CORRESPONDENCE
HIP LITERATURE AND
SQUARE CRITICS
SIRS :
The criticisms of hipsters made
nearly three years ago in my reply
to "The White Negro" still hold up
(with one exception noted below);
but I appear to have made a tac–
tical blunder in publishing them,
for some people have garbled and
overgeneralized my remarks in order
to prop up an unwillingness to sym–
pathize with any bohemia that does
not recapitulate the bohemia of
their own bygone youth. The latest
such distortion may be found in
Irving Howe's review of Norman
Mailer's
Advertisements for Myself
(PR,
Winter 1960), and it leads
Mr. Howe into other errors.
I made these specific criticisms
of hipsters: that their reading is
wilfully deficient and their writing
poor; that what Mailer takes to be
their revolutionary sexual action is
merely acting out ; and that in his
"acceptance" of Negroes the white
hipster, instead of making himself
truly color blind, sees the world as
through his sunglasses, darkly. In
ignoring the particularity of these
criticisms (as well as my remarks
that the hipsters are the only sig–
nificant new group of rebels, that
Mailer is right to extend them his
sympathy, etc.), in trying to fashion
them into a total rejection of any–
thing that looks "hip," Mr. Howe
for one thing blinds himself to cer–
tain merits of Mailer's recent
fiction.
379
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