Even Hemingway, for all his efforts to formulate a naturalistic morality in The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell To Arms never maintained that sex was all.
Hemingway's fiction is supported by a "moral" backbone and in its search for ultimate meaning hints at a religious dimension.
And D. H. Lawrence, in Fantasia Of The Unconscious, protested vehemently against the overestimation of the sexual motive.
Though sex in some form or other enters into all human activity and it was a good thing that Freud emphasized this aspect of human nature, it is fantastic to explain everything in terms of sex.
"All is not sex", declared Lawrence.
Man is not confined to one outlet for his vital energy.
The creative urge, for example, transcends the body and the self.

But for the beat generation all is sex.
Nothing is more revealing of the way of life and literary aspirations of this group than their attitude toward sex.
For the beatnik, like the hipster, is in opposition to a society that is based on the repression of the sex instinct.
He has elevated sex -- not Eros or libido but pure, spontaneous, uninhibited sex -- to the rank of the godhead;
it is Astarte, Ishtar, Venus, Yahwe, Dionysus, Christ, the mysterious and divine orgone energy flowing through the body of the universe.
Jazz is sex, marijuana is a stimulus to sex, the beat tempo is adjusted to the orgiastic release of the sexual impulse.
Lawrence Lipton, in The Holy Barbarians, stresses that for the beat generation sex is more than a source of pleasure;
it is a mystique, and their private language is rich in the multivalent ambiguities of sexual reference so that they dwell in a sexualized universe of discourse.
The singular uncompromising force of their revolt against the cult of restraint is illustrated by their refusal to dance in a public place.
The dance is but a disguised ritual for the expression of ungratified sexual desire.
For this reason, too, their language is more forthright and earthy.
The beatniks crave a sexual experience in which their whole being participates.

It is therefore not surprising that they resist the lure of marriage and the trap of domesticity, for like cats they are determined not to tame their sexual energy.
They withdraw to the underground of the slums where they can defy the precepts of legalized propriety.
Unlike the heroes and flappers of the lost generation, they disdain the art of "necking" and "petting".
That is reserved for the squares.
If they avoid the use of the pungent, outlawed four-letter word it is because it is taboo;
it is sacred.
As Lipton, the prophet of the beat generation, declares: "In the sexual act, the beat are filled with mana, the divine power.
This is far from the vulgar, leering sexuality of the middle-class square in heat".
This is the Holy Grail these knights of the orgasm pursue, this is the irresistible cosmic urge to which they respond.

If Wilhelm Reich is the Moses who has led them out of the Egypt of sexual slavery, Dylan Thomas is the poet who offers them the Dionysian dialectic of justification for their indulgence in liquor, marijuana, sex, and jazz.
In addition, they have been converted to Zen Buddhism, with its glorification of all that is "natural" and mysteriously alive, the sense that everything in the world is flowing.
Thus, paradoxically, the beat writers resort to "religious" metaphors: they are in search of mana, the spiritual, the numinous, but not anything connected with formal religion.
What they are after is the beatific vision.
And Zen Buddhism, though it is extremely difficult to understand how these internal contradictions are reconciled, helps them in their struggle to achieve personal salvation through sexual release.

The style of life chosen by the beat generation, the rhythm and ritual they have adopted as uniquely their own, is designed to enhance the value of the sexual experience.
Jazz is good not only because it promotes wholeness but because of its decided sexual effect.
Jazz is the musical language of sex, the vocabulary of the orgasm;
indeed, it is maintained that the sexual element in jazz, by freeing the listener of his inhibitions, can have therapeutic value.
That is why, the argument runs, the squares are so fearful of jazz and yet perversely fascinated by it.
Instead of giving themselves spontaneously to the orgiastic release that jazz can give them, they undergo psychoanalysis or flirt with mysticism or turn to prostitutes for satisfaction.
Thus jazz is transmuted into something holy, the sacred road to integration of being.
Jazz, like sex, is a mystique.
It is not a substitute for sex but a dynamic expression of the creative impulse in unfettered man.

The mystique of sex, combined with marijuana and jazz, is intended to provide a design for living.
Those who are sexually liberated can become creatively alive and free, their instincts put at the service of the imagination.
Righteous in their denunciation of all that makes for death, the beat prophets bid all men become cool cats;
let them learn to "swing" freely, to let go, to become authentically themselves, and then perhaps civilization will be saved.
The beatnik, seceding from a society that is fatally afflicted with a deathward drive, is concerned with his personal salvation in the living present.
If he is the child of nothingness, if he is the predestined victim of an age of atomic wars, then he will consult only his own organic needs and go beyond good and evil.
He will not curb his instinctual desires but release the energy within him that makes him feel truly and fully alive, even if it is only for this brief moment before the apocalypse of annihilation explodes on earth.

