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Still, we mostly associate ostensibly conventional writers with heroic perfectionism. The Beats have no legendary feats of hunger artistry like Pound cutting "The Waste Land" or Lish cutting Carver, no Hemingway challenging buddies to shorten a single one of his sentences; fairly or unfairly, the popular image of the Beat writer remains Kerouac speeding his brains out, a mile-long roll of paper chugging through his chattering typewriter. Nor do the Beats have achievements like Hemingway's "Soldier's Home" or Carver's "Fat" -- short, exquisitely shaped pieces of utter elegance and devastating power, in which every word pulls its weight.

In "Interzone," Burroughs made wicked sport with just this sort of talk: "Not bad, young man, not bad. But you must learn the meaning of discipline. Now you will observe in my production every word got some kinda awful function fit into mosaic on the shithouse wall of the world." This is a masterstroke of contempt. Literary formalists are old blowhards who don't understand a new mode of writing that can't be "fixed" with a little stick-to-it-ivity. Worse still, in Burroughs' essentially Manichaean view, they're collaborators with the cosmic status quo, the doctored "reality film," the jailhouse of time, space and language. "What scared you all into time?" Burroughs wrote in Nova Express. "Into body? Into shit? I will tell you: 'the word.'" Kerouac's Buddhist Catholicism also led him to regard the visible world as a con game and language as the barker's spiel. "Why do we fool to be alive," he wrote in "Desolation Angels." "Enough I've said it all, and there's not even a Desolation in Solitude, not even this page, not even words, but the prejudged show of things impinging on your habit energy -- O Ignorant brothers, O Ignorant sisters, O Ignorant me! there's nothing to write about, everything is nothing, there's everything to write about! -- Time! Time! Things! Things! Why? Why? ... look closely, you're being fooled -- look close, you're dreaming."

Needless to say, the conviction that both words and phenomena are unreal doesn't dispose a novelist either to fuss over le mot juste or to get lost in the intricate passions and conflicts of deluded worldlings. Kerouac and Burroughs wrote their best when most in love with the world -- Kerouac chiefly treasured its sad sweetness, Burroughs its rich, Falstaffian villainies and the rich contempt they excited in him -- or most pained by its evanescence. Near the end of his life, Burroughs dropped the steely ironies and wrote artlessly and lovingly about his cats. "They are living, breathing creatures, and when any other being is contacted, it is sad: because you see the limitations, the pain and fear and the final death. That is what contact means. That is what I see when I touch a cat and find that tears are flowing down my face."

Podhoretz was right that our attitude toward the Beats has something to do with our attitude toward intelligence. But it didn't occur to him that it might be intelligent to be skeptical of intelligence. Samuel Johnson was. Samuel Beckett was. (If they didn't learn this paradox from experience, they probably picked it up where Harold Bloom says the rest of us did, from "Hamlet.") If the Beats ditched intelligence too quickly in favor of mysticism or hedonism, how much longer should they have stuck with it? Until they ended up like Beckett's Unnamable, so gridlocked in dualism that instant denial negated every assertion, and that denial denied in its turn? If the Beats were conveniently self-forgiving in matters of literary craft, at least they had a convenient rationale: As Kerouac put it, "Craft is craft."

And if the Beats trusted too much that their subjectivities would somehow mesh with their readers' subjectivities -- at least they trusted. Kerouac didn't tweak his sub-picaresque plots or shape his scenes for dramatic effect, but he somehow got readers to experience a mood and a moment so strongly that they tried to re-create it in their own lives. Dean Moriarty, the pseudonymized Neal Cassady of "On the Road," is one of American literature's great characters; so is Kerouac's ongoing, unprettified self-portrait under such names as Sal Paradise and Jack Duluoz: a needy, self-doubting depressive prone to both spiritual panic attacks and arias of ecstasy. Despite Burroughs' satisfaction with the "organic continuity" of "Naked Lunch," its riffs, routines, voices and shards of narrative seem determined by subjective considerations to which we're not privy. But his inventiveness, his gift for ventriloquism and his weird fusion of the outrageous with the coldly logical supply something like the momentum of a conventional plot, every sentence its own cliffhanger.

And not far beneath Burroughs' Martian ironies, his fearsome transgressiveness and his flashes of mystic irrationalism, the reader feels moral bedrock. Sooner or later, every would-be writer who takes the Beats to heart has to make Podhoretz's Choice, and I had to go the other way. For one thing, some of this stuff just wasn't readable -- though I'd still rather slog through "Minutes to Go" or Kerouac's onomatopoeic sea poem at the end of "Big Sur" than "Finnegans Wake." For another, I didn't believe in magic: The Burroughs/Brion Gysin notion of exposing hidden truths by cutting up and folding in texts seemed as silly to me as Yeats or James Merrill summoning up spooks at the Ouija board, and Kerouac's Catholicism bored me even more than Flannery O'Connor's.

But mostly it became obvious to me that I wasn't a genius all the time, and that I could only make my work better by working on it. The Beats reverenced the work in part for the process of its creation. ("The usual novel," Burroughs wrote to Ginsberg during the writing of "Naked Lunch," "has happened. This novel is happening.") This resistance to the notion of art as artifact is a smart way of "reading" a Charlie Parker solo, in which the kick is to witness its coming into being; but for me it began to seem a dubious approach to a text -- in which the words count for everything, and what might or might not be in the writer's mind, heart and soul count for nothing.

And finally, Beat dogmatism and messianism started to wear me out. Burroughs, particularly, loved to hand out free advice in his books -- "cut lines of control," "storm the reality studio" -- and I began to think that my relations with reality were none of his damn business. Probably I was being defensive, because I'd begun to wallow in what Kerouac would have dismissed, however sweetly and compassionately, as the world of maya -- that is, of Dickens and Austen, Tolstoy and George Eliot -- and I figured I'd pay the piper on the next karmic go-around. Or maybe I could do penance here and now in Beckett's lavish deprivations, his anguished reveling in the noble futilities of language. But my choice was simply a matter of taste and temperament. It wasn't about intelligence (as Podhoretz would've said) or about collaborating with literary Nova criminals (as true believers might think) in order to review and get reviewed in the New York Times. It was just how things happened to happen, and I don't offer this account of my backings and forthings as covert advice. The Beats were my first vicarious mentors, and they have my gratitude, my admiration -- my love, is what I'm avoiding saying. It's just that they can't have me.
salon.com | April 12, 1999

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