146
PARTI SAN REVIEW
ANGELS AND REBELS
NAKED ANGELS: THE LIVES AND LITERATURE OF THE BEAT
GENERATION.
By John Tytell. McGraw-Hil I. $10.
When, in
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,
Tom Wolfe
discovers that the driver of the Merry Pranksters' bus on their self–
consciously f!1ythic, freaked-out cross-country trip in 1964 is none
other than Neal Cassady-Cassady, who had been the inspiration,
fifteen years earlier, for the character of Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerou–
ac's
On the Road- the
discovery gives a confirming pat to a familiar
opinion about recent social history : that the Beat Genera tion had been
the important precursor of the sixties Countercu lture, originating the
styles and attitudes of cultural revolt. All en Ginsberg served publicly at
th e time as the emblem of an underground inheritance between two
generations, as did Gary Snyder, which is partly the reason that they
are currently the only certain examples of ex-Beats in no need of
rediscovery. But Neal Cassady was the fierce original, the personal
apotheosis of the Bea t. As Moriarty, he was the subject of a portrait
more memorable than the book itself, as a " burning, frightful, shud–
dering angel." To the Pranksters and Yippies Cassady drove East to the
World's Fair, he must have glowed with a mystique of ancestry and
rei nca rnation.
It seems hardly
to
make sense at first that a fu ll-scale revival of
interes t in the Beats did not come to pass when their legacy flourished
a t the end of the last decade, but in fact, they were largely unread. The
instances of the three writers John Tytell studies in
Naked Angels
are
exemplary : in the late sixties, Jack Kerouac was mostly out of print,
Burroughs stood in some oblique relation to the drug cu lture but was
otherwise out of fashion, and only Ginsberg was widely known-as
sainted elder, at least if not as poet. Moreover, the Beats ' writing had
littl e in common with the work of writers who were esteemed and read
by the Counter-culture, such as Hesse or Kurt Vonnegut. The gap
between the
Naked Lunch
tetrology and, say,
The Lord of the Rings
could hardly be wider. Or consider the dramatic difference between
On
The Road
and the 1967 fi lm
Easy Rider:
on the one hand, Kerouac's
energeti c, manic, verbal hell-raisers, fu ll of " raw, wi ld joy," and on
the other, Peter Fonda as a wistfu l, passive-aggressive on a motorcycle,
