NORMAN PODHORETZ
to\4.er. Solidljl good-looking in a jungle-print tie and tan pants--&
looked like a somewhat stockier version of Cassady-Hansen
gave off
a strong positive vibe that suggested a disposition inherited from his
fatiler. T h e only thing of Neal's that h e owned was a sheaf of yellowing
lland\vri~tenletters that Cassady wrote to Diana Hansen in the ear]\/
Fifties. \vhen he was trying to convince her to move to one town a\vay
from his wife, Carolyn, so he could continue the sexual triangulation
that was one of his life's driving obsessions.
"The letters have some pretty wild stuff in them," Curtis said. "He
talks about cunt hair and all the sex they're going to have when the\,
get together. You can tell they had a real good sexual relationship."
"What did your mom tell you about Cassady?" I asked.
I should stay away from
"Oh, she said that h e was a jailbird-that
him. I was real embarrassed \&?henhe went to prison in the late
Fifties-that's
why we changed my name to Hansen."
"\h/hat did you think of On the Road?"
"That book they wrote together?" he said. "I thought it was bori~zg,"h e says. "I never really understood what that \whole shtick was
about."
Yet Hansen \vas inspired by the father h e never knew and the
book h e didn't care for to go on the road himself, driving across count ~ ?in 1969, after he was "invited to leave" college on suspicion of selling mescaline and for having a girl in his room. "That trip across the
country is one of the things I'm proudest of in my life," h e said. "Cassady had just died, I got laid for the first time, got high and took off. It
Mias definitely a symbolic journey."
"I imagine that it must have been difficult to be Cassady's son," I
offered.
"\?/ell, I used to feel I had a lot to live up to," h e said in his effusive, former-DJ voice. "I wish my dad had been around so I could have
asked him about girls. I used to have a lot of trouble in that area."
In a fen, weeks, h e and his wife, a receptionist at his office, were
d u e to visit Salt Lake City for a creative visualization workshop. "This
is definitely the dawning of the Age of Aquarius," h e said. "I'm totally
in favor of-what do they call it?-'popular spirituality.' Just because
it's popular doesn't mean it's wrong."
At his office, Hansen excitedly sho\ired me the computer that creates each day's playlist-it was all based on market research, studying
1
479
demographic reaction to song "burnout" and likability among babyboomer \vomen. "We don't want to upset our audience or they11 turn
dial," h e explained, gesturing with his hands as h e speaks. "Mre try
L ~ S C onl!. good cvords on the air, like 'free' and 'special offer.' "
\?ic walked past the darkened soundstages, where insectile-looking
headgear and metal protuberances dangled from the ceiling. Technicians hurried past, many of them wearing 1960s-style beards and ponytails. "Ronald Reagan once sat here,'' Hansen said, pointing at a bare
,z,ooden table. "There used to be a plaque but I guess it fell off."
Listening to the drone of a Michael Bolton song in Hansen's office, where windows overlooked the gray panorama of Bridgeport, I
t h o ~ ~ g about
ht
h o ~ vradio once encouraged the outsider expression of
someone like Alan Freed, \&thopromoted rock 8. roll in its early days.
In the Forties and Fifties, Symphony Sid's shocvs of jazz and bebop
had inspired Kerouac and Cassady on their manic jaunts across the
continent.
"Does it bother you that radio has become so corporate?" I asked
Hansen.
lo, that's what's so great about our time," h e said. "\firhat I think
lppened is that the counterculture and the mainstream have
merged." H e waved his hands excitedly in the air as h e continued.
"You don't have to listen anymore to the songs you don't like-)rou only
listen to the songs that the majority of the people like. You see what I
mcan? T h e mainstream has become the new frontier." From his desk,
he turned up the volume on the live feed from the soundstage down
the hall. and the voice of hlichael Bolton grew louder and louder until
it momentarily seemed to envelop us.
NORMAN
PODHORETZ,
editor and critic, published "The Kno\vNothing Bohemians" in Pal-tisan R e ~ ~ i avol.
v,
No. 2 (Spring
1958). More than forty years later, in his memoir Ex-Frieizds
(1999), he continued to rail at Allen Ginsherg, n,hose "close
480
i
I
I
/
BE,\T
DOM'N
TO Y O U R S O U L
ncss," Podhoretz cxplainecl, "consisted not in a genuine friendship h ~ in~ the
t many ycars we \vent back and the recurrent visions and dreams he had about me." Podhoretz \\!as a member
of the informal group of New York intellectuals \z~hojourneyed
from radicalism to conservatism in their careers after the Second Mlorld \&'at-. In his attack on the spontaneity, energy, and
enthusiasm of the Beat writers in his 1958 article, Podhoretz appointed himself "spokesman of the rear guard," as the biographer Ted hlorgan understood.
