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word shy, hoping that someone will shoot him for his ideals. These
examples suggest that what was gritty and dismal and hysterical, and
gave its high color
to
the distinctive work of the Beats, was markedly
out of place in the next decade; and, too, that the Beats had a better
sense of fun. Ultimately the image of Cassady-Moriarty behind the
wheel for two decades of wandering, disaffected youth is misleading, all
coincidence and sentimentality.
And yet it is part of John Tytell's insistence in his thoughtful
book, the most thorough critical study of the subject available, that we
consider the Beats the "first 'dropouts,' the renegade vanguard of a new
culture." At first, he writes, they
were regarded as brigands of the underground; they had
to
find new
ways to remind their culture of the dignity of self-reliance and
to
provide an Emersonian awareness of the tyranny of institutions.
Execrating the worldly, dreading the implications of control, they
chose
to
consecrate the whims of the individual. Ecstatic iconoclasts,
youthful seekers of what Kerouac called "potent and inconceivable
radiances," they simultaneously heralded an impending apocalypse
and dramatized the irrational, the oral and the improvisatory
to
provoke the end of an omnipresent stupor.
Elsewhere in the book the Beats are called "the creative soul of the
fifties," bearing witness to the individual sensibility at a moment when
the Cold War chastened everyone into what Ginsberg called a fear of
feeling. Above all Tytell imagines the Beats as an unslumbering oasis
of "Emerson ian awareness" in an era of "omnipresent stupor." Plainly
he intends that the new recognition of Beat literature the book
advocates will be founded on an idea of the affirmative political
character of their work as against the withering negativity of its
historical period.
But Tytell finds such an idea difficult to sustain in relation to
specifiC Beat texts, especiall y texts by Burroughs and Kerouac. It is an
admission of this difficulty that he restricts his broad, generalizing
comments to the first and last chapters of the book, where he permits
himself to blend his very different writers for the sake of speculation.
For example, he would not use the above language of transcendence
and "inconceivable radiances" in the chapter on Burroughs's fiction,
where he leads us on a LOur of those debased and putrefying landscapes.
He does, however, search out humanitarian features in the unfriendly
place, though not without evidence of strain. He reads Burrough's
dread fantasies of complex, impersonal systems of control as
