476
Gory Generation rather than the Beat
one. What is really important here is
tha.t Mr. Podhoretz and Mr. Mailer
are not talking about the same
thing~;
neither of them gets down to saying
what he thinks the secrets of human
energy are, although
it
is clear that
they have entirely different ideas. Mr.
Mailer believes (to paraphrase from
the article Mr. Podhoretz mentions)
thM a movement in the direction of in–
stinct and being and the secrets of
human energy would liberate in man
mud, more of creativity than of mur–
derousness, and would perhaps pre–
vent him from destroying himself
(which, it is implied, he is fully pre–
pared to do---collectively-and as the
next logical step in the civilization he
hw- constructed in
opposition
to in–
stinct and being and the secrets of
human energy) .
Mr. Podhoretz, quite obviously,
would not go along with this, or else
he would not get nervous; and since
h:: would not go along with this, what
hi~
article ultimately amounts to is a
sort of conviction on the basis of guilt
by association of ideas. However, the
ideas are not really associated. There
is nothing especially original about this.
In fact it is no more original than
the Beat Generation.
David Fit.lson
SIRS:
The H-bomb is rapidly becoming the
last refuge of the lazy-minded: invoke
the mushroom cloud and all issues will
be settled, all phenomena explained,
aU idiocies justified. Our civilization,
Mr. Fitelson tells us, is pursuing col–
lectivf' death, and the Beat boys rep–
resent a response to this condition:
eat, drink, be merry, and take tea, for
tcmorrow we die. I don't think that
Bea'! has much to do with the threat
of collective death. It has appeared
at this "moment in history" (to bor–
row Mr. Fitelson's impressively reson-
ant phrase) for the same reason, in
my
opinion, that adolescent crime has
beer. spreading at this "moment in his–
tory"-because there is a power va–
cuum in our society created by the in–
ability of the educated middle chus
(and of the intellectuals in their
sphere) to supply authoritative stand–
ards to guide the young. Left to them–
selves, the kids make their own rules–
the rules of the street-just as the Beat
boys make their own rules for litera–
ture, defining carelessness as sponta–
neity, incoherence as clarity, drunken–
ness as vitality, and inarticulateness as
eloquence. Control is "chicken" and
subtlety is "crap," both in the street–
gang and among the Beats.
Of
couru
-to jump to Mr. Jones for a minute
-Beat is a "reaction" to the "aca-
demically condoned" literature of the
last twenty years, but there are good
reactions and bad (aren't there?);
thi~
one is bad.
If
the failure of the
educated middle class is at the root of
juvenile delinquency today, it is equal–
ly true that the failure of the intel–
lectuals lies in the background of Beat.
But can any good, either for life or
literature, come of a "reaction" based
on the ethos I described in my article?
Nc',
Mr. Jones, we don't need violence,
we need better writing, more critical
thinking, and deeper feeling. I tried
to
show through quotation and analysis
that Kerouac's novels are distinguished
by a poverty of emotional, intellectual,
and aesthetic resources, an ineptitude
of expression, and an inability to make
anything dramatically meaningful, and
I related these qualities to the atti–
tudes toward life exhibited in
On
tit,
Rflad
and
Th, Subterraneans.
If
that
isr:'t literary criticism, Mr. Jones, what
is? Praise, with a few gentle demurrers
as to the felicity of this or that line?
Now to specific points. There's noth–
ing wrong per se with liking bums
and whores, and I wasn't attacking
Kerouac or anyone else for preferring
