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313
in the attempt to identify him with Harlem or Dixieland. The only
major Negro character
in
either of Kerouac's two novels is Mardou
Fox, and she is about as primitive as Wilhelm Reich himself.
The plain truth is that the primitivism of the Beat Generation serves
fmt
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 know all about Pound without 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, without the tedious
intellectualness" :
We passed a little kid who was throwing stones at the cars in the road.
"Think of it," said Dean. "One day he'll put a stone through a man's
windshield and the man will crash and die-all on account of that little
kid.
You see what
I
mean? God exists without qualms. As we roll along
this
way
I
am positive beyond doubt that everything will be taken
care of for us-that even you, as you drive, fearful of the wheel . . .
the thing will go along of itself and you won't go off the road a.nd
I
can
sleep. Furthermore we know America, we're at home;
I
can go
anywhere in America and get what
I
want because it's the same
in
every corner,
I
know the people,
I
know what they do. We give and
take and go in the incredibly complicated sweetness zigzagging every
side."
You see what he means? Formal and shining and complete. No tedious
intellectualness. Completely unpretentious. "There was nothing clear
about the things he said but what he meant to say was somehow made
pure and clear."
Somehow.
Of course.
If
what he wanted to say had
been carefully thought out and precisely articulated, that would have
been tedious and pretentious and, no doubt,
somehow
unclear and
clearly impure. But so long as he utters these banalities with his tongue
tied
and with no comprehension of their meaning, so long as he makes
noises that come out of his soul (since they couldn't possibly have come
out of his mind), he passes the test of true intellectuality.
Which brings us to Kerouac's spontaneous bop prosody. This "pro–
my"
is not to be confused with bop language itself, which has such a
limited vocabulary (Basic English is a verbal treasure-house by com–
parison) that you couldn't write a note to the milkman in it, much
less
a novel. Kerouac, however, manages to remain true to the spirit
of
hipster slang while making forays into enemy territory (i.e., the
English language) by his simple inability to express anything in words.
The only method he has of describing an object is to summon up the
lIIDe half-dozen adjectives over and over again: "greatest," "tremen-
