The 'Beat Generation'

          

We return now to the chronology of the established generational groupings. The 'Lost' group ceased to be a significant factor in the difference discourse universe of American texts and text reception sometime in the 1930s. (Perhaps the last significant 'Lost' fiction was Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night (1934).) The intervention of the Great Depression and its attendant politicization of the textual universe, followed by the Second World War and its boost in the national difference discourse combined to drown out the generational discourse, certainly in fiction. However, texts were still produced in the '40s which explicitly stated generational belonging and Zeitgeist formulation as their programmatics. I am thinking here of the writings of Jack Kerouac, who, however, in the process of receiving rejection after rejection (after the modest success of his debut novel The Town and the City (1950)), parallel with his own spiritual and technical development, grew ever more experimental and radical in his search for spontaneous expression of his consciousness - with the result that his writings were unpublishable at the time of writing. It was only after a long draught during which the potential market for his writing arose, that his seminal novel On the Road appeared in 1957. The publication, and furore and scandal pursuant to the reception of his friend Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems in 1956 broke the way for Kerouac's prose, too. What was the connection between two such formally disparate works? This is the main question behind this section of the generational history.

 

Eric Mottram writes on this issue in The Penguin Companion to Literature:

 

            [T]he Beats were a criticism of American complacency under the Ike-Nixon regime, an expression of new forms of prose, and poetry and an exploration of consciousness, which joined the dissent of existing Bohemias [...] to produce a distinct style of literature and living, based on disaffiliation, poverty, anarchic individualism and communal living. A relaxation of 'square' (puritan, middle-class, respectable) attitudes towards sex, drugs, religion and art became the opposing uniformity of 'beat'. (28)

 

This early formulation gives us some of the building blocks of the 'Beat' identity. Firstly, we note the conflation of "style of literature and living", a highly characteristic observation when it comes to the 'Beat' writers, who have long been considered less as artists and fictionalizers than as recorders of a frantic lifestyle, with little attention on their part to artifice in their practice. Clearly there is some truth to the observation that 'Beat' writings can be and have been used as blueprints for Bohemian living by many of its creators and readers. Probably no other generational construct has had as direct a relationship between its textual expressions and its members' socio-cultural behaviour.

 

Next, we note the emphasis on "criticism" and "dissent", both seen in relation to the dominant culture of 1950s America, a period of domestic political tranquility and relative prosperity compared to the previous two decades, with the attendant gelling of consumption and nuclear family patterns. That the period was also characterized by a near-paranoid obsession with the oppression of deviant political, religious and existential beliefs, should also be noted as a necessary presupposition for understanding the reception of 'Beat' writings (see later this chapter for details).

 

Thirdly, we note the catalogue of determinant features of the 'Beat' ethos: "disaffiliation, poverty, anarchic individualism and communal living". Here the conflation between life style description and literary features or themes is complete. It is hard to see what the ideal of poverty, often with little choice involved, has to do with literary expression, other than the fact that literature can of course be about poor people in some sense. At the end of the quote we find the only criticism of the 'Beat' construct in the piece, namely that its opposition to dominant culture values, became in itself a rigid doctrine, "the opposing uniformity of 'beat'". This refers to the in-group marking that went into re-enforcing the 'Beat' identity, for example, as indicated, the subcultural argot used by 'beats' (and not understood by 'squares').

 

The 'Beat Generation' quickly became an accepted entity in intellectual debate and popular media culture in America. Kerouac became an instant celebrity after the publication of On the Road, and its modest success on the best-seller lists as a hard-cover book (The New York Times Book Review list for the fall of 1957, for instance, shows it entering at number 14 on October 6, a position which was held and slightly bettered throughout October and the first half of November, only for it to disappear for good from the list on November 17. Its high point was number 11, on October 27 and November 10, both). A good example of the familiarization process Kerouac's name underwent is found in Richard Eberhart's little book To Eberhart from Ginsberg. A Letter about HOWL 1956: "I recall in that early time hearing the word Kerouac. I thought this a foreign and most odd-sounding word, one which I had never heard before. As years passed it became a household term not odd sounding at all." (Eberhart, 1976:8)

 

Quickly people started making comparisons between the two named generational constructs, an activity that is still on-going. Often the figure used was a father/son metaphor, as e.g. in a very early description of the figure of the hipster as "[T]he illegitimate son of the Lost Generation." (Anatole Broyard: "Portrait of a Hipster" in Partisan Review 15, no. 6. 721, June 1948)

 

The most thoroughgoing analysis of the 'Beat' phenomenon, and one made before the publication of any 'Beat' literature, other than his own novel Go (1952), was written by John Clellon Holmes and published by The New York Times Magazine, November 16, 1952. Holmes' essays were collected in the book Nothing More to Declare (1967). He explicitly makes the inter-generational comparison:

 