Thc result of Podhoretz's article was a spate of letters to
the Pniiisnn Revim7 defending the Beats, including one by
LcRoi Jones. In the "Correspondence" pages of the nest issue
of the journal, Jones wrote that Beat literature \\!as "less a
mo\.ement than a reaction. It is a reaction against, let us say to
start, fifteen years of sterile, unreadable magazine poetry" by
writers such as "Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Karl Shapiro,
Delmore Schivartz, John Berryman, Peter Viereck, George
Barker, Stephen Spender, Louis Macniece, and others who
were so representative of what poetry was in the 1940s, as \veil
as [Richard] Eberhart, [Richard] Wilbur, [\Yilliam] Meredith.
[I&!S.] h:Ier\vin, [Elizabeth] Bishop" and others who "represent
the academically condoned poetn of the 1950s. But I wish to
say emphaticall!! that from this entire group of poets (\\.hich
represents almost twenty years of poetry) we ha1.e about five
poems of note."
Podhoretz and other critics and revie\vers continued to
snipe away at the Beat writers in the pages of Pnrtisn7z R e ~ ~ i n t :
For example, in the Fall 1958 issue, Podhoretz wrote in "The
New Nihilism and the No\lel" that the "reception accorded Jack
Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, u.hose work combines an appearance of radicalism jvith a shovv of intense spirituality, testifies to
the hunger that has grown up on all sides for something extreme, fenlent, affirmative, and s\veeping; five, or even three,
years ago the 13eat Generation would simply not have been noticed." In the same issue, the English critic A1 Alvarez, revie\ving Denise Levertov's small-press collection of poetry O~~erlnwd
to tlze Islaizds, began by saying, "Rliss Denise Levertov is said to
he the best of San Francisco's Beat poets. Since the other candidates are Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Lawrence
Ferlinghetti, no one will deny her the title." Alvarez, who
had befriended the poet Sylvia Plath in London, wanted
Lcvertov to stop imitating William Carlos \?/illiams and find
"a language of her oc\.n. Perhaps the San Francisco scene
has something to do with her timidity, for the eulraordinary
thing about the Beat Generation [~vriters]is the degree to
which they are old-Fashioned. They seem to feel they have to
be 'modern,' and 'modern' simply means going through the
ritual experiments that were alread!~dated by the mid-'twenties.
It is, after all, time someone explained to Mr. Ginsherg
that Whitman and \[ache1 Lindsay are not so very a17~1nt"
The Know-Nothing Bohemians
dlen Ginsberg's little volume of poems, Hmvl, \vhich got the San
-rancisco renaissance off to a screaming start a year or so ago, \\,as
edicated to Jack Kerouac ("new Buddha of Amcrican prose, nlho spit
~ r t hintelligence into eleven books written in half thc number of years
. . creating a spontaneous bop prosody and original classic literature"), William Se\vard Burroughs ("author of Naked Lznzclz, an endless novel which will drive everybody mad"), and Neal Cassady
("author of T h e First Tlzii-d, an autobiograph!~ . . . which enlightened
Buddha"). So far, everybody's sanity has been spared by the inability of
Naked Lzrlzch to find a
and \4#emay never get the chance to
discover what Buddha learned from Neal Cassady's autobiography. but
thanks to the Viking and Grove Presses, two of Kerouac's original classics, 0 1 2 the Road and Tlze Sztbterranea~zs,have now been revealed to
the \vorld. When O n the Road appeared last year, Gilbert RIillstein
commemorated the event in the Ne\v York Ti117esby declaring it to be
Z
"a historic occasion" comparable to thc publication of T71e S Z I I Also
Rises in the 1920's. But even before the novel was actuall!/ published,
the word got around that Kerouac was the spokesman of a new group
of rebels and Bohemians who called themselves the Beat Generation,
and soon his photogenic countenance (unshaven, of course, and
opped by an unruly crop of rich black hair falling over his forehead)
vas sho\ving up in various mass-circulation magazines, h e \vas being
ntel-vieuled earnestly on television, and he was being featured in a
NORMAN POVHORETZ
GreenIvich \/illage nightclub where, in San Francisco fashion, he read
specimens of his spontaneous bop prosody against a backgrountl of
jazz music.
