Reading the literary journals just a year or two ago one sometimes got the feeling that all the trend-spotters, the Zeitgeist-reporters, the people who watch the clouds of dust made by the movements as they wheel, were getting thoroughly discouraged by the alternate silences and incoherencies of the scene they were watching. Nothing seemed to be happening, there were no movements, no trends, no generations, there was really no business offering in the literary market places. But today the literary speculators and brokers are somewhat more cheerful. In England there is a whole New Movement of “angry young men” to talk about; and as for America—well here, for example, is Mr. Kenneth Rexroth saying, “There has been so much publicity about the San Francisco Renaissance and the New Generation of Revolt and the Underground Literature, that I for one am getting sick of talking about it.” This is the first sentence of his “Letter” which introduces San Francisco Scene,1 published as No. 2 of the Evergreen Review: the book as a whole is apparently meant to introduce to a wider public this Renaissance and Revolt; and Mr. Rexroth has a vigorous idea of what the Revolt is about and what the rebels are doing. “For ten years after the Second War there was a convergence of interest—the Business Community, military imperialism, political reaction, the hysterical tear- and mud-drenched guilt of the ex-Stalinist and ex-Trotskyist American intellectuals, the highly organized academic and literary employment agency of the Neoantireconstructionists. . . . This ministry of all the talents formed a dense crust of custom over American cultural life—more of an ice-pack. Ultimately the living water underneath just got so damn hot the ice-pack has begun to melt, rot, break up and drift away into Arctic oblivion. That is all there is to it.”
Nevertheless Mr. Rexroth goes on for another six pages. “It is easy to understand why all this has centered in San Francisco. It is a long way from Astor Place or Kenyon College,” he tells us. “. . . I for one,” he warns, “can say flatly that if I couldn’t live here I would leave the United States for some place like Aix-en-Provence.” This warning is perhaps intended to strike fear and despair into the hearts of all those Americans who are not fortunate enough to live in San Francisco; but then there is only fear and despair outside San Francisco anyway—according to Mr. Rexroth. “Poets come to San Francisco,” he writes, “for the same reason that so many Hungarians have been going to Austria recently.” It was at that point that I had had enough of Mr. Rexroth to go on with, and left him, to put my foot into the “living water.”
How beautiful things are in a beautiful
room
At night
Without proportion
A black cat on a white spread
A black longhaired cat with a sensitive
human face
Thus Mr. Michael McClure, in a poem chosen more or less at random from San Francisco Scene. And here is another, by Mr. Philip Whalen:
The release itself—
The comfort of your body—
Our freedom together and more, a
Revelation
Of myself as father as a landscape as a
universe
Being . . .
(The dots are Mr. Whalen’s, not mine.) Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who is generously represented in San Francisco Scene, has also published a volume of his poems,2 from which I take Poem No. 20.
That fellow on the boattrain who insisted
on playing blackjack
had teeth that stuck out
like lighthouses on a rocky coast
but
he had no eyes to see
the dusk flash past
horses in orchards
noiselessly running . . .
and the butterflies of yesterday
that flittered on
my mind
This “water” is tepid, it couldn’t melt a pound of butter, let alone an ice-pack. And with the exception of the poems contributed by Brother Antoninus, O.P. (William Everson), and Allen Ginsberg, the poetry in San Francisco Scene is for the most part so remarkably innocent of rhythm, of a true feeling for the weight and value of words, of sustained thought, or of anything else that might go into the making of poetry, that one can only wonder at the prestige of verse, that it should still attract so many people who have no particular talent for writing it.
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But there is always Mr. Ginsberg to throw into the breach; and in fact one cannot accuse Mr. Ginsberg of being incapable in quite the same way as most of the other poets who contribute to San Francisco Scene. He does have a rhythm, and he does have a feeling for the value of words; but despite these great advantages he still hasn’t managed to write a poem which can stand up to any but an excessively sympathetic examination.
