478
Shakespeare's point was to write plays
in
English
(and thereby to avail
him–
self of all the resources, both literary
and colloquial, that the language af–
forried in his day). The difference be–
tween Elizabethan English and hipster
slang is that the one was a living
language--richer and more flexible, in–
cidentally, than English became when
it
wa~
formalized around the end of
tht.. 17th century in the interest of
greater "scientific" precision-and the
other a pure construct with no vital
relation either to contemporary speech
or to the best literary traditions.
If
Mr. Jones thinks that "the language
can be extended and enlivened by just
such prosody as Kerouac's," he must
be consulting a newspeak dictionary.
How in the name of Fowler can a
language be
extended
by a "prosody"
whose main purpose is to confine
it
within the limits of a willfully in–
articulate jargon, and how can it be
enlivened
by a principled refusal to
draw on all its reserves and a deter–
mination to base poetry and fiction on
the artificial lingo of a group which
believes that language itself is an en–
cumbrance to expression?
Whether or not the new Bohemians
care about any art other than jazz is,
of course, a matter of fact, and since
Mr. Fitelson and Mr. Jones seem to
be "initiates" of the movement, I'm
willing to take their word for it that
I exaggerated on that particular point.
Nevertheless, Beat writing, such as it
is, fails to support their contention, and
the quality of the interest in literatul'e
exhibited, say, in
The Subterraneans
is (to put it charitably) sophomoric.
The question of Negroes in the Beat
ethos is more serious. I could quote
godfather Rexroth himself to the ef–
fect that Kerouac is guilty of "Crow–
Jimism- and let it go at that, but
I do want to make it clear to Mr.
Fitelson that the words "ecstatic" and
"true-hearted" come from
On the
Road,
not from my own nasty polemi–
cal mind. And I also want to defend
myself against the charges of "calum–
ny" (Fitelson) and "middle class mis–
conception" (Jones). In the paragraph
under contention, I attacked Kerouac
for the insulting assumption that dark–
skinned peoples (he mentions Mexicans
and Japanese as well as Negroes) are
more spontaneous than whites because
they are more "primitive," and I cited
Ned Polsky's observation that this kind
of thinking was "an inverted form of
keeping the nigger in his place." I
then went on to say: "But even
if
it
were true that American Negroes, by
virtue of their position in our culture,
have been able to retain a degree of
primitive spontaneity, the last place
you would expect to find evidence of
this is among Bohemian Negroes. Bo–
hemianism, after all, is for the Negro
a means of entry into the world of the
whites, and no Negro Bohemian is go–
ing to cooperate in the attempt to
identify him with Harlem or Dixie–
land." By which I meant that a Ne–
gro Bohemian presumably wants as
little to do with the stereotypes–
whether pat-on-the-head affectionate,
like Kerouac's, or crackerishly hostile
-of the Negro character and with the
constricted possibilities of a segregated
Negro society as a whitt Bohemian
from the midwest (or from a Brooklyn
immigrant neighborhood, for that mat–
ter) would want to do with small–
town "friendliness" and philistinism.
Mr. Jones insists that Negro intellec–
tuals take no responsibility for Harlem
or Dixieland-which (see the quote
above) is exactly what I said. He also
claims that the Negro Bohemian's
flight from Harlem is not a flight from
the world of color, but from the world
of the bourgeoisie. Maybe so, but isn't
it
also true that the world into which
the Negro Bohemian has escaped is a
white world in the sense that it
ia
free of the restrictions suffered by
the