Though the nightclub act reportedly flopped, 011 the Rmrrd sold
we]] enough to hit the best-seller lists for se\,eral \veeks, and it i\n't
hard to understand \vhy. Americans love nothing so m~rchas rcprcsentative documents, and what could be more interesting in this /\gc of
Sociology than a novel that speaks for the "yo~rnggeneration?" (l'llc
fact that Kerouac is thirty-five or thereabouts \\,as generously not hcId
against him.) Reyond that, ho\vevec I think that the unveiling of 111~
Beat Generation \\.as greeted with a certain relief by many people
\vho had heen disturbed by the notorious respectabilit!. and "maturit!."
of postwar w:riting. This was more like it-restless,
rebellious, confused youth living it up, instead of thin, balding, buttoned-dou.n instructors of English composing ironic verses with one hand \\.bile
changing the baby's diapers with the other. Bohemianism is not particularly fashionable no\vadays, but the image of Bohemia still
exerts a po\verful fascination-nowhere more so than in the S U ~ L I I - h s ,
\vhich are filled to o\:erflo\ving with men and ivornen who uneasil!.
thinli of themselves as conformists and of Bohemianism as the
heroic road. The whole point of 1llar:jorie i\~lornil7gstnr \\!as to
assure the young marrieds of hlamaroneck that they were better off
of Greenwich Villagc.
than thc apparently glamorous lz~fiine~zsclze~z
and the fact that \Arouk had to work so hard at making this idca sceln
convincing is a good indication of the strength of prevailing d o u l ~on
the matter.
O n the surface, at least, the Bohemianism of On the Rond is \.el>,
attractive. Here is a group of high-spirited young men r~rnningback
and forth across the c o u n t n (mostly hitch-hiking, sometimes i n thcir
o\;\ln second-hand cars), going to "wild" parties in Nc\v Yorlc ant1 Dcnver and San Francisco, li\.ing on a shoe-string (GI educational hcncfits, an occasional fifty buclcs from a liindly aunt, an odd job as a t~8pist.
a fruit-picker, a parking-lot attendant), talking intensely about lo\^) a n d
God and salvation, getting high on marijuana ( b ~ l never
t
heroin or cocaine), listening feverishly to jazz in cro\\~dedlittlc joints, and slccprnp
freely with beautiful girls. No\\! and again here is a reference to ploonl
and melancholy, but the characteristic note str~lcliby Kerouac is cxuberance:
/
483
\&restopped along the road for a bite to eat. The co\vboy \\.cnt
,ff to have a spare tire patched, and Eddie and 1 sat dolvn in
a kind of homelnade diner. I heard a great laugh, the greatest
laugh in the world, and here came this rawhide oldtinies Nebraska farmer ivith a bunch of other boys into the diner; yo11
could hear his raspy cries clear across the plains, across the
\\:hole gray world of them that day. Everybody else laughed
\\;ith him. H e didn't have a care in the u~orldand had the
hugest regard for everybody. 1 said to m!iself, M'han~,listen to
that man laugh. That's the \Vest, hcrc I am in the \Vest. He
came booming into the diner, calling i\lla\\,'s name, and she
made the sweetest cherry pie in Nebraska, and 1 had some
with a mountainous scoop of ice cream on top. "i\/Ia~i:rustle
me up some grub afore I have to start eatin myself or some
damn silly idee like that."And he threw himself on a stool and
went hya\v hyaw hyaw hya\\:. "And thro\,v some beans in it." It
was the spirit of the \Vest sitting right next to me. I \\ished 1
knew his whole raw life and what the hell he'd been doing all
these years besides laughing and yelling like that. Mihooee, I
told my soul. and the cowboy came back and off \ve \iZentto
Grand Island.
Kerouac's enthusiasm for the Nebraska farmer is part of his general
readiness to find the source of all vitality and virtue in simple rural
types and in the dispossessed urban groups (Negroes, bums, whores).
His idea of life in New lbrk is "millions and millions hustling forever
for a buck aniong themselves . . . grabbing. taking, giving, sighing, d!ling, just so the); could be buried in those awful cemeten cities beyond
Long Island City," whereas the rest of America is populated almost excIusi\lely by the true of heart. There are intimations here of a kind of
know-nothing populist sentiment, but in other \\lays this attitude resembles Nelson Algren's belief that bums and ivhores and junkies are
more interesting than white-collar workers or civil servants. The difference is that Algren hates middle-class respectability for moral and
political reasons-the
middle class exploits and persecutes-v~hile
Kerouac, who is thoroughly unpolitical, seems to feel that respectahilit\: is a sign not of moral corruption but of spiritual death. "The only
People for me," says Sal Paradise, the narrator of 0 7 7 the Rond, "are the
mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved,
desirous of everything at the same time, the ones \vho never yawn or
484
1
R E A T DO\\'N
TO YOUR SOUL
NOR~\IANPODHORETZ
say a commonplace thing, hut burn. b ~ ~ r burn
n , like fahuloLls
roman candles exploding like spiders across thc stars. . .
tremendous emphasis on emotional intensity this notion tllat to he
hopped-up is the most desil-able of all hunian conditions, lies at
heart of the Beat Generation ethos and disting~~ishes
it ~ - ~ d i c ~ fro,,,
l]!,
the Bohemianism of the past.