         The Lost Generation was discovered in a roadster, laughing hysterically because nothing meant anything any more. It migrated to Europe, unsure whether it was looking for the "orgiastic future" or escaping from the "puritanical past". Its symbols were the flapper, the flask of bootleg whiskey, and an attitude of desperate frivolity... It was caught up in the romance of disillusionment, until even that became an illusion [...] But the wild boys of today are not lost [...] this generation conspicuously lacks that eloquent air of bereavement which made so many of the exploits of the Lost Generation symbolic actions. [...] Their excursions into drugs or promiscuity came out of curiosity, not disillusionment. (Holmes, 1967:111)

 

Holmes thus cuts to the bone and tries to crystallize the ethos and existential values of the 'Beats'. As he sees it, the differentiating characteristics of the 'Beats' are that "actually they were on a quest and [...] the specific object of their quest was spiritual" - "their real journey was inward" (117). He consistently emphasizes the positive outlook on life and the curiosity rather than world-weariness of the new generation. Later he turns to more philosophical issues:

 

            How to live seems to them much more crucial than why. [U]nlike the Lost Generation, which was occupied with the loss of faith, the Beat Generation is becoming more and more occupied with the need for it. [...] It is a will to believe, even in the face of an inability to do so in conventional terms. (112)

 

This emphasizes the shift from epistemological issues of "why" to ontological issues of "how", incidentally mirroring Brian McHale's notion of the change of tonic between modernism and postmodernism (McHale, 1987:9-10), and goes on to explicitly point to a form of (non-conformist, non-Christian) religious ontology in the 'Beat' ethos. However, not all comparisons with the 'Lost' hinge on differences for Holmes. He also sees a significant similarity in historic position vis-a-vis decisive world events, and the attendant effect on the 'Beats' as writers in terms of formulating an identity:

 

            As writers, we had the example of the twenties to encourage us in this, because the creative renaissance of that decade seemed to have resulted in large part from another postwar generation finding its distinct voice in the act of finding a poetic image for itself. (104)

 

Clellon Holmes has functioned as a self-appointed chronicler and apologete for the 'Beat Generation' and especially through the 1950s and '60s he defended and explained the 'Beat' philosophy in mainstream media in America. For this reason I have given special attention to his writings and their importance in the initial construction of the 'Beat Generation', whereas Kerouac's own post-generational writings are analyzed later in a separate diachronic chapter, along with other generational spokesmen's explanations of their self-labellings (chapter 6).

 

Holmes explicitly discusses the labelling process and its effects on several occasions: "Try [sic!] to categorize the experience of one's own peer group (what I call "generationing") is an urge that most fiercely besets you when you are woung and the rage for order is at its most intense." (108) Thus Holmes interestingly uses the term 'generationing' for the labelling urge itself, and links it to youthful desires for order, a teasing reversal of the tradition image of youth that young rebels thrive with chaos. Perhaps Holmes is on to something, since all the successful self-labellings in the generational history seem to have come from young men. He further suggests that labelling as a creator of in-group identity is linked to the speed of change in American culture and society, and necessitated by this speed, combined with the (writerly) urge for discovery of self:

 

            [Writers] instinctively gravitate to experiences they don't quite understand. This may be the primary reason why American writers in this century compartmentalize themselves into "generations", for American life alters from top to bottom almost every ten years, and each new group of writers is compelled to discover its own America, if it would discover itself. So it seemed only natural that we should seek our identity as a generation in experiences for which there existed no older literary tradition. (106)

 

Returning to his initial essay, we see some elaboration of the content of the 'Beat' label, which "[I]mplies the feeling of having been used"; involves a sort of nakedness of mind, and ultimately, of soul: "goes for broke and wagers the sum of his resources on a single number" (110). This element of the desperate is always tempered by the questing element in the 'Beat' mind:

 

            For beneath the excess and the conformity, there is something other than detachment. There are the stirrings of a quest. [for "a stable position from which to operate"] [...] There is no single philosophy, no single party, no single attitude. [...] More than anything else, this is what is responsible for this generation's reluctance to name itself, its reluctance to discuss itself as a group, sometimes its reluctance to be itself. (114)

 

The latter part of the quote reverts to the issue of labelling itself. What good is a label which always simplifies and unifies, when the group the label targets by its own definition is diverse (as Holmes confesses in retrospect in his Preface: "[M]ine was, above all, a first-person generation, with a built-in distrust of second-hand opinions and all four estates" (12))? Thus labelling ends up being an irresolvably paradoxical act, and the labelling urge always seems to win out: "Any attempt to label an entire generation is unrewarding [...] yet [the generation] seems to possess a unifirm, general quality which demands an adjective" (110) How can the labelling even be done when its target is "a generation of extremes" (i.e. from hipsters to young Republicans) (113)? "[To] write a manifesto would seem [...] absurd" (113), yet this is exactly what Holmes resorts to doing, not once but over and over again.