The poem “Howl” (which is reprinted in part in San Francisco Scene, and is the longest single poem in Mr. Ginsberg’s collection3) has won more notice than any other work of the “San Francisco School”— it was even banned in San Francisco itself by a zealous customs officer, who was then reversed in court. The poem tries to be what its title proclaims: a howl of rage and defiance, in long Whitmanesque lines describing people who, for example,
. . . were expelled from the academies for
crazy & publishing obscene odes on the
windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear,
burning their money in waste-baskets
and listening to the Terror
through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning
through Laredo with a belt of
marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine
in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried
their torsos night after night . . .
and so on, and so on, relative clause piled upon relative clause for page upon page. Now it is insufficient to say in condemnation that this writing is incoherent, frenzied, frantic, self-indulgent. It is all these things, but the people who admire it are likely to turn around and say, “Well, that’s what it’s meant to be”; Mr. Rexroth has already in his “Letter” described such remarks as favorable to the poem. Apparently for many readers it is Mr. Ginsberg’s very frenzy and incoherence that are to be valued, as a defiant assertion of the individual spirit in an ugly time. “‘Howl,’” Mr. Rexroth assures us, “is the confession of faith of the generation which is going to be running the world in 1965 or 1975.”
I think that in making this comment Mr. Rexroth is true to the spirit of the poem. And it is precisely for this reason that I must say, so far from finding “Howl” defiant and anarchic, and all the rest of the things of which Mr. Rexroth (and Mr. Ginsberg, if one can judge from the internal evidence of the poem) would be so proud, “Howl” struck me as being pathetically dependent on a concurrent movement of literary opinion, on the Zeitgeist as familiar ally, on the anxious support of those who make it their business to jump as the “generation” jumps. So far from finding the poem individualistic, it seemed to me afraid to stand on its own legs. In its very first line “Howl” simply puts its fingers between its teeth and whistles up all its friends.
For who are the people who are doing the terrible things to themselves that Mr. Ginsberg describes in all his relative clauses? He tells us, in his first line. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,” he announces; and it is this hopelessly bald and unsupported assertion that he expects to bear the weight of the rest of his poem. So we know where we are already. It seems that Mr. Ginsberg could not write his poem about one suffering soul: it had to be about nothing less inflated (and companionable) than a “generation.” What kind of individualism is this, exactly? What kind of a rebellion is it? Couldn’t “Howl” have howled about one man, one mind?
The answer of course is no. For if “Howl” had been about one man, one mind, it would have been a far more difficult poem to write: restraint and thought would have been forced upon it; the poem would have demanded a facing up and a dealing with particular experience that Mr. Ginsberg has preferred to shirk. He has taken the easier way; and from this rebellion the customs officers in San Francisco should really have nothing to fear.
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“Howl and Other Poems” is dedicated to several people, among them Mr. Jack Kerouac, the author of On the Road, who is described by Mr. Ginsberg as the “new Buddha of American prose, who spit forth intelligence into eleven books . . . creating a spontaneous bop prosody and original classic literature. . . . All these books are published in heaven.” Now, however, On the Road,4 which is among the eleven titles enumerated by Mr. Ginsberg, has been published on earth as well, by the Viking Press, who on the wrapper of the book tell us: “After World War I a certain group of restless searching Americans came to be called ‘The Lost Generation’. . . . For a good many of the same reasons after World War II another group, roaming America in a wild, desperate search for identity and purpose, became known as ‘The Beat Generation.’ Jack Kerouac is the voice of this group, and this is his novel.”
All this is unfair to any novel; and it is to the credit of Mr. Kerouac’s novel that it does not always try to be what the publishers would make of it. Some of the writing is immediately attractive; but what is attractive about it is not its “wildness” or its “desperation,” but a certain unmistakable simplicity and openness of mind. The narrator of the book tells the truth about himself when he writes early, “I pictured myself in a Denver bar that night, with all the gang, and in their eyes I would be ragged and strange and like the Prophet who has walked across the land to bring the dark Word, and the only Word I had was ‘Wow!’” When Mr. Kerouac says “Wow!” he can convey a certain sense of wonder and innocence that is affecting. As the narrator hitchhikes or drives back and forth across the American continent, and never for any good reason, he meets fellow tramps and travelers, sees towns and cities that he approaches and lives in and leaves again, and the plains and mountains between—and to these he can respond with an engaging candor.
But the narrator is truthful about himself too when he describes his insistent intention in the book as that of a prophet, of a bringer of some large truth about America and human existence. So far as On the Road has a story, it is the story of the unswerving admiration of the narrator for his friend, Dean Moriarty. Moriarty is a great lover of women, an ex-juvenile delinquent, a talker, a thief, a taker of drugs, a would-be writer, and—we are told—a saint and an angel. “[Dean’s] ‘criminality’ was not something that sulked or sneered; it was a wild yea-saying overburst of American joy; it was Western, the west wind, an ode from the Plains, something new, long prophesied, long a-coming (he only stole cars for joy rides). . . . A western kinsman of the sun, Dean.”
