150
PARTISAN REVIEW
thin gs, it reports an incidenta l remark by Ca rl Solomon whi ch g ives
the probl em of the Bea ts wha t is for me its decisive cast. In the la te
forti es Solomon is sa id to have call ed Ginsberg a "do pey daffodil "
hecause the poet "seemed
to
represent a Wordsworth ian p rojecti on of
sensiti vity ra ther than Artaud' s Surrea li st conception of the poet as
hrute." Wordswo rth or Artaud, then ? Flower o r switchbl ade? The
avant-garde a t all times likes to think of itself as dangerous, even if
onl y, as in the
I
890s, dan gerously beautiful. But wha t if the bes t g ifts of
a new genera tion of writers lay with their instincts of delicacy, warmth ,
inflectio n ?
If
their vo ice insists o n being, as it were, stubbornl y deli cate,
in spite of their own Artaud-like des ires
to
terrify? T o be cursed with an
essenti a ll y sympa thetic voice seems to be the dil emma of the bes t Bea t
writing : the abundantl y Wordsworth ian poetry of Gary Sn yder, the
confliCled, elega ic strains in
The Fall of America,
o r in " Kadd ish"
itself, where the stridency of incanta tion yet fa ils
to
suppress wh a t is
shaded and personal in the voice. Something simil ar is true o f that
whi ch is enduring in
On
the R oad:
We were standing on top of a hill on a beautiful sunny day in San
Francisco; our shadows fell across the sidewa lk. Out of the ten ement
next
to
Camille's house fil ed eleven G reek men and women who
illstantl y lin ed th emselves up on the sunn y pavement whil e ano ther
hacked up across the narrow street and smiled a t them over a camera.
We gaped a t these ancient peopl e who were h aving a wedding party
fo r o ne o f their da ughters, probabl y the thou sandth in an unbroken
dark gellera tion of smiling in the sun. They were well dressed , and
(hey were strange. Dean and I mi ght h ave been in Cyprus fo r all of
thaI. Gull s flew o verhead in the sparkling air.
No do ubt these are the accents o f pervas ive mys tificati on , sho ul der- to–
thc-wheel romanti cism : Byron summering in Californi a. For all tha t,
the passage is well-judged , affecting, and beautifull y troubl ed: "They
were well dressed, and they were strange." Ironi es swarm in the
reflection tha t it may be Kerouac's ultima te fa te to ch arm ra ther than to
shock.
JOHN ROMANO