 

The urge to sweepingly label a whole generation has recurred a number of times after Holmes' generation, yet he questions from his vantage point of writing in the mid 1960s, whether the act of unified labelling will ever occur again: "Probably mine was the last generation to feel that its shared experience had produced an attitude so widespread and so peculiar to us that it could be expressed in a single descriptive term" (104) Of course, history has proved him wrong, but the speculation must have seemed safe and reasonable for someone mired in the cultural multiverse of the sixties, which saw the, relatively unified, 'Beat' ethos splinter into an impossibly large number of alternative spiritualities and philosophies.

 

Holmes discusses these historical transformations of the 'Beat' ethos into something new in the sixties. First he does it in a personal context, musing on reaching the age of forty:

 

            My generation - the generation that came of age during, or just after, the Second World War - has reached this frontier also. We are going into our full maturity, and, hopefully, into our solidest accomplishments as well, and not a few of us, I imagine, are just as happy to pass on the mantle of the "New Generation", which we have worn for over ten years now, to all those energetic kids, with their guitars and placards, who frug and demonstrate so indefatigably everywhere these days. (11)

 

He sums up the legacy of 'Beatdom': "Whether we like it or not, a new vision is abroad in the land now, a vision that was fathered by my generation's attitudes and antics, a vision that perhaps can best be understood by understanding us." (12) This is simultaneously a passing of the torch and the perfect excuse to dive back into your own navel, and notably again uses the organic father/son metaphor to explain the changes from generation to generation in the political and cultural spheres.

 

Holmes also discusses at length the co-optation and incorporation process of his generation's deviance, specifically in relation to the invention of the derivative label, "Beatnik". The mechanism of other-labelling as such, he sneers at: "if you can't understand them, brand them." (127) He further discusses the role of the media, in collusion with those who accepted the other-labelling:

 

            [T]he Beatniks and the Mass Media, between them, succeeded in beclouding most of what was unsettling and thereby valuable, in the idea of Beatness [...] The Beatniks were [...] essentially Bohemians [...] Of course, Bohemians have always, drearily, derived most of their behaviour patterns from attentively watching the bourgeosie and then doing the opposite. (128)

 

Holmes sees Bohemianism as escapism, in sharp contrast to the quest of the original Beats. He especially vehemently glosses "the Rent-a-Beatnik fad" (128) as "merchandising scheme" - rather than as symbolic resistance: "they advertised so much" (129). His final conclusion of the media rôle in these labellings, and the inverse side of the coin, namely the behaviour of those who play along in the "Game of the Name", as he titles this section: "But if the Beatniks were good copy, it was because they acted out all these censored fantasies, and thereby provided a kind of voyeuristic relief to a frustrated time" (130).

 

A further paradox inherent in other-labelling is very astutely pointed out by Holmes: "Critics constantly express amazement at the willingness, even the delight, with which this generation accepts what are (to the critics) basically unflattering images of itself." (121) (A good example is also found in the Marlon Brando film The Wild Ones) This almost perverse glee in being labelled aversely is re-found in much GenX discourse.

 

Holmes next discusses the social and sociological import of the 'Beats' as a group:

 

            Perhaps all generations feel that they have inherited "the worst of all possible worlds", but the Beat Generation probably has more claim to the feeling than any that have come before it [because of a violent historical climate and the attendant erosion of private and public morality, BS] [T]he Beat Generation is specifically the product of this world, and it is the only world its members have ever known. (118)

 

Holmes isolates 4 traits in the historical situation of the 'Beats' that to him prove the uniqueness of stress on this group: 1) that they have undergone peacetime military training, 2) that the catch phrases of psychiatry have become widespread and banal, 3) that terms and phenomena such as genocide, brainwashing, cybernetics, motivational reasearch are familiar, and finally 4) that nuclear destruction is a possibility. These stress factors have combined to create a generational response which is: "too vigorous, too intent, too indefatigable, too curious to suit its elders" (119). This sets the stage for the late '50s version of repressive tolerance from the dominant culture and socio-economic establishment, including academic responses trying to analyze the 'Beat' strangeness out of existence. Holmes takes issue with all these, otherwise relatively sympathetic critiques.

 

He sees the following types of critiques of Beat(niks): The anti-intellectual primitivism type (examples are Norman Podhoretz' article "The Know-Nothing Bohemians in Partisan Review, Spring 1958:308-318, and Herbert Gold's books and articles) Holmes rejects because Beats are seen as "apolitical, asocial, amoral" (131) (Seeing the Negro as noble svage figure is linked to 'Beat' in this critique).

