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"blood." To the extent that it has intellectual interests at all, they run
to mystical doctrines, irrationalist philosophies, and left-wing Reichian–
ism. The only art the new Bohemians have any use for is jazz, mainly
of the cool variety. Their predilection for bop language is a way of
demonstrating solidarity with the primitive vitality and spontaneity
they find in jazz and of expressing contempt for coherent, rational dis–
course which, being a product of the mind, is in their view a form of
death. To be articulate is to admit that you have no feelings (for how
can real feelings be expressed in syntactical language?), that you can't
respond to anything (Kerouac responds to everything by saying
"Wow!") , and that you are probably impotent.
At the one end of the spectrum, this ethos shades off into violence
and criminality, main-line drug addiction and madness. Allen Ginsberg's
poetry, with its lurid apocalyptic celebration of "angel-headed hipsters,"
speaks for the darker side of the new Bohemianism. Kerouac is milder.
He shows little taste for violence, and the criminality he admires is
the harmless kind. The hero of
On the Road,
Dean Moriarty, has a
record: "From the age of eleven to seventeen he was usually in reform
school. His specialty was stealing cars, gunning for girls coming out of
high school in the afternoon, driving them out to the mountains, making
them, and coming back to sleep in any available hotel bathtub in
town." But Dean's criminality, we are told, "was not something that
sulked and sneered; it was a wild yea-saying overburst of American
joy; it was Western, the west wind, an ode from the Plains, something
new, long prophesied, long a-coming (he only stole cars for joy rides)."
And, in fact, the species of Bohemian that Kerouac writes about is on
the whole rather law-abiding. In
The Subterraneans,
a bunch of drunken
boys steal a pushcart in the middle of the night, and when they leave
it in front of a friend's apartment building, he denounces them angrily
for "screwing up the security of my pad." When Sal Paradise (in On
the Road)
steals some groceries from the canteen of an itinerant work–
ers' camp in which he has taken a temporary job as a barracks guard, he
comments, "I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is
a natural-born thief"-which, of course, is a way of turning his own
stealing into a bit of boyish prankishness. Nevertheless, Kerouac is at–
tracted to criminality, and that in itself is more significant than the
fact that he personally feels constrained to put the brakes on his own
destructive impulses.
Sex has always played a very important role in Bohemianism:
sleeping around was the Bohemian's most dramatic demonstration of
his freedom from conventional moral standards, and a defiant denial
