the company of one kind
oC
person to
another. What I was getting at (and
here, I admit, I had in mind Norman
Mailer's appeal to the socialist read–
ers of
Dissent
to form a popular front
of protest with the hipster) was sim–
ply that the Beat rebellion comes, if
it can
be
interpreted politically at all,
fror,] the right, not the left. Mr. Fitel–
son's reference to Whitman, Crane,
aml the Transcendalists is irrelevant,
because the question is not
whether
you like bums and whores but
why
you
like them and the literary or ideological
use you make of your fondness. I think
I demonstrated quite clearly in my ar–
ticle that the "populism" of Kerouac's
wClk
is
enlisted into the service of a
VIOlent anti-intellectualism and that
"bop prosody" and the passion for jazz
are weapons in the same cause. I
didn't say that a reliance on non-syn–
tactical language necessarily expresses
"contempt for coherent, rational dis–
course"-if Mr. Fitelson had ever read
Joyce attentively, he would have known
that the non-syntactical language of
Ulysses
is not only coherent and ra–
tIOnal but almost monstrously articu–
late; all I said was that Kerouac's
prose
does
express such contempt. Can
Mr. Fitelson show me up by citing
chapter and verse in Kerouac's fic–
tkn? Nor did I imply that an interest
in jazz always involves hostility to in–
tellect; I said that Beat's interest in
jazz most emphatically does. I would
be happy
to
learn that I was mistaken,
but neither Mr. Fitelson nor Mr. Jones
provides 'any evidence to the contrary.
Mr. Jones, in fact, disingenuously dis–
torts my remarks about "bop prosody"
-though I must say I get off easy in
his letter compared to the treatment
he gives poor Shakespeare. "To write
a novel
in
bop language" (and there–
b} to reduce the possible range of ex–
pression to the three alternatives of
grunting, groaning, or drooling), Mr.
Jones, is Kerouac's point, while
477
midstream
a Quarterly Jewish Review
ARTICLES by leading writers of
our time with penetrating ana–
lysis of current world events and
vital problems facing the contem–
porary Jew.
FICTION and poetry by out–
standing American and foreign
authors.
BASIC reviews of books dealing
with the chief cultural problems
of today by well-known critics.
Among our contributors are:
Lionel Abel
James T. Farrell
Leslie A. Fiedler
Herbert Gold
Paul Goodman
Irving Howe
Norman Podhoretz
Harold Rosenberg
Isaac 'Rosenfeld
(whose
posthumous story, "The
Boys," appears in the
Spring Issue)
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