 

The most interesting thing about Podhoretz' article is his comparison between the Bohemians of the 1920s, whom he sees characterized by:

 

            [R]epudiation of the provinciality, philistinism, and moral hypocricy of American life [...] [I]ts ideals were intelligence, cultivation, spiritual refinement. The typical literary figure of the 1920s was a midwesterner who had fled from his home-town to New York or Paris in search of a freer, more expansive, more enlightened way of life" (Podhoretz, 1958:307)

 

Whereas to him the Bohemianism of the 1950s is "hostile to civilization; it worships primitivism, instinct, energy, "blood"" (307-308). "To the extent that it has intellectual interests at all, they run to mystical doctrines, irrational philosophies, and left-wing Reichiansim" (308). Thus the dichotomy is clear: the 'Lost' went on a quest for knowledge, whereas the "Know-Nothing Bohemians" of the title of his piece, are barbarians, out to destroy the temples of knowledge with their misguided new gurus of irrationalism. Holmes of course reverses the polarities.

 

Paul Goodman's critique in Growing up Absurd (1960) sees Beat as a healthy sign of society's disease and calls for society to be "fixed", but Holmes does not approve of the reductionism of 'Beat' to symptom in this line of thinking. Finally, Holmes discusses Mailer's critique in "The White Negro" (in Advertisements for Myself (1959): Holmes disagrees only with future directions, i.e. the consequences of the analysis. Mailer denies the hipster's metaphysical quest and sends him "back into the jungle of the world, where Power is the prize, and ego is the weapon, and Hip is the sight through which you aim" (135)

 

In this social analysis, even crime is an expression of a longing for moral values:

 

            [A] return to an older, more personal, but no less rigorous code of ethics [...] the ethics of the tribe, rather than the community. [cf. Bob Dylan's similar view on the outlaw: "You've got to be honest to live outside the law", BS] [...] [T]he most he [the hipster, BS] would ever propose as a program would be the removal of every social and intellectual restraint to the expression and enjoyment of his unique individuality (123).

 

Holmes reiterates the identity search and ontological quest of the 'tribal' 'Beat': "Everywhere the Beat Generation seems occupied with the feverish production of answers [...] to a single question: how are we to live?" (119) And again: "Only the most myopic, it seems to me, can view this need for mobility (and it is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the Beat Generation) as a flight rather than a search" (120). Yet the main importance of the 'Beats' comes from their writings, not their social acts. In retrospect:

 

            [I]t is clear that its contributions were social and cultural [not spiritual, BS] - its ferment was fermenting. [...] But it was the blasting, beering and bumming in our work, the restless, energetic surface of the life described, and not the world-and-mind weariness, the continual moulting of consciousness, and the spirit's arduous venture toward its own reconciliations, that caught whatever fancies - Square and Beatnik - that were eventually caught. (136)

 

This finally leads Holmes to shift the focus away from the 'Beat Generation' as social phenomenon, and to conclude: "Finally, my Beat Generation, like the Lost Generation before it, was primarily a literary group, and not a social movement" (136). This interestingly reverses (and yet completes) the dissemination of the label of 'Beat', by sending it back to its originary, narrow application simply to a group of writings by writers who were also a circle of close personal friends.

 

He details the seminal works and types of cultural products that go into forming the 'Beat' sensibility. He names Existentialism as 'New', but European, and claims that if 'Beat' was existential it was "in the Kierkegaard, rather than the Jean-Paul Sartre, sense" (117). He names 'Bop' as a liminal experience - an initiation, and notes that the name itself 'Bop', becomes one in a chain of fixed signifiers of in-group marked tastes. (We return to this signification chain in chapter 5.) He glosses jazz in general as "the music of inner freedom, of improvisation" (124), and Charlie Parker as the culture hero of bop. He discusses the perceived apathy of the young 'Beat Generation' adherents (a media/academic label) and offers instead "detachment" (113), with its notable Buddhist connotations, thus forming a complete cultural, philosophical lexicon of influence. (For a discussion of Orientalist tendencies in 'Beat' literature, see chapter 9.)

 

Holmes, not surprisingly, specifically singles out two works as typifying the 'beat' ethos, namely Ginsberg's Howl, which:

 

            [M]ade its own way into the mind of its times on the lips of thousands of young people, for whom it had the paradoxical effect of all revelation - it said precisely what they were thinking and feeling but could not manage, themselves, to heave into words. [...] It was the biography of a part of our era. (62)

 

This emphasizes the Zeitgeist summation that generational works seem to always accomplish. Other appraisals of the generational seminality of Howl include Eberhart's: "Twenty years is more or less a literary generation and Ginsberg's "Howl" ushered in a new generation." (Eberhart, 1976:7)), and Kenneth Rexroth's astute projection: "Howl is the confession of faith of the generation that is going to be running the world in 1965 and 1975 - if it's still there to be run" (Evergreen Review, No. 2, vol. 1, 1957:11).

