[New York Peasant by Wilfrid: September 28, 2007]
In this, the fiftieth year of On the Road, it looks like the Beats are going to linger.
I already devoted two articles to a walking tour of Greenwich Village based around a book published by City Lights (thanks for the link). I said then that I hadn't done Burroughs justice; but in fact the party for Kerouac is by no means over. A forthcoming New York Public Library exhibition, a new book by John Leland, Why Kerouac Matters, the publication of the original "scroll" version of Road, and now attendant ruminations by Louis Menand in The New Yorker.
Scroll on down for Abstract Expressionism at the Met...
The Beats Go On
I should perhaps say that my intellectual life does not revolve around the Beats. I read On the Road in summer of '76, at the right kind of age, and then most of Kerouac's other novels and some of Ginsberg's poetry. It took longer to understand what Burroughs was about. My real interest is in urban artistic bohemias, and I'd be at least as happy writing about Nerval and Baudelaire or Francis Bacon at Muriel's or the Bromley contingent - but the Beats have the conch right now.
Menand's summation, which takes its departure mainly from the Leland book, makes some shrewd points. As I said back in July, the Beats had their roots not in the fifties (Road was published in 1957) but in "the '40s; those few years of sudden survival after the war; years of short hair, heavy coats and fedoras, a pre-Eisenhower straight society, and a New York City almost unrecognizable today".
Menand clearly gets this ("it is not a book about the nineteen-fifties. It’s a book about the nineteen-forties"), but at the same time anachronistically associates Kerouac's work with a Frank Sinatra album from 1958, the movie "Ocean's Eleven" (1960), and generally a "rat pack" sensibility. This serves, I presume, to set up his characterization of the Beat circle as exclusively masculine and callously sexist.
Menand also understands that, Ginsberg's evolution notwithstanding, the original Beats were not ur-Hippies. Kerouac came to loathe "flower power" and the anti-war movements of the 1960s, and resented any association between his work and the so-called '60s "counter culture".
On the other hand, Menand over-emphasizes Neal Cassady's role in the formation of the Beat sensibility. Certainly, Cassady figures as the inspiration for Dean Moriarty in Road, but he was one of a number of muses for the Beat writers. Lucien Carr, Carl Solomon, Bill Cannastra, Hal Chase, and perhaps above all Herbert Huncke, combined with others to teach Jack and Allen new ways to walk, talk and think. Indeed, for all that it's dedicated to "N.C.", Ginsberg's "Howl" is haunted by all these ghosts, and others, and has an entire section inspired by Solomon's incarceration in a psychological institution.
But again, making Cassady, that lovable (or not) promiscuous lunk, the center of the action aids the charges of machismo and misogyny.
Finally, Menand commits the cardinal error - remarkable in a professor of English - of inferring from the autobiographical material clearly present in Road that Sal Paradise, the fictional hero, can be identified in a completely straightforward way with Kerouac, the author ("Sal Paradise, the Kerouac figure"). At the very least, Paradise is an idealization of the author; there's a hint, after all, in the name.
According to Menand, "[Road] is not about hipsters looking for kicks, or about subversives and nonconformists, rebels without a cause who point the way for the radicals of the nineteen-sixties." It's easy to concur with the latter judgment: Ginsberg's connection with sixties radicals was his own; Burroughs' politics are more complicated and more interesting. But not about "looking for kicks"? Not about "noncomformists"? ("Hipster" and "subversive" are loaded terms).
Well, it's explicitly about looking for kicks. Moriarty says so constantly: open the book and the quotes tumble out ("Dean rubbed his hands over the wheel. "Now we're going to get our kicks!" At dusk we were coming into the humming streets of New Orleans. "Oh, smell the people!"). It's also explicitly about driving drunkenly across the country, drug-taking, extra-marital sex, car theft, public bad behavior, and the valorization of hoboes. Of course, in the days of the three martini lunch, drunkenness and even DUI are not enough to separate the hipsters from the squares. Menand, however, is unduly dismissive of some of the character's other lifestyle choices: "crimes against the establishment consist of speeding, shoplifting, and a minor bout of car stealing (all right, a little illegal drug use, too)."
