REFERENCES - A Portrait of a Hipster by Anatole Broyard

"Broyard's best-known essay, one which was reprinted several times in later years and extensively quoted from, was "A Portrait of the Hipster," published in Partisan Review in 1948. In it, Broyard attempted an analysis and a definition of a new type then appearing around Greenwich Village who had, in his view, been welcomed by intellectuals who "ransacking everything for meaning, admiring insurgence... .attributed every heroism to the hipster.,, But Broyard was less enthusiastic about these supposed new rebels, and saw the attempts to escape from the restraints of society through narcotics, jazz, and general disaffiliation, as merely ways to a new conformity. People who were once shadowy presences in the jazz underground began to take themselves seriously and to crave the adulation others gave them. In Broyard's words: "The hipster promptly became in his own eyes, a poet, a seer, a hero." And he added that the hipster life-style "grew more rigid than the Institutions it had set out to defy. It became a boring routine. The hipster - once an unregenerate Individualist, an underground poet, a guerrilla - had become a pretentious poet laureate."

Of course, what Broyard was doing, as well as attacking the hipsters, was criticising his fellow-intellectuals for failing to accept that the hipster rebellion was a sham. It was the intellectuals, in their desperate search for types who seemed to stand against the society intellectuals despised, who had idealised the hipster, something which had deep implications for their own state of mind and lack of broad political vision. Broyard's essay was written fifty years ago, and yet it has relevance to current practices where intellectuals try to find cultural heroes amongst pop musicians and the like.

The magazines which carried Broyard's essays usually mentioned that he was working on a novel, and that portions of it had appeared in various journals. A 1954 issue of Modern Writing printed "Sunday Dinner in Brooklyn," a story which was about a Greenwich Village intellectual visiting his parents in Brooklyn and trying to come to terms with the fact of the growing distance between them. It was a sharply observed piece, and I recall that when I first read It In the 1958 anthology, Protest: The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men, it seemed to speak for and to me in terms of how I felt about my own background, and the way in which I was moving away from it. There were astute little scenes in Broyard's story, as when, on arrival at his parents' house, they rush to find him the book supplement from the Sunday paper, as if to show that they understand his needs."

by Jim Burns