 

Holmes, in tune with Rexroth's "confession" aspect of the poem, further glosses Howl as an "Affirmation" (unlike most other contemporary opinions of the poem, for instance Eberhart's first impression of Howl: "It did not teach me to live, an attitude he [Ginsberg himself] countered. I felt that it was destructive and did not in itself evoke a better life while it showed evils of society of the time." (Eberhart, 1976:9). Rexroth is again astute: "Nothing goes to show how square the squares are so much as the favourable reviews they've given it [Howl, BS]" (Evergreen Review, No. 2, vol. 1, 1957:11)). This affirmative modality is then later linked to Kerouac's On the Road. Again Holmes negates self-pity and hatred as 'Beat Generation' characteristics:

 

            The suggestion [in On the Road] is that beyond the violence, the drugs, the jazz, and all the other "kicks" in which it frantically seeks its identity, this generation will find a faith and become consciously [...] a religious generation" (126).

 

Finally Holmes dons a slightly bitter and world-weary mien and pronounces:

 

            We have paid for the audacity of daring to label ourselves a 'generation' by being continually ticketed with attitudes of mind and styles of behavior that were not necessarily ours, and having our work dismissed as these attitudes and styles became moribund. (137) For my own part, I am weary of labels. Whatever lies ahead for my generation will certainly make them less and less applicable to our experience, for an inevitable part of aging seems to be that one relentlessly becomes less representative of one's times, and more representative of oneself. (140-141)

 

This slightly disingeneous position of elder, retiring prophet seems forgetful of the nervous urge of Holmes' younger self to label despite all costs. And in fact Holmes ultimately wishes to have the credit that falls to the successful labeller, as he credits the incipient 1960s "thaw" to 'Beat' influence:

 

            Perhaps because of all this, the fever for naming generations may be dying out of our culture at last. Perhaps the future holds no single occurence that will prove so forming that an entire age group can be characterized by a single term [Woodstock was one such occurence, and proved Holmes wrong less than one year after this prediction - BS]. Sometimes I find myself wondering if this happened, in actual fact, in our case. But deluded though we may have been, it was a generation we sought to describe, and not simply a minority group and its exotic mores; it was a unique phenomenon-of-mind in all of us, and not only the eccentric behavior pattern in a few, that we felt impelled to name. (138-139)

 

This almost touching spite, in the face of what Holmes sees as a tide turning massively against his generation, threatening to erase its import completely, and insistance on the generational label as the right one, is very noteworthy. Clearly Holmes seems to have a notion that difference discourses exist in various balances and that the days of the dominant generational discourse are (temporarily, as it turned out) numbered. Holmes falls back into the 'After me, the Deluge'-attitude that the aging Jack Kerouac also favoured (see chapter 6).

 

In summation of this lengthy excursion, which we may remember took off as a discussion of similarities and differences between the two first generational text constructs, we can say that both the Lost and Beat generations have their original naming episodes sanctified - transliterated from oral episodes to ecriture by hagiographers (first Stein by Hemingway; then Kerouac by Holmes). Later we shall see how GenX has its origin in an appropriation of already existing writing... though this is complicated by a history of the name in the popular cultural public sphere as the name of a rock band, which is as much in the oral realm as in the written.

 

Features of a 'Beat Generation' Reception History.

 

We return now to the mainstream critical reception of the seminal 'Beat' texts, and specifically Kerouac's On the Road. Both Newsweek and The New York Times Book Review see the book in the light of a much mellowed interpretation of 'Lost Generation' texts. What is striking is the difference between dominant culture spokesmen's evaluations of the moral valence of On the Road, compared to more sympathetic counter-cultural evaluations. First Newsweek:

 

            If art has anything to do with life, the novels of Hemingway and Fitzgerald make one point about the "Lost Generation" of the '20s. It had the knack of going to hell in a chin-up style.

            The years after the second world war have dragged in something called the "Beat Generation". In this novel, a few choice specimens of the "beat" are up for display, put there by Jack Kerouac, a 35-year-old writer who once hit the road himself for several years. As he presents them, they are an unappetizing chin-down group. [...]

            SUMMING UP: Crazy, man, crazy. (Newsweek, Sept. 9, 1957:115)

 

Thus the deviance once read into Hemingway and Fitzgerald's texts is now glossed as "going to hell in a chin-up style", whereas everything about Kerouac's characters is seen as negative or "chin-down". The summation excels in a patronising and derogatory appropriation of a Kerouacian stylistic quirk, borrowing his borrowed hipster slang, and using it to produce the opposite connotation in the (presumed) bigotted reader, and also reversing the valence of the main thematic content of Kerouac's book, namely that madness is preferable over conformity (see chapter 4 for elaboration of this theme). The slanginess of Kerouac's book was a major thorn in the eye of another, more up-market intellectual/society publication, The New Yorker, which regards the novel as "A sentimental celebration of contemporary lowlife in America [...] Mr Kerouac writes as if he had just invented American slang." (The New Yorker, Oct. 5, 1957:186) Here, at least, there is no explicit condemnation of the morality of the novel, but it is clear that the contempt for using slang in a literary work is only very thinly veiled.

