of this reaction would be absurd, just
as it would be to say that all the art
of such a parallel movement as Dada
was purposeful and valid. . .. As with
Dada, Beat represents a line of de–
parture rather than a concrete doctrine.
And even if this departure never pro–
duces another poem as influential or
controversial as
Allen
Ginsberg's
"Howl," there is no doubt in my mind
that it will produce better ones. The
same is true of Kerouac's
On the Road.
It breaks new ground, and plants new
seeds .
[Podhoretz] shows an ignorance about
the whole of the Beat reaction. . . .
Statements like "Kerouac's 'bop pro–
sody~
is not to be confused with bop
langt:age itself, which has such a lim–
ited vocabulary you couldn't write a
Dote to the milkman in it, much less
a novel" show not only a basic ignor–
ance . . . of the role of bop language
in our society, but also a complete ina–
bility to see its possible function in
litelature per se. To write a novel in
bop language is not the point, no more
than it was Shakespeare's
point
to
write his plays in Elizabethan English.
A novel, play, etc. is about people, the
ideas of people, not about language.
. . . Of course
On The Road
is un–
thinkable without bop language, just
as
Hamlet
is unthinkable without Eli–
zabethan English.
If
one thinks the
hipster's language meaningless, perhaps
it is not entirely the hipster's fault.
.. . The point is that the language can
be extended and enlivened by just such
prosody as Kerouac's if we are not too
snobbish to accept it.
Another of Mr. Podhoretz's miscon–
ceptions is his rather early-'30's mid–
dle class assumption that "Bohemian–
ism, after all, is for the Negro a means
of entry into the world of the whites,
and no Negro Bohemian is going to
coc.perate in an attempt to identify
him
with Harlem or Dixieland:" Har–
lem is today the veritable capitol city
473
of the Black Bourgeoisie. The Negro
Bohemian's flight from Harlem is not
a flight from the world of color but
the flight of any would-be Bohemian
from what Mr. Podhoretz himself calls
"the provinciality, philistinism and
moral hypocrisy of American life."
Dixieland . . . is to traditional jazz
what Rock and Roll is to Blues, or
Rhythm and Blues-a cheap commer–
cial imitation. The Negro intellectual
certainly has no responsibility either
for or to it.
Finally, a statement like "The only
art the new Bohemians have any use
for is jazz" . . . borders on back alley
polemics, not at all in the tradition of
the "coherent, rational discourse" Mr.
Podhoretz says he cherishes. . . .
LeRoi Jones
SIRS :
In the course of delivering some
apt and quite valid remarks on the
literary inadequacies of Jack Kerouac
(PR Spring, ) Norman Podhoretz, last
quarter, made several comments about
hipsters and the Beat Generation which
seem in need of qualification. . . .
In its anti-cosmopolitan "readiness
to find the source of all vitality and
virtue in simple rural types and in the
dispossessed urban groups (Negroes,
bums, whores)" (I am quoting here
from Mr. Podhoretz's article), Mr.
Kerouac's Bohemianism echoes at least
two major strains in American litera–
ture: the Transcendentalist (to which
a postscript was provided by Whitman,
possibly the most obvious antecedent
of Kerouac) , and the early realist
(Stephen Crane sought the company of
Negroes, bums, and whores for a writ–
er'~
education). Neither of these seems
in any great way inimical to the values
of the respectable Bohemias; however,
I think Mr. Podhoretz has something
of a point when he speaks of the new
Bohemianism's hostility to civilization.
It
is
not entirely an accident that Mr.
