PARTISAN REVIEW
171
The key to the problem seems to me to lie in the concept of the
"drop-out." There have always
been
young Americans who dislike
the society very much and do not want to fit into any of its categories
of acceptability. Accordingly they have cultivated failure and have
dropped out of the society. But in a society which attaches so much
importance to youth a good-looking or hirsute young drop-out is that
paradoxical thing, a successful failure. Whole generations of young
people have been succes;ful failures, choosing Bohemian lives in
Greenwich Village or Old Town Chicago, or going to Woodstock
and other Pop Festivals. The drop-out has also been a pick-up: pro–
moted and advertised by the glamor of youth. At the same time it
is
quite clear that certain of these photographed, televised, interviewed
and publicized members of each new generation really do in every
way drop out when they lose their youth, unles; they pass the test
of succes; on some other level. The choice that confronts them is not
really between success and failure but between the kind of success
which
is
destroying of everything except publicity and money values
and the kind of success in which the values of personal relations and
a critical attitude toward the society are maintained.
It
may seem paradoxical to suggest that the greatest achievement
of some Beatniks, Hippies and Pop
artists
is
that they have managed
to turn their contempt for values of success and their stubborn
insis–
tence on clinging to their own most personal attitudes and feelings
into unprecedented success. They have not allowed themselves to be–
come depersonalized by publicity; on the contrary, they have ex–
ploited it as the medium of expression of their personal values. It is
true that this has sometimes turned them into public "personalities."
Yet there is a great difference between the "personalities" of those
who, like Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, became swallowed up in
their
own legend while they were still alive, and those like Norman
Mailer and Allen Ginsberg who have responded in kind to the condi–
tions of publicity and success imposed on them and yet have remained
warmly and accessibly themselves.
Ever since Whitman's day certain American poets have played
out the dramas of their private lives in public with tragic fervor; as
though they thought it their duty not only to write their
poetry
but
to
pitch their personal lives against the background of the mechanized
society. In the twentieth century half a dozen American
poets -
from
Hart
Crane to Sylvia Plath and John
Berryman -
have played out