 

Turning now to The New York Times, that doyen of middle class, middle brow respectability, its Book Review section devotes substantial space to a review of On the Road. The pre-review blurb reads: "Jack Kerouac, roving author of The Town and the City, tracks riotous members of the "beat generation" across the country" (Sept. 1, 1957:4) This is relatively neutral, apart from the loaded adjective "riotous" which is ambiguous in the sense that it suggests both that the characters are funny and jokish, as well as potentially subversive in their intent. Note also the scare quotes around "beat generation" which clearly was not a familiarized term for the readership of The New York Times, despite Clellon Holmes "This Is the Beat Generation" article 5 years earlier.

 

The named reviewer, David Dempsey, writes in the review proper (titled "In Pursuit of 'Kicks'") the following week:

 

            Thirty years ago it was fashionable for the young and weary - creatures of Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald - simply to be "lost". Today, one depression and two wars later, in order to remain uncommitted one must at least flirt with depravity. On the Road belongs to the new Bohemianism in American fiction in which an experimental style is combined with eccentric characters and a morally neutral point of view. It is not so much a novel as a long affectionate lark inspired by the so-called "beat" generation... [...] The non-sequiturs of the beat generation become the author's own plotless and themeless technique. (The New York Times Book Review, Sept. 8, 1957:4)

 

This review suggests that the literary expression of generationality must follow the social developments and upheavals ("one depression and two wars later"), in a logic that must read that social troubles somehow make authors callous and mandate them to thematize or "flirt with depravity". While the review does not explicitly condemn the moral standpoint of the novel, which seems quite naively conflated with that of any and all of its characters, it is nonetheless suggested strongly that "morally neutral" is not the thing to be. Certainly the notion of "flirting with depravity" when coupled with a morally neutral point of view is condemned by the reviewer, who might have preferred a serious love affair with depravity coupled with a strong moral condemnation thereof (he ought to have enjoyed Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero if this is indeed the case).

 

Of course the main criticism of the novel is not couched in moral terms but rather in technical terms, and is as devastating as it can get in this understated mode. The novel is not really a novel at all, but a "lark", which in this connection perhaps means that the reviewer is suspicious that Kerouac had too much fun while writing the book, rather than slaving away at the hard work of being a serious writer. The reviewer seems also to think that Kerouac was trying to cash in on some ability to shock or something similar, rather than being the original progenitor of the still scare quoted "beat" label. What is worse is of course the accusation of plotlessness as well as themelessness of the work - claims which any perfunctory study of the novel would reject out of hand. While the plot is not teleologically oriented in a traditional classification principle plot (cf. Moretti, 1987) it is a perfectly fine postmodern Bildungs-plot complying with the transformation principle. Clearly the novel is not themeless either, on the contrary it is overdetermined thematically, only not so obviously in the areas of description of character psychology and setting, as the reviewer might expect at the time, but rather in the language representations and especially in the 'slang' that so bothered the New Yorker reviewer (see chapter 4 for elaboration).

 

Here it might be interesting to cast a brief glance back to the reception of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises in the same newspaper 31 years earlier. Under the headline "Marital Tragedy: The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway", the unnamed reviewer writes:

 

            Ernest Hemingway's first novel, The Sun Also Rises, treats of certain of those younger Americans concerning whom Gertrude Stein has remarked: "You are all a lost generation." [...]

           When he [Jake Barnes] and Brett (Lady Ashley) fall in love, and know, with that complete absence of reticences of the war generation, that nothing can be done about it, the thing might well have ended there. Mr. Hemingway shows uncanny skill in prolonging it and delivering it of all its implications. (The New York Times Book Review, October 31, 1926:7)

 

The first impression of this review is inescapably that the reviewer cannot possibly have read the novel. The references to what Gertrude Stein has remarked can of course only come from the novel's epigraphs, but these seem stripped by the reviewer in a purely mechanical fashion, which does not really seem to have been spurred on by actually seeing them in print in their proper epigraphic position. Also, the lack of reference to Jake's wound as the direct cause why "nothing can be done about" the protagonists' love affair would seem to suggest that, either the reviewer is too delicate to make reference to the sexually related problem of Jake, or thinks that his readers would be offended if he mentioned it, or possibly generally that the times required such silence as the reviewer offers on this crucial matter. Still, I lean more towards the theory that the review is constructed on the basis of publisher's material rather than an actual reading of the novel. This is further supported by the peculiarly inappropriate headline with its reference to "marital tragedy", which it is hard to find any warrant for at all in the novel.

 

What is perhaps the most funny aspect of the review of the novel is the hardly concealed feeling that the reviewer would have liked the book to be much, much shorter (perhaps that is why he gave up reading it). The acidity hidden under the apparent politeness of phrases such as the "uncanny skills" shown by Hemingway in "delivering it of all its implications" seeps through the layers of conventional non-committal praise. After all "delivering something of something" usually means voiding the object in question, and thus the review text manages to suggest an emptiness in Hemingway's prose, at the same time that it accuses it of going on for too long, in too great detail. This is a peculiar instance in the reception history of a book that has otherwise been praised for its brevity and understatement on the level of the narrative. Probably the real agenda is that the review suggests the inappropriateness of the subject matter of the novel.