T h e Bohemianism of the 1920's represented a repudiation of lhe
provinciality pr hi list in ism, and moral hypocrisy of America17 ]ifeia
life, incidentall~r,which \\>as still essentially snlall-to\\rn a n d I-Llral in
tone. Bohemia, in other ~vords,was a movement created in the name
of civilization: its ideals ivere intelligence. cultivation,
merit. T h e typical literal-)/ f i g ~ ~ rofe the rgzo's \vas a mid\\,estcrncr
(Hemin,o\\lay, Fititzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Eliot, Pound) \\,ho had fled
from his home t o ~ mto New Jbrk or Paris in search of a freer, mol-cexpansiile, more enlightened way of life than was possible in Ohio or
Minnesota or Rlichigan. T h e political radicalism that supplied the
characteristic coloring of Bohemianism in the 1930's did nothing to
ter the urban, cosmopolitan bias of the 1920's. At its hest, the ratlicalism of thc 1930's was marked by deep intellectual s e r i o ~ ~ s n e sand
s
aimed at a state of societ)[ in which the fruits of ci\rilization \\,auld he
more ~videlya\lailable-and ultirnatel!~available to all.
T h e Bohemianism of the I ~ ~ O is' Sanother kettle of fish altogether.
It is hostile to civilization; it worships primitivism, instinct, cncl-a,
"blood." To the extent that it has intellectual interests at all. the!. run
to mystical tloctrines, irrationalist philosophies, and left-~vingKeichianism. T h e only art the ne\.fr Bohemians have any use for is jazz,
mainly of the cool variety. Their predilection for bop lang~lageis il \{.a![
of demonstrating solidarity \\rith the primitive vitalit![ and spontaneity
the![ find in jazz and of expressing contempt for coherent, rational discourse i~lhich,being a product of the mind. is in their vie\\; a form
of death. To be articulate is to admit that you have no feelings (for
ho\\/ can real feelings be expressed in syntactical languagc?), that ! ~ u
can't respond to anything (Kerouac responds to e\~e~-ytIiing
hy sa!.ing
"\hro\&l!"),and that you arc probably impotent.
,"
rhis
At the one end of the spectrum, this ethos shades off into \.iolence and criminality, main-line d r ~ l gaddiction and nladncss. Allen
Ginsberg's poet)-!I, with its lurid apocalyptic celebration of " l ~ n ~ e l headed hipsters," spealo for the darker side of the ne\bf Bol7emianism
485
Kernuac is milder H e shoars little taste for \~iolencc,and the criminalhe admires is the harmless kind. T h e hero of OILthe Rolrd, Deal1
"From the a p of eleven to seventeen hc was
hioriarty, has a
,,sually in reform school, His specialty ulas stealing cars. gunning for
qirls coming out of high school in the shernoon, driving them O L ~ L to
.he mountains, making them, and coming back to sleep in any availll,le hotel bathtub in town." But Dean's criminality \ye are told, "\\,as
something that sulked and sneered; it was a \wild yea-saying oIrerburst of American joy; it \was \Vestern, the \vest wind, an ode from the
long a-coming (he onl!~ stole
new. long
Plains,
cars for joy rides)." And, in fact, the species of Bohemian that I(erouac
about is on the \ahole rather la\\[-abiding. In Tlte SLtbtet~ra~zai~zs,
of drunken boys steal a pushcart in the middle of the night,
a
and \Yhen they leave it in front of a friend's apartment building, he denounces them angrily for "screiving u p the security of my pad." \{/hen
Paradise (in 0 1 2 the Road) steals some groceries from the canteen
job as
camp in \vhich he has taken a
of an itinerant
sal
a barracks guard, he comments, "I suddenly began to realize that
in America is a natural-born thiefw-which, of course, is a
\\;a); of turning his own stealing into a bit of boyish prankishness.
Nevertheless, Kerouac is attracted t o criminality and that in itself is
more significant than the fact that h e personally feels constrained to
put the brakes on his own destructive impulses.