This is a note that recurs with all too great a frequency throughout the book, and nowhere does it carry any more conviction than it does the first time we hear it. Moriarty is never “explained” or examined by anything more than this kind of rhetoric, and so, despite all the strain and emphasis, it remains purely a private conviction of the author’s that car-stealing, for example, is a form of yea-saying. The conviction might have been more persuasive if we had been allowed to see a little more of the kind of people from whom cars are stolen; and it would certainly have been of help if Dean Moriarty, who talks about life like this—“We give and take and go in the incredibly complicated sweetness zigzagging every side”—were not such a bore. (And the boredom he causes isn’t relieved by the author immediately assuring us, “There was nothing clear about the things he said, but what he meant to say was somehow made pure and clear.”)
In fact, as I have suggested, the true yea-saying in the book is to be found in those passages which describe the time the narrator spent as a guard in a barracks for migrant workers, or his affair with a Mexican girl whom he meets in a bus going to Los Angeles, and leaves a few weeks later when he returns to New York. In such passages there is some factual resistance to the rhetoric, some hard social and physical circumstance to respond to and to be contended with; but for much the greater part of the book the emptiness of Dean Moriarty—angel, bum, and saint—is matched by the emptiness of the social scene in which Moriarty declaims and postures.
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We have to take it entirely on trust that the conditions of American life are such that if one wishes to say “Yea” to life one has to indulge in the violent and delinquent activities of Mr. Kerouac’s heroes. It is with this demand upon the reader that On the Road finds common ground with “Howl” and with Mr. Rexroth’s introduction to San Francisco Scene; but we cannot possibly respond to the demand when there are so few signs that these writers have been modest, disciplined, and serious enough to look determinedly and honestly at the America around them, before leaping to their alarming conclusions. In Mr. Kerouac’s book there is only intermittently any real sense of continuing habitation in the country his narrator traverses; when Mr. Ginsberg goes to a supermarket he does not go as you or 1 might, to buy a loaf of bread or a box of Kleenex, but only (revealingly enough) “to shop for images”; and Mr. Rexroth’s sense of proportion is shown up clearly in his comparison of America with Hungary under the Russian bombardment.
And—it should be added—from none of the other authors who contribute to San Francisco Scene do we get a sense of a clear individual gaze at any one aspect of American life. Mr. Michael Rumaker’s long story, The Desert, distinguishes itself by some of the most wooden satire of “American” values that I can remember reading in the last few years; others among the poets seem to imagine that they will arouse our scorn or our horror merely by naming such things as “suburban bedrooms block on block,” “two cars in every garage,” “supermarket suburbs,” and “Senators.” (Each of these examples comes from a different poem in the book.)
This kind of thing can hardly be dignified by calling it criticism of American life—it is as obvious and blatant as that which it sets out to criticize. And neither supermarkets nor suburbs—as they are presented in these poems and stories—are any justification for drinking turpentine, stealing cars, taking drugs, or swearing at “squares.” It all comes too easily, too glibly; the outsider cannot but be struck by how totally these “relbels” accept the most vulgar of the received ideas of “America” as the truth about America. “I am obsessed by Time Magazine,” Mr. Ginsberg cries; and he speaks more truly than he perhaps knows.
I suppose it should not come as a surprise that at a time of great prosperity and great insecurity there should be writers—and readers—who seek to flatter themselves by believing that it is in images of despair and danger and rebellion that they see themselves and their society reflected. This is a tendency—pace Mr. Rexroth—which is not confined to San Francisco, or even to the United States: self-pity and self-admiration of this sort comes easily in 1957.
But the truth is that we are entitled to despair or howl for rebellion only after much harder work than anyone here has bothered to do.
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1 Grove Press, 160 pp. $1.00.
2 Pictures of the Gone World, The City Lights Pocket Bookshop, San Francisco, 27 pp., 50c.
3 Howl and Other Poems, The City Lights Pocket Bookshop, 45 pp., 75c.
4 Viking, 310 pp., $3.95.
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