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PARTISAN REVIEW
sic to the given instance." That's his phrase. Quite just and abso–
lutely precise.
If
you wanted to write a novel you wrote a novel the
way Norman Mailer wrote a novel or James Baldwin wrote a novel
or James Jones wrote a novel. There was no other way of writing a
novel. Kerouac said in the face of this, "Fuck you
I "
That's what his
novels should have been subtitled:
The Dharma Bums, or Fuck You!
That was Kerouac, that was his beauty. A remarkably courageous
man. He wrote a novel called
The Town and the City.
It's compe–
tently written, well plotted, the characters are, as they say, realized
and developed, and so on. A very formal first novel which got
excellent reviews. Kerouac could have parlayed that reception, as
many young writers do, into a second novel just as dead, just as silly.
Instead, he wrote
On the Road,
which took many years to be
published. Who would publish such a thing? This wasn't a "novel."
The editors didn't know what it was because they hadn 't read
anything like it in college. Editors know what the spirit of the age
tells them. Editors are probably among the dullest of all human
beings. Enormously incompetent.
Barone:
How long did you work for Grove?
Sorrentino:
Five years. Grove was, of course, not your run-of-the-mill
publishing house. Economics was never taken into consideration
while I was there. My one complaint about Grove is that it missed
the opportunity it had in the mid-sixties to get all the new American
writers under contract.
Barone:
There are a lot of interviews where you run across Donald
Allen's name.
Sorrentino:
Don Allen was one of the original editors with Barney
Rosset after he bought Grove, then became an editor of
Evergreen
Review,
and then became a kind of roving editor for Grove. He's
responsible for
The New American Poetry.
If
you were not there at
the time you cannot imagine what that book meant.
It
was a central
event of the age. It was curiously fitting that it should be published
in 1960, at the turn of the decade. Don very consciously titled the
book: not
New American Poetry,
but
The New American Poetry,
which was intended as a slap in the face of the establishment. And it
was, indeed.
Barone:
Do you think that the poetry that was in
The New American
Poetry
has or may become a new form of academicism?
Sorrentino:
Well, I think some of it already has. There's no helping
that. There are a lot of forms, if you want to use such a loose term,
that were set down in
The New American Poetry
for investigation,