Sex has alwa)is played a very important role in Bohemianism:
sleeping around was the Bohemian's most dramatic demonstration of
his freedom from con\~entionalmoral standards, and a defiant denial
of the idea that sex \itas Permissible only in marriage and then only for
the sake of a family. At the same time, to he "promiscuous" was to assert the validity of sexual experience in and for itself. T h e "meaning" of
Bohemian scs. then, was at once social and ~ e r s o n a l ,a crucial eleideal of civilization. Here again the contrast
ment in the
\vith Beat Generation Bohemianism is sharp. O n the one h a n d there
is a fair amount of sexual activity in 01.1
the Road and TI7.e S1117tel.~a~zeajn,
Dean hloriarty is a "new kind of American saint" at least
partly because of his amazing sexual pou:er: h e can lteep three \\;omen
satisfied simultaneously and he can make love an!] time, an!where
(once he mounts a girl in the bacli seat of a car urhile poor Sal Paradise
is trying to sleep in front). Sal, too. is al\\lqs on the make, and tho~lgh
486
1
B E A T D O W N TO Y O U R S O U L
he isn't as successful as the great Dean, he does pretty well: offhand 1
can remember a girl in Denver, one on a bus. and another in ;\'e\\.
b u t a little research ~ r o u l dcertainly unearth a few more. .lhe
heroine of The Sztbterra1zeam, a Negro girl named M a r d o ~ iFox, seems
to have switched from one to another member of the same gang and
its time"), and \\.e
ual about such an
stle is not freedom
from ordinary social restrictions or defiance of convention (escept in
relation to homosexuality, which is Ginsberg's presenre: among "the
best minds" of Ginsberg's generation who \yere destroyed by A~ncrica
are those "who let themselves be -in the -by saintly motorc,clists, and screamed with joy, / ~ l h blew
o
and were blo\vn by those 11~1man seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean lo\,e").
T h e sex in Kerouac's book goes hand in hand with a great deal of talk
about forming permanent relationships ("although I have a hot feeling
sexually and all that for her," says the poet Adam hiloorad in The Sllbterralzea~zs,"I really don't want to get any further into her not on&.for
these reasons but finally, the big one, if I'm going to get invol\.ed \\.ith
a girl now I want to be permanent like permanent and serious and
long termed and 1 can't d o that with her"), and a habit of getting married and then duly divorced and re-married when another girl comes
along. In fact, there are as many marriages and divorces in 0r.z the
Road as in the Holly\vood movie colony (must be that California climate): "All those years I \vas looking for the woman I n~antedto
marry" Sal Paradise tells us. "I couldn't meet a girl without saying to
myself, What kind of \\fife \vould she make?" Even more re\.ealing is
Kero~iac'srefusal to admit that any of his characters ever make love
\vantonly or Iccherously-no matter how casual the encounter it must
al\vays entail m r e e t feelings toward the girl. Sal, for example. is fixed
up with Rita Bettencourt in Denver, whom h e has never met before. "1
got her in my bedroom after a long talk in the dark of the front room.
She was a nice little girl, simple and true [naturally], and tremendously frightened of sex. I told her it was beautiful. I \\,anted t o pro1.e
this to h e r She let me prove it, but I was too impatient and
nothing. She sighed in the d a r t . 'What do you want out of iifi.:'
asked, and I used to ask that all the time of girls." This is rather t o ~ ~ c h ing, but only because the narrator is really just as frightened of sex as
d-
nice little girl was. H e is frightened of failure and he \\-orries
his performance. For peifor-mcrrzce is the point-pei-formancc
J,d "good orgasms." which are the first duty of man and thc only duty
of \voman. What seems to he involved here, in short, is sexual anxiety
enormous proportions-an
anxiety that coines out very cleal-111 in
711eSzlbte1~a7zenl?s,\\lhich is about a love affair between the young
,,,riter, Leo Percepied, and the Negro girl, Alardou Fox. Despite its
the book is one long agony of fear and trembling
o\.er sex:
I spend long nights and many hours making her, finally I have
her, I pray for it to come, I can hear her breathing harder, I
hope against hope it's time, a noise in the hall (or \\,hoop of
drunkards nest door) takes her mind off and she can't make it
and laughs-but
\\)hen she does make it I hear her crying,
\vhimpering, the shuddering electrical female orgasm makes
her sound like a little girl crying, moaning in the night, it lasts
a good twenty seconds and \\,hen it's over she moans, "0\vhy
can't it last longer." and "0\+then will I n'hen you do?"-"Soon
now I bet," I said, "you'rc getting closer and closer"\'en1 primitive, very spontaneous, v e n elemental, very beat.
For the neiv Bohemians interracial friendships and love affairs apparently play the same role of social defiance that ses used to play in
older Bohemian circles. Negroes and \j.hites associate freely on a basis
of complete equality and \without a trace of racial hostility. But putting
it that way understates the case, for not only is there no racial hostilit); there is positive adulation for the "happy true-hearted, ecstatic
xegroes of America."
