Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Books

Reviews
"The Coldest Winter Ever"
Sister Souljah gives herself a starring role in her first novel.
By Sean Elder
[04/12/99]

True crime
Vanity Fair reporter Maureen Orth blames gay society for the crimes of Andrew Cunanan.
By Ted Gideonse
[04/09/99]

Reviews
The Sopranos
Six Catholic schoolgirls head off for the city in search of trouble and go back home looking for love.
By Stephanie Zacharek
[04/09/99]

Reviews
East of the Mountains
The author of "Snow Falling on Cedars" confronts suicide.
By Janice Harayda
[04/08/99]

Story love
I was a literary snob until I learned to stop pooh-poohing plot.
By Jean Hanff Korelitz
[04/08/99]

Complete archives for Books

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Reading this today, I'm inclined to laugh. William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, probably even Jack Kerouac, were surely better wired and immeasurably lighter on their feet than an earnest A-minus student like Podhoretz. Nevertheless, in those early days -- when Burroughs' "Naked Lunch" was still the mysterious unpublished novel Ginsberg's dedication to "Howl" promised would "drive everybody mad" -- Podhoretz was smart to recognize the Beat writers as avatars of an alternative, anticanonical literature, whose work demanded, both implicitly and explicitly, that other writers and readers stand with them or against them.

I was only 11 when Podhoretz's piece came out, but when I discovered the Beats a few years later, I felt the pressure too. So did my friends. So has every generation since. The Beats believed -- and not without reason -- that rigid literary forms reflect and perpetuate political, social, racial, sexual, psychic and spiritual oppression; their writing was in part an altar call on behalf of a freer, more passionate, more intuitive life and letters. Kerouac's "On the Road" posits a literary community far from seminars and cocktail parties: the open road and the writer's life seem like metaphors for each other. Burroughs hit upon a wildly appealing synthesis of high-bohemian contempt for the bourgeoisie and the cantankerous American individualism of the frontier saga and the Hollywood western. Lee, the protagonist of Burroughs's long-unpublished second novel, "Queer," feels "a killing hate for the stupid, ordinary, disapproving people who kept him from doing what he wanted to do. 'Someday I am going to have things just like I want,' he said to himself. [He has in mind a Huck Finn-like life in a territory where drugs and boys are always on hand.] 'And if any moralizing son of a bitch gives me any static, they will fish him out of the river.'"

The Beats cast themselves as the Romantics of the 20th century: similarly libertarian, similarly dismissive of received literary forms, similarly intent on what they considered direct expression of inner states of feeling. And like Blake, Byron and Shelley, they pioneered a radical sensibility that, when sufficiently domesticated, came to typify the rest of their century. From Bob Dylan through Kurt Cobain, popular music has been essentially post-Beat poetry with electric guitars, and as Burroughs wrote, "Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes. Woodstock rises from his pages."

Directly or indirectly, Beat literature has transformed much of America. Except for American literature. Beat, once-Beat and post-Beat poets (Gary Snyder, Anne Waldman, John Giorno, the poetry slam movement) continue to hold their ground, but they simply constitute one more school -- like their evil twins, the New Formalists, squinting over sestinas in the age of hip-hop. Mainstream-modern lyric poets like John Ashbery still win most of the prizes and get most of the teaching gigs. Among novelists, Kerouac and Burroughs may be honored as role models of American cussedness, as familiar spirits, as Promethean innovators, as visionaries who lived on enviably intimate terms with their imaginations. But relatively few people actually want to write like either of them, and few of those few will have their work taken seriously by whatever's left of the literary establishment. A 21-year-old applying to a writing program is as ill-advised to cite Jack Kerouac as an influence as O. Henry or H.P. Lovecraft.

In a way, this has all worked out just as it should. By keeping their outsider cachet, Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs get to stay forever young; they're discovered and taken to heart by generation after generation of late adolescent idealists who aspire to become holy degenerates. The Beats make wonderful, moody, endlessly engaging armchair buddies; Burroughs, particularly, is a cranky, brilliant, funny, ironic and sometimes heartbreaking presence on the page. But they're also dicey company for a young writer. Not so much because they're apt to make drugs and unsafe sex seem like a hell of an adventure -- who could deny it? -- but because their ideology of endless possibility paradoxically limited their literary options. And their various theories, manifestos and obiter dicta tended to discourage the rigorous self-scrutiny that enables a writer to reach the truest, weirdest, innermost vision.

Next page | Sorry, Jack, you're not a genius all the time