is an archetypal character who appears in many guises, the outcast, the rebel, the trickster, personified by figures such as Walt Whitman, Bob Dylan, and Kurt Cobain. Critics have argued that Mailer’s hipster is a myth, a fiction, a proletarian, a fallen Adam, and a romanticized version of himself, all plausible interpretations.² Mailer’s hipster was a projection of his existential worldview, an abstraction based on his own experiences of jazz clubs, parties, and underground characters in the post-war world; yet, his “white Negro” bore similarities to his 19th and 20th century Hip predecessors who rejected America’s Protestant work ethic, domesticity, and sexual repression. As one of the most widely read essays on college campuses and in intellectual circles in the 1950s–1960s, “The White Negro” shocked many in the Cold War generation into an awareness of what it meant to be Hip.

Kerouac, an original hipster, romanticized the lives of African-Americans, or at least the way he imagined those lives, engaging with their down and outness, their alienation, and their style. In On the Road, published the same year as Mailer’s essay, Kerouac recalls walking through the streets of Denver and naively “wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had to offer was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night” (179). In his reverie, Kerouac imagines a Romantic ideal of African-Americans as noble primitives. According to Gary T. Marx in “The White Negro and the Negro White,” members of the Beat Generation liked “super-sexed, narcotics-using, primitive, easy-going, spontaneous, irresponsible, violent Negroes”; therefore, “Their conception of what it means to be a Negro probably differs greatly from the experience of most back people” (175). Yet, as Mailer’s worldview was darker and less romanticized than Kerouac’s, he displayed a keener awareness of racial oppression and the means by which black people struggled to survive:

Knowing in the cells of his experience that life was war, nothing but war, the Negro (all exceptions permitted) . . . kept for his survival the art of the primitive, he subsisted for his Saturday night kicks, he lived in the enormous present . . . and in his music he gave voice to the quality and character of his existence, to his rage and the infinite variations of joy, lust, languor, growl, cramp, pinch, scream, and despair of his orgasm. (279)

Mailer thus concluded that “it is no accident that the source of Hip is the Negro for he has been living on the margin of totalitarianism [in the form of slavery and institutionalized racism] and democracy for two centuries” (278). Mailer argued metaphorically that “The Hipster had absorbed the existential synapses of the Negro, and for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro” (279). He had gleaned in that post-war era that race is not only biologically determined but socially constructed, anticipating the formulation of racial formation theory.³ Although Mailer did construct African-Americans in some ways as the Other, in his essay he was breaking down the binaries, self and Other, white and black.⁴

Mailer’s conception of the hipster was informed by his reading of psychoanalyst Robert Lindner’s book Rebel Without a Cause, The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath,5 a case study of one of his psychopathic patients. Lindner diagnosed the psychopath as

a rebel without a cause, an agitator without a slogan, a revolutionary without a program . . . his rebelliousness is aimed to achieve goals satisfactory to himself alone; he is incapable of exertions for the sake of others. All his efforts, hidden under no matter what disguise, represent investments designed to satisfy his immediate wishes and desires. . . . The psychopath, like the child, cannot delay the pleasures of gratification, and the trait is one of his underlying, universal characteristics. He cannot wait upon erotic gratification which convention demands should be preceded by the chase before the kill: he must rape. He cannot wait upon the development of prestige in society: his egoistic ambitions lead him to leap into headlines by daring performances. Like a red thread the predominance of this mechanism for immediate satisfaction runs through the history of every psychopath. It explains not only his behavior but also the violent nature of his acts. (2)

Roughly a decade after the publication of “The White Negro,” Hunter S. Thompson published Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga in which he cited a truncated version of the same Lindner quote, and as applied to the Angels it bears repeating:

The psychopath, like the child, cannot delay the pleasures of gratification, and the trait is one of his underlying, universal characteristics. He cannot wait upon erotic gratification which convention demands should be preceded by the chase before the kill: he must rape. He cannot wait upon the development of prestige in society: his egoistic ambitions lead him to leap into headlines by daring performances. Like a red thread the predominance of this mechanism for immediate satisfaction runs through the history of every psychopath. It explains not only his behavior but also the violent nature of his acts. (2)