At lilac evening I \\talked with every muscle aching among the
lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, \vishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white \li.orld had
offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy
kicks, darkness, music, not enough night. . . . I wished I were
a Denver A,Iexican, or even a poor o\len\~orkedJap, anything
but what I \\.as so drearily, a "n-hite man" disillusioned. All my
life I'd had white ambitions. . . . I passed the dark porches of
h'lesican and Negro homes; soft voices \vere there, occasionally the dusky knee of some ~nysterioussensuous gal; and
dark faces of the men behind rose arbors. Little children sat
like sages in ancient rocking chairs.
,,-
It \2:ill be news to the Negroes to learn that they are so happy and
static; I doubt if a more idyllic picture of Negro life has been painted
since certain Southern ideologues tried to convince the world that
things \{,ere just as fine as fine could be for the slaves on the old plantation. Be that as it may Kerouac's love for Negroes and other darkskinned groups is tied up with his worship of primitivism, not a l t h an!,
radical social attitudes. Ironically enough, in fact, to see the.Negro as
more elemental than the white man, as Ned Polskp has acutely remarked, is "an inverted form of keeping the nigger in his place." ~~t
even if it were true that American Negroes, by virtue of their position
in our culture, have been able to retain a degree of primitive spontaneity, the last place you \ifould expect to find evidence of this is
among Bohemian Negroes. Bohemianism, after all, is for the Negro a
means of entry into the world of the whites, and no Negro Bohemian
is going to cooperate in the attempt to identify him with Harlem or
Dixieland. T h e only major Negro character in either of Kerouac's t\vo
no\!els is hlardou Fox, and she is about as primitive as Wilhelm Reicli
himself.
T h e plain truth is that the primitivism of the Beat Generation
serves first of all as a cover for an anti-intellectualism so bitter that it
makes the ordinary American's hatred of eggheads seem positively benign. Kerouac and his friends like to think of themselves as intellectuals ("they are intellectual as hell and kno\v all about Pound ~ l i t h o ~ ~ t
being pretentious or talking too much about it"), but this is only a form
of newspeak. Here is an example of what Kerouac considers intelligent discourse-"formal
and shining and complete, \vithout the tedious intellectualness":
\Vc passed a little kid who \hias t h r o ~ i i n gstones at the cars in
thc road. "Think of it," said Dean. "One day he'll put a stone
through a man's windshield and the man will crash and dieall on account of that little kid. You see {vhat I mean! God esists ~ ~ i t l i o uqualms.
t
As we roll along this \&layI am positive
beyond doubt that everything \vill be taken care of for usthat even you, as you drive, fearful of the \vheel . . . the thing
will go along of itself and you won't go off the road and I can
F~lrtliermorewe Itnow America, \ve're at home; I can go
,ny\vhere in America and get what I \\:ant because it's the
same in every corner, I know the people, I know what they do.
\,Ve give and take and go in the incredibly complicated stveetness zigzagging every side."
~ b see
u what h e means? Formal and shining and complete. No tedious
i n t e l l e c t ~ a l n eCompletely
~~.
unpretentious. "There ulas nothing clear
,bout the things h e said but what h e meant to say was somehow made
pure and clear." Sonzehou! Of course. If what h e wanted to say had
heen carefully thought out and precisely articulated, that would have
been tedious and pretentious and, no doubt, somelzoul unclear and
clearly impure. But s o long as he utters these banalities with his
tongue tied and with no comprehension of their meaning, so long
as lie makes noises that came out of his soul (since they couldn't
have come out of his mind), h e passes the test of true intellectualit!r.
Which brings us to Kerouac's spontaneous bop prosody. This
"prosod!;' is not to be confused with bop language itself, which has
such a limited \locabulary (Basic English is a verbal treasure-house by
comparison) that you couldn't write a note to the milk-man in it, much
less a novel. Kerouac, however, manages to remain true to the spirit of
hipster slang \\lhilc making forays into enemy territonl (i.e., the English language) by his simple inability to express anything in words.
The only method h e has of describing an object is to summon up the
same half-dozen adjectives over and over again: "greatest," "tremenlous," "crazy," "mad," "\vild," and perhaps one or two others. When it's
nore than just mad or crazy or wild, it becomes "really mad" or "reall!/
:razy" or "really wild." (All quantities in excess of three, incidentally,
Ire subsumed under the r ~ ~ b r "innumerable,"
ic
a word used innumerable times in 0 1 2 the Road but not so innumerably in 7?7e S d t e r .anea~zs.)T h e same poverty of resources is apparent in those passages
&whereKerouac tries to handle a situation in\~olvingeven slightly com~ l i c a t e dfeelings. His usual tactic is to run for cover behind clichi. and
a g u e signals to the reader. For instance: "I looked at him; my eyes
were watering with embarrassment and tears. Still he stared at me.
