CORRESPONDENCE
of Mr. Howe's world,
is
keenly
attuned to its foibles and rigid–
ities. (A hip Negro once said to
me,
apropos a folksy-artsy social–
ist, "Man, that banjo bolshevik, he
wouldn't even caU a
shovel
a
spade." ) True enough, the Amer–
ican world Mailer describes, though
large and growing, is mostly under–
ground despite the Luce papers'
embrace of its exhibitionist minor–
ity-a world that Mr. Howe ap–
parently has been unable to exper–
ience at first hand, for reasons
psychological or ideological (not
chronological, since there are both
hipsters and square hangers-on
older than Mr. Howe) . All the
more reason, then, that Mr. Howe
should welcome good "social observ–
ation and narrative" of that world.
I
find it especiaUy disturbing
that Mr. Howe should utterly re–
ject the hipsters at this particular
time. He would tum his back on
the hip world at precisely the
moment when it is, at long last,
coming up with a few people who
show signs of being able to write
lI.!
well as howl. Mr. Howe ought
to see
The Connection.
Mr. Howe
ought to learn that for all the
limitations of the hip world-view–
I
agree that there are plenty-there
is a great difference in
literary
achievement between the crepita–
tions of Kerouac and such recent
work as, say Alexander Trocchi's
Cain's Book.
If
Mr. Howe really
is
interested in "exceptional gifts for
social observation and narrative"
then he ought to read John Rechy's
''The Fabulous Wedding of Miss
Destiny" (in
Big Table,
no. 3) - a
hip story of the homosexual world
381
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to
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Present.
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Henry James: RODERICK HUDSON.
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