 

In comparison with the review of On the Road, the Hemingway review is clearly not as openly scathing, but also clearly not suggestive of dealing with a work of great novelty in invention and style, nor a work of any generational significance, apart from the perfunctory reference to the Stein quote, and the alternative epithet "war generation", which seems to be the more familiarized term, since the "lack of reticence" of that "generation" can be referred to as a well-known phenomenon. But altogether the reviews share the reviewer position of patronising dismissal of "younger Americans" in the Hemingway review and of "the so-called "beat" generation" in the Kerouac case.

 

Returning to the reception history roughly contemporary with the publication of On the Road, it is striking how great the contrast is between dominant culture representative media, and more sympathetic fellow traveller media voices in the academic counter-cultural milieu. In the February 1960 issue of Evergreen Review, Warren Tellman gives an appraisal of "Kerouac's Sound". Note the continuing comparison with the 'Lost Generation' forebears:

 

            Although Kerouac's art is limited, I am convinced that his sound is more nearly in the American grain than that of any writer since Fitzgerald. The efforts of his outcast protagonists to get life into their lives seem more closely related to our actual moment than any since Jay Gatsby, similar across worlds of difference, tried to shoot the North American moon. Gatsby failed and finished like a sad swan, floating dead on the surface of a pool. And Kerouac's protagonists fail too. Dean Moriarty [in On the Road] does not make it to creation-day as was his mad desire. Ray Smith [in Dharma Bums] fumbles the Zen football. Leo Percipied [in The Subterraneans] cannot enter guilt-forbidden realms of Mardou's Negro love. Fitzgerald's efforts got lost in the personal, national, and international chaos from which he summoned Gatsby into presence. But it was only after his energies lost coherence that Fitzgerald woke up in the ruin of that dark midnight of the soul where it is always three o'clock in the morning. Kerouac starts in with the dark midnight and it is his effort to bring his protagonists through the jazz of that night, naked, into something like a new day. He fails too. (Evergreen Review, vol 4, 11, Jan/Feb 1960:169)

 

This is good, meaty, metaphor driven prose, which does not tell any lies about the plots, themes or narrative features of the texts under discussion. One might take issue with the judgements of success and failure expressed here, but that would be missing the point of the text. The comparison is not between two abstract generational constructs, but between actual texts and oeuvres. The writer does not let claimed or other-imposed generational affiliation get between him and the actual texts he is reading. On the contrary he clearly demonstrates good perceptive attention to style and sound. What is noticeable, however is that the ultimate object of the analysis is not primarily to say something about the writings, but rather about their fitting into the vaguely expressed "American grain". I take this to mean that which expresses something specifically American, and if this holds and the writer does not simply mean the Zeitgeist, then he only substitutes the generational difference discourse for the national, but still enters a grand narrative about American letters. Still what he says about Kerouac is perceptive considering the closeness in time and the limited size of the available (i.e. published) Kerouacian oeuvre at the time of writing.

 

Perhaps it is fitting to let Kerouac have the last word on the issue of connections with his predecessors inside or outside the 'Lost Generation'. The first quote comes not from an essay, but from Desolation Angels, his 1965 publication, and one of his most experimental novels:

 

            Wolfe suddenly remembering the lonely milkman's bottle clink at dawn in North Carolina as he lies tormented in an Oxford room, or Hemingway suddenly seeing the autumn leaves of Ann Arbor in a Berlin brothel. Scott Fitz tears coming into his eyes in Spain to think of his father's old shoes in the farmhouse door... (Kerouac, 1965:317)

 

The text is, of course, about nostalgia and reminiscences of lost childhoods returning to haunt exiles or expatriates with stunning, displacing topographical force. What is noteworthy here is the clear tone of pure homage in Kerouac's prose, which leaves no doubt that he stands in awe of the writers' power of evocation, and that he wishes to emulate them in narrative power.

 

Hyper- and Intertextual Links across and within Generational Constructs

 

Kerouac on several occasions refers more obliquely to Hemingway as a writer and to the quality and characteristics of his writings. The thematic interlinks will be dealt with in the next chapter, but here we shall look at some other linkages. In his 1968 novel Vanity of Duluoz he writes towards the end:

 

    'When this book is finished, which is going to be the sum and substance and crap of everything I've been thru throughout this whole gaddam life, I shall be redeemed.'

    But, wifey, I did it all, I wrote the book, I stalked the streets of life, of Manhattan, of Long Island, stalked thru 1.183 pages of my first novel, sold the book, got an advance, whooped, hallelujah'd went on, did everything you're supposed to do in life.

    But nothing ever came of it.