NOMI his eyes \\/ere blank and looking through me. . . . Something
:licked in both of us. In me it was suddenly concern for a man who
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BEAT DOWN TO YOUR S O U L
was years younger than I, five years, and whose fate Mias w o ~ ~ n d
mine across the passage of the recent years; in him it was a matt,,
that I can ascertain only from what he did aftenvard." If !?OU can ascertain what this is all about. either beforehand. during, or aftenzlard,
you are surely no square.
In keeping with its populistic bias, the style of O n the Road is
folksir and lvrical. T h e prose of Tlze Szibterm7zeans, on the other hand,
sounds like an inept parody of Faulkner at his worst, the main differ.
ence being that Faulkner usuallj~produces bad writing out of an impulse to inflate the commonplace while Kerouac gets into trouble hv
pursuing "spontaneity." Strictly speaking, spontaneity is a quality of
feeling, not of writing: when \Ale call a piece of writing spontaneous,
we are registering our in~pressionthat the author hit upon the right
words \\.ithout siveating, that no "art" and no calculation entered into
the picture, that his feelings seem to have spoken themselves, seem to
have sprouted a tongue at the moment of composition. Kerouac apparently thinks that spontaneity is a matter of saying whatever comes
into your head, in any order you happen to feel like saying it. It isn't
the riglzt words he wants (even if h e knows what they might be),
but the first \r\lords, or at any rate the words that most obviously announce themselves as deriving from emotion rather than cerebration,
as coming from "life" rather than "literature," from the guts rather than
the brain. (The brain, remember, is the angel
of death.) But writing
that springs easily and ."spontaneously" out of strong feelings is 7?e1ler
vague: it always has a quality of sharpness and precision because it is
in the nature of strong feelings to be aroused by specific objects. The
notion that a diffuse, generalized, and unrelenting enthusiasm is the
marl< of great sensitivity and responsiveness is utterly fantastic, an
idea that comes from taking drunkenness or drug addiction as the
state of perfect emotional vigor. The effect of such enthusiasm is actually to wipe out the world altogether, for if a filling station will serve
as \veil as the Rocky Mountains to arouse a sense of awe and \vondel;
then both the filling station and the mountains are robbed of their reality. Kerouac's conception of feeling is one that only a solipsist could
believe in-and a solipsist, be it noted, is a man who does not relate to
anything outside himself.
Solipsism is precisely \\that characterizes Kerouac's fiction. 0 7 2 the
Road and T h e Szlbtel-ralzea~zsare so patently autobiographical in con-
NORMAN PODHORETZ
/
491
[hat they become almost impossible to discuss as novels; if sponeitv \.!;ere indeed a matter of destroying the distinction between life
tan ,
literature, these books w o u l d unquestionably be It. "As w e were
out to the car Babe slipped and fell flat on her face. Poor girl \\,as
o,,cnvrought. H e r brother Tim a n d I helped her up. We got in t h e car;
~ l ~and
j ~Betty
r joined us. The sad ride back to Denver began." Babe
;, girl \\rho is mentioned a felt, times in the course of 0 1 2 tlze Road;
don't know why s h e is over\vrought on this occasion, and even if
did it \vouldn't matter, since there is no reason for her presence in
book at all. But Kerouac tells us that she fell flat on her face while
,valking toward a car. It is impossible to believe that Kerouac made
[his detail up, that his imagination was creating a \ilorld real enough to
include \\~hollpgratuitous elements; i f that were the case, Babe would
ha\le come alive as a h u m a n being. Rut she is only a name; Kerouac
ne\,er even describes her. S h e is in the book because the sister of one
of Kerouac's friends \??as there
he took a trip to Central City,
Colorado, and she slips i n O n t h e Road because she slipped that day
on the way to the car. W h a t is t r u e of Babe who fell flat on her face is
true of virtually every incident i n O n the Road and TIze Szrbterra~zea~u.
Sothing that happens has any dramatic reason for happening. Sal Paradise meets such-and-such people on the road whom he likes or
(rarely) dislikes; they exchange a fe\v \vords, they have a few beers together, they part. It is all very unremarkable and commonplace, b u t for
Kerouac it is always the greatest, t h e wildest, the most. What you get
in these two books is a m a n proclaiming that he is alive and offering
even1 trivial experience h e has ever had in evidence. Once I did this,
once 1 did that (he is saying) a n d by God, it meant something! Because
1 nspolzded! But if it meant something, and you responded so powerfull!! why can't you explain what it meant, and why d o you have to insist s ~ : :
,
,,.,
I think it is legitimate to say, t h e n , that the Beat Generation's warship of primitivism and spontaneity is more than a cover for hostility to
Intelligence; it arises from a pathetic poverty of feeling as ~ r e l l .T h e
I1ipsters and hipster-lovers of t h e Beat Generation are rebels, all right,
hut not against anything s o sociological and historical as the middlc
class or capitalism or even respectability This is the revolt of the spirItually underprivileged and the crippled of soul-voung men \vho can't
think straight and so hate anyone \</hocan; young men u ~ h ocan't get
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BEAT DOWN TO YOUR SOUL
~ ~ l t s i dthe
c morass of self and so construct definitions of feeling that
exclude all human beings \Vh0 manage to live. even miseraI>ly, in a
world of ol>jects; yoLlng men who are burdened unto death with the
specially poignant sexual anxiety that America-in its eternal promise
of erotic glory and its spiteful ~iithholdingof actual erotic possibilit\,,
seems bent on breeding, and \vho therefore dream of the unattainable
perfect orgasm, which excuses all sexual failures in the real world. N~~
long ago. Norman Mailer suggested that the rise of t h e hipster ma,.
