BOOKS
THE KNOW-NOTHING BOHEMIANS
Allen Ginsberg's little volume of poems,
Howl,
which got the
San Francisco renaissance off to a screaming start a year or so ago, was
dedicated to Jack Kerouac ("new Buddha of American prose, who spit
forth intelligence into eleven books written in half the number of years
... creating a spontaneous bop prosody and original classic literature"),
William Seward Burroughs ("author of
Naked Lunch,
an endless novel
which will drive everybody mad"), and Neal Cassady ("author of
The
First Third,
an autobiography ... which enlightened Buddha"). So
far, everybody's sanity has been spared by the inability of
Naked Lunch
to find a publisher, and we may 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,
On the
Road
and
The Subterraneans,
have now been revealed to the world.
When
On the Road
appeared last year, Gilbert Milstein commemorated
the event in the New York
Times
by declaring it to be "a historic oc–
casion" comparable to the publication of
The Sun Also Rises
in the
1920's. But even before the novel was actually 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 topped by an un–
ruly crop of rich black hair falling over
his
forehead) was showing up
in various mass-circulation magazines, he was being interviewed earnestly
on television, and he was being featured in a Greenwich Village night–
club where, in San Francisco fashion, he read specimens of his spon–
taneous bop prosody against a background of jazz music.
Though the nightclub act reportedly flopped,
On the Road
sold
well enough to hit the best-seller lists for several weeks, and it isn't
hard to understand why. Americans love nothing so much as represen–
tative documents, and what could be more interesting in this Age of
Sociology than a novel that speaks for the "young generation?" (The
fact that Kerouac is thirty-five or thereabouts was generously not held
against him.) Beyond that, however, I think that the unveiling of the
Beat Generation was greeted with a certain relief by many people who
