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PARTISAN REVIEW
nection between ideologies of primitivistic vitalism and a willingness to
look upon cruelty and blood-letting with complacency, if not downright
enthusiasm. The reason I bring this up is that the spirit of hipsterism
and the Beat Generation strikes me as the same spirit which animates
the young savages in leather jackets who have been running amuck in
the last few years with their switch-blades and zip guns. What does
Mailer think of those wretched kids, I wonder? What does he think of
the gang that stoned a nine-year-old boy to death in Central Park in
broad daylight a few 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 orgiastically stabbed
him over and over and over again even after he was good and dead?
Is that what he means by the liberation of instinct and ' the mysteries
of being? Maybe so. At least he says somewhere in his article that two
eighteen-year-old hoodlums who bash in the brains of a candy-store
keeper are murdering an institution, committing an act that "violates
private property"-which is one of the most morally gruesome ideas I
have ever come across, and which indicates where the ideology of
hipsterism can lead. I happen to believe that there is a direct connection
between the flabbiness of American middle-class life and the spread of
juvenile crime in the 1950's, but I also believe that juvenile crime can
be explained partly in terms of the same resentment against normal
feeling and the attempt to cope with the world through intelligence
that lies behind Kerouac and Ginsberg. Even the relatively mild ethos
of Kerouac's books can spill over easily into brutality, for there is a
suppressed cry in those books:
Kill
the intellectuals who can talk
C\J–
herently, kill the people who can sit still for five minutes at a time,
kill those incomprehensible characters who are capable of getting seri–
ously involved with a woman, a job, a cause. How can anyone in his
right mind pretend that this has anything to do with private property
or the middle class? No. Being for or against what the Beat Generation
stands for has to do with denying that incoherence is superior to pre–
cision; that ignorance is superior to knowledge; that the exercise of
mind and discrimination is a form of death.
It
has to do wi'th
fighting the notion that sordid acts of violence are justifiable so
long as they are committed in the name of "instinct."
It
even has to
do with fighting the poisonous glorification of the adolescent in Ameri–
can popular culture. It has to do, in other words, with being for ' or
against intelligence itself.
Norman Podhoretz