represent "the first wind of a second revolution in this centur): movina
not forward toward action and more rational equitable distribution,
but baclward toward being and the secrets of human energy." To tell
the truth, \vhenever I hear anyone talking about instinct and being and
the secrets of human energy I get nervous; next thing you kno\v hc'll
be saying that violence is just fine, and then I begin \Vondering
\vhether h e really thinks that lticlting someone in the teeth or sticking
a knife between his ribs are deeds to be admired. History after alland especially the history of modern times-teaches
that there is a
close connection between ideologies of primitivistic vitalism and a
willingness to look upon cruelty and blood-letting with complacency, if
not downright enthusiasm. T h e reason I bring this up is that the spirit
of hipsterism and the Beat Generation strikes m e as the same spirit
\vhich animates the young savages in leather jackets who have been
running amuck in the last few years with their s\vitch-blades and zip
guns. W h a t does A'Iailer think of those wretched kids. I wonder? \?'hat
does h e think of the gang that stoned a nine-year-old boy to death in
Central Parli in broad daylight a fe\v months ago, or the one that set
fire to an old man drowsing on a bench near the Brooklyn waterfront
one summer's day, or the one that pounced on a crippled child and 01.giastically stabbed him over and over and over again even after he \\;as
good and dead? Is that what h e means by the liberation of instinct and
the mysteries of being? R~Iaybeso. At least he says somewhere in his
article that t ~ v oeighteen-year-old hoodlums who bash in the brains
a candy-store keeper are murdering an institution, committing an
that "violates private propert!l's-vi~hich is one of the most morall!'
gruesome ideas I have ever come across, and ~ v h i c hindicates \\'herc
the ideology of hipsterism can lead. I happen to believe that there is
dircct connection between the flabbiness of American middle-class
life and the spread of juvenile crime in tlie I ~ ~ o 'but
s , I also helie'''
KENNETH REXROTH
/
493
tl,ilt juvenile crime can be explained partly in ternis of the same rescllt~nentagainst normal feeling and the attempt to cope \vith [Ile
,\.orld through intelligence that lies behind Kerouac and Ginsberg.
~ \ . c nthe relatively mild ethos of Kerouac's books can spill over easily
into brutality, for there is a suppressed cry in those books: Kill tlie intcllcctuals who can talk coherently, kill the people who can sit still for
f i \ f ~minutes at a time, kill those inconlprehensible characters who are
capal>le of getting seriously involved with a woman, a job, a cause.
~ o \ \can
. anyone in his right mind pretend that this has anything to do
\,,ith private property or the middle class? No. Being for or against
\\.hat the Beat Generation stands for has to do with denying that incoherence is superior to precision; that ignorance is superior to knowledge; that the exercise of mind and discrimination is a form of death.
It has to do with fighting the notion that sordid acts of violence are
justifiable so long as they are committed in the name of "instinct." It
c\.en has to d o with fighting the poisonous glorification of the adolescent in American popular culture. It has to do, in other words, with
being for or against intelligence itself.
KENNETH REXROTH(1905-1982) was an early supporter and defender of Ginsberg and Kerouac, young writers from the East
Coast who lived only briefly in the East Bay Area of San Francisco and were not truly members of the resident community of
poets. This talented group included Kenneth Patchen, Robert
Duncan, Jack Spicer, William Everson, Rilary Fabilli, Josephine
Aliles, Philip Lamantia, Joanne Kyger, h,lichael ;\/lcClure, Gary
Snyder, and Philip Whalen, among others, cvho contributed to
the San Francisco Poetiy Renaissance. In 1957 Rexroth published an essay, "Disengagement: The Art of the Beat Generation," in number I r of the paperback anthology Natz \)\'or-ld
14'ritirzg. In this essay, as his biographer Linda Hamilton recognized, Rexroth "seemed eager" to speak for the younger generation of poets, "who \vith their youth, energy and friendship had