That is why the members of the beat generation proudly assume the title of the holy barbarians;
they will destroy the shrines, temples, museums, and churches of the state that is the implacable enemy of the life they believe in.
Apart from the categorical imperative they derive from the metaphysics of the orgasm, the only affirmation they are capable of making is that art is their only refuge.
Their writing, born of their experiments in marijuana and untrammeled sexuality, reflects the extremity of their existential alienation.
The mind has betrayed them, reason is the foe of life;
they will trust only their physical sensations, the wisdom of the body, the holy promptings of the unconscious.
With lyrical intensity they reveal what they hate, but their faith in love, inspired by the revolutionary rhythms of jazz, culminates in the climax of the orgasm.
Their work mirrors the mentality of the psychopath, rootless and irresponsible.
Their rebellion against authoritarian society is not far removed from the violence of revolt characteristic of the juvenile delinquent.

And the life they lead is undisciplined and for the most part unproductive, even though they make a fetish of devoting themselves to some creative pursuit -- writing, painting, music.
They are non-conformists on principle.
When they express themselves it is incandescent hatred that shines forth, the rage of repudiation, the ecstasy of negation.
It is sex that obsesses them, sex that is at the basis of their aesthetic creed.
What they discuss with dialectical seriousness is the degree to which sex can inspire the Muse.
Monogamy is the vice from which the abjectly fearful middle class continue to suffer, whereas the beatnik has the courage to break out of that prison of respectability.
One girl describes her past, her succession of broken marriages, the abortions she has had and finally confesses that she loves sex and sees no reason why she must justify her passion.
If it is an honest feeling, then why should she not yield to it?
"Most often", she says, "it's the monogamous relationship that is dishonest".
There is nothing holy in wedlock.
This girl soon drops the bourgeois pyschiatrist who disapproves of her life.
She finds married life stifling and every prolonged sex relationship unbearably monotonous.

This confession serves to make clear in part what is behind this sexual revolution: the craving for sensation for its own sake, the need for change, for new experiences.
Boredom is death.
In the realm of physical sensations, sex reigns supreme.
Hence the beatniks sustain themselves on marijuana, jazz, free swinging poetry, exhausting themselves in orgies of sex;
some of them are driven over the borderline of sanity and lose contact with reality.
One beat poet composes a poem, "Lines On A Tijuana John", which contains a few happy hints for survival.
The new fact the initiates of this cult have to learn is that they must move toward simplicity.
The professed mission of this disaffiliated generation is to find a new way of life which they can express in poetry and fiction, but what they produce is unfortunately disordered, nourished solely on the hysteria of negation.

Who are the creative representatives of this movement?
Nymphomaniacs, junkies, homosexuals, drug addicts, lesbians, alcoholics, the weak, the frustrated, the irresolute, the despairing, the derelicts and outcasts of society.
They embrace independent poverty, usually with a "shack-up" partner who will help support them.
They are full of contempt for the institution of matrimony.
Their previous legalized marriages do not count, for they hold the laws of the state null and void.
They feel they are leagued against a hostile, persecutory world, faced with the concerted malevolent opposition of squares and their hirelings, the police.
This is the rhetoric of righteousness the beatniks use in defending their way of life, their search for wholeness, though their actual existence fails to reach these "religious" heights.
One beatnik got the woman he was living with so involved in drugs and self-analysis and all-night sessions of sex that she was beginning to crack up.
What obsessions had she picked up during these long nights of talk?
Sex as the creative principle of the universe, the secret of primitive religion, the life of myth.
Everything in the final analysis reduced itself to sexual symbolism.
In his chapter on "The Loveways Of The Beat Generation", Lipton spares the reader none of the sordid details.
No one asks questions about the free union of the sexes in West Venice so long as the partners share the negative attitudes of the group.

The women who come to West Venice, having forsaken radicalism, are interested in living only for the moment, in being constantly on the move.
Others who are attracted to this Mecca of the beat generation are homosexuals, heroin addicts, and smalltime hoodlums.
Those who are sexual deviants are naturally drawn to join the beatniks.
Since the homosexuals widely use marijuana, they do not have to be initiated.
Part of the ritual of sex is the use of marijuana.
As Lipton puts it: "The Eros is felt in the magic circle of marijuana with far greater force, as a unifying principle in human relationships, than at any other time except, perhaps, in the mutual metaphysical orgasms.
The magic circle is, in fact, a symbol of and preparation for the metaphysical orgasm".
Under the influence of marijuana the beatnik comes alive within and experiences a wonderfully enhanced sense of self as if he had discovered the open sesame to the universe of being.
Carried high on this "charge", he composes "magical" poetry that captures the organic rhythms of life in words.
If he thus achieves a lyrical, dreamlike, drugged intensity, he pays the price for his indulgence by producing work -- Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" is a striking example of this tendency -- that is disoriented, Dionysian but without depth and without Apollonian control.
For drugs are in themselves no royal road to creativity.
How is the beat poet to achieve unity of form when he is at the same time engaged in a systematic derangement of senses.

If love reflects the nature of man, as Ortega Y Gasset believes, if the person in love betrays decisively what he is by his behavior in love, then the writers of the beat generation are creating a new literary genre.