The fact that both Thompson and Mailer cited the same passage connects Mailer’s essay to Thompson’s reporting on the motorcycle gang. Mailer’s “White Negroes” and Kerouac’s Beats anticipated some of the countercultural figures of the 1960s such as hippies, Black Power radicals, and outlaw motorcycle clubs like the Angels. Mailer wrote that to get hip required one “to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on the uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self” (277), an ethos consistent with figures as diverse as the Beats and the Angels. Mailer’s hipsters had morphed into Thompson’s bikers: they had become white Negroes on wheels.

As Leland noted, the hipster tends to be a male figure who forms male-bonding relationships, a feature of the Beat Generation’s core figures, Kerouac, Cassady, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and others. The Angels were an exclusively white male club for whom bonding and bad behavior on bikes were de rigueur. Mailer acknowledges that there are female hipsters, but his hipster is a projection of his own notions of masculinity, and with some exceptions his white Negro was a solitary figure, an underground man to whom the idea of belonging to something, a group, a party, a religion, was Square. So, the hipster opted out, believing that

One is Hip or one is Square (the alternative which each new generation coming into American life is beginning to feel), one is a rebel or one conforms, one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American night life, or else a Square cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed. (278)

Lexicographer Clarence Major locates the origins of the words “hip” and the related but anachronistic “hep” to the West African Zolof words “hepi” [“to see”] and “hipi” [“to open one’s eyes”] (214). The hipster, then, is by definition someone with a heightened awareness, an ability to see what others cannot, to perceive the realities masked by social convention. This heightened perception is precisely what Mailer sought to articulate in his portrait of the hipster as a figure standing apart from mainstream American life.

In this sense, the hipster’s refusal of conformity parallels Thompson’s portrayal of the Hell’s Angels, whose rejection of middle-class norms and embrace of risk placed them outside the boundaries of respectable society. Thompson’s Angels, like Mailer’s hipsters, lived according to an ethic of immediacy and excess, one that privileged sensation over security and experience over stability. As Thompson observed, their attraction to motorcycles and LSD stemmed from a shared desire to push beyond conventional limits:

There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others—the living—are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it. . . . But the edge is still Out there. Or maybe it’s In. The association of motorcycles with LSD is no accident of publicity. They are both a means to an end, to the place of definitions. (271)

Thompson seems to have followed Mailer’s admonition, the hipster’s code: “one must grow, or else pay more for remaining the same” (286).

Notes

1. Glenday notes that Kerouac and Ginsberg “reacted negatively to Mailer’s more abrasive and confrontational adaptation of Beat philosophy,” considering Mailer’s essay “a fundamental distortion of what for them had been its essence” (31); yet, Ginsberg considered Mailer a “philosophical ally” (32). Michael K. Glenday, Norman Mailer. London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1995. ↩

2. Laura Adams, Existential Battles: The Growth of Norman Mailer. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1976; J. Michael Lennon, Norman Mailer: A Double Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013. ↩

3. See Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States. New York: Routledge, 1994. ↩

4. For a discussion of Mailer and racial otherness, see John Whalen-Bridge, “Mailer’s Negro,” in Norman Mailer: Critical Essays, ed. John Whalen-Bridge. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1998. ↩

5. Robert Lindner, Rebel Without a Cause: The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath. New York: Grune & Stratton, 1944. ↩

Works Cited

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Introduction by Christopher Hitchens. NY: W.W. Norton, 2010.

Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. Introduction by Ann Charters. NY: Penguin Books, 2003.

Leland, John. Hip: The History. NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 2004.

Lennon, J. Michael. Norman Mailer: A Double Life. NY: Simon and Schuster, 2013.

Lindner, Robert. Must You Conform? NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1956.