    No 'generation' is 'new'. There's 'nothing new under the sun.' 'All is vanity.' (Kerouac, 1968:213)

 

Of course, Kerouac's alter ego narrator (this passage has a very close alignment with Kerouac's actual biography) is quoting Ecclesiastes, as is already hinted at in the title of the novel. The dominant mood is one of tired bitterness, of a nearing of the end of life for this persona. But the interesting thing is naturally the explicit reference to 'generation' in connection with 'new'-ness. Ecclesiastes says: "One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever." Hence the feeling that if everything repeats, nothing can be genuinely new. There is however not the feeling of bitterness in Ecclesiastes, but rather the profound resignation to fate as a human that can be the foundation for faith. The obvious reason for quoting Ecclesiastes is clearly that this is what Hemingway did when he generationed the context of his first novel. Here Kerouac is talking about his own first novel, his hopes, his struggles and eventual bitter defeat. Thus his critique is both implicitly of Hemingway's generationing act, but even more so of Kerouac's own hopes that his generation and his generationing of his books would make things new. The older Kerouac is disillusioned and in denial of his own importance. This position we shall see mirrorred in his post-generational non-fiction which is analysed in chapter 6, along with his resignation from spokesmanship for his generation.

 

In On the Road we are treated to another evocation of Hemingway as Kerouac's literary predecessor, namely in a scene set in Denver where Sal Paradise, the protagonist meets another writer, Roland Major, who re-animates Hemingway in his stories and talk. He prefers France and Europe in general over America, which he finds too full of "arty types [...] sucking up its blood". (41) He reminisces:

 

            'Ah, if you could just come with me sometime and drink Cinzano and hear the musicians of Bandol, then you'd be living. Then there's Normandy in the summers, the sabots, the fine old Calvados. Come on, Sam,' he said to his invisible pal. 'Take the wine out of the water and let's see if it got cold enough while we fished.' [Sal comments:] Straight out of Hemingway, it was. (52)

 

And indeed it is a straight pastiche of The Sun Also Rises ("I walked up the road and got out the two bottles of wine. They were cold. Moisture beaded on the bottles as I walked back to the trees. [...] The wine was icy cold and tasted faintly rusty. "That's not such filthy wine," Bill said" (Hemingway 1926:125-126)), only with different generic American names. But it is clear that Roland invites Sal to be Bill (or 'Sam') to his Jake Barnes. The effect of this pastiche is to both establish the connectedness between the two texts, but also to vaguely disturb the reader's gestalt of Hemingway's refined, but rugged characters by lifting them out of the European nature scene in The Sun Also Rises, and instead situating them in On the Road in a scene where Roland is throning in the middle of a huge cleaning operation of an old miner's house in Old Denver - a piece of authentic Old West, and as American as apple pie. The expat mannerisms of the Hemingway epigone seem highly stilted and artificial in that re-contexting.

 

Apart from this diachronic inter- and hypertextuality, we also find an incipient synchronic intertextual universe developing among 'Beat' writers. Of course all Kerouac's writer friends appear under pseudonym in his novels, and there are many amusing references to their books as well (under pseudonym Burroughs' Naked Lunch, which was actually thus titled by Kerouac, becomes "Nude Supper" in Desolation Angels (Kerouac, 1965:314)). But over and above that the 'Beats' developed the habit of actually reusing each others pseudonyms, so that the works would appear to be separate installments in the same ongoing saga or textual universe, all about the same people. Holmes writes in the foreword to Go  on naming a character in that novel, "Will Dennison", Kerouac's name for Burroughs in The Town and the City:

 

        [W]e all took delight in dropping these enigmatic, intersecting references into our books - as Jack did in Maggie Cassidy when he alludes to the mood and subject of an early, unpublished work of mine. (Clellon Holmes, 1976:xix)

 

Similarly Holmes used the name Pasternak for his Kerouac character both in Go and The Horn. (Get Home Free is the title of the above mentioned sequel to Go, according to Gregory Stephenson's: The Daybreak Boys, chapter 6: "Homeward from Nowhere: Notes on the Novels of John Clellon Holmes. (Stephenson, 1990:104))

 

This tendency of shared character naming has been further extended by the two more recent generational constructs. There is, in fact, an unusually obvious use of intertextuality in the most recent generational novels, to an extent where one can talk of a 'virtual reality' composed of shared 'Blank Generation' characters, fictional localities (companies) and fictional props (identified by brand names). This raises the more general theoretical question of what the significance is of this conscious creation of an artificial reality, where characters can interact across the boundaries of individual works and oeuvres. A tentative answer might be that the authors feel a need for a further emphasis on the connotative elements of "family" and "security" located within the label "generation", which they attempt to strengthen by building this close knit web of shared cultural and familial (cf. the Bateman dynasty of Easton Ellis) values, which in these novels become carriers of a duality of fascination by and alienation from traditional family life, involving emotions, meaningful interaction etc. Apart from this hypothesized need within the authors' psyches, there might be a conscious incorporation of a literary feature culled from the 'cyberpunk' subculture of the 1980s, where the idea of a virtual reality as a shared cultural topography originated.