This is anachronistic. We are in the late 1940s, recall, when extolling heroin use (not just drug use, although smack permeates Kerouac's first novel, The Town and the City, more than Road), theft and casual sex - and more pertinently, finding moral and explicitly spiritual value in emulating the lives of bums, hoboes, and - get this - "negroes", was sharply transgressive. Significantly, the beat attitude to the black experience (channeled for the most part, admittedly, through jazz) is starkly absent from Menand's review.*
Patronizing maybe, a major theme of Road is that a special, unspoken understanding of life is to be found in the African American experience, and in the shared experience of people one way or another "down and out" (or "beat", which is all the term means). Consider the great scene in a jazz club, featuring a real jazz performer under his real name: "Slim Gaillard is a tall, thin Negro with big sad eyes who's always saying 'Right-orooni' and 'How 'bout a little bourbon-arooni.'" Moriarty observes: "'Sal, Slim knows time, he knows time'" - and he doesn't mean 4/4 time either.
Dean too knows time, at the moment he finds himself thrown out of yet another love-nest, nothing but a battered suitcase, a thumb he broke swinging a punch at his lover bound in a dirty bandage.
"'What do my eyeballs see? Ah-the blue sky. Long-fellow!' He swayed and blinked. He rubbed his eyes. 'Together with windows-have you ever dug windows? Now let's talk about windows. I have seen some really crazy windows that made faces at me, and some of them had shades drawn and so they winked....Now really, Sal, let's dig everything as we go along . . .'"
As Kerouac's subsequent writings tried to explain - whether or not they succeeded - this beat condition, to which his characters constantly aspire, is tantamount to a mystical condition. For Kerouac, it was a stage of enlightenment. It involved a different knowledge of time. It may indeed also have involved rejecting the female in toto, partly as an epiphenomenon of rejecting marrying and settling down.
But whatever it is, the condition is not conformist, not "square", and it's hard to see how Menand concludes that "(a) middle-class life with a house and a wife and kids" is what Paradise and even Moriarty really want. It's as if he read a different book.
The kernel of Menand's problem is that he fails to conceive a nonconformism, a radicalism, which does not fit a modern (indeed post-1960s) pattern of political correctness, vague liberalism and secularism. Kerouac was religious to his bones (even Ginsberg stayed religious); his radicalism lay in creating characters who find a boozy version of Buddhism through a rejection of "white" career and social values, and attempting to reflect that rejection in the fabric of his prose. The author's own life, of course, took a different trajectory - that's why the distinction between Kerouac and Paradise/Duluoz matters.
As for the rejection of the feminine, this is hardly a distinguishing mark of Kerouac's novels. One can wander far and wide through the thin-lipped, noir-ish landscape of 1940s American fiction without finding many strong, three-dimensional female characters. But in calling the sexuality of the book "straight and mostly male", Menand is unduly blinkered by the constraints under which Kerouac forced himself to write. We know that this was far from exclusively a straight milieu. Like almost all significant artistic/cultural bohemias, gay/bi sensibility was an indispensable ingredient in the original Beat circle. The question should then be, what is concealed and what revealed in a book like Road? But that goes far beyond the present discussion.
In a sense, Menand is right. Take away race, religion and polymorphous sexuality, and Kerouac and pals were a downmarket rat pack. But then take away Pollock's paintbrush and he was an annoying drunk. There are many negative things to say about the Beats and what they became; but first you have to see their project whole and clear.
"Pull my daisy
tip my cup
all my doors are open
Cut my thoughts
for coconuts
all my eggs are broken"
*Norman Mailer, of course, visited this topic first in his 1957 essay, "The White Negro".
Abstract Expressionism and other Modern Works
Being the Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman Collection, primarily from the 1950s, on display at the Met through February 3 next year. And since Ms Newman collected paintings like she collected surnames, it's a sizeable and varied show.
AbEx being MOMA's stomping ground, it's amusing to see the grand old galleries on 82nd let their hair down. But while major works by Pollock and Kline and Motherwell form the heart of the show, there's a healthy mix of other modernists in the selection too: some of Cornell's boxes, a mobile by Calder, worthwhile, if fairly typical works by Miro, Leger, Giacometti, Arthur Dove and others. A large De Kooning, on the other hand, is quite untypical. While figures are discernible in the pell-mell of "Attic", it's about as far in the direction of Pollock-ish, near-monochrome, chaos as I can recall De Kooning coming, each part of the large canvas bearing an equal weight of clashing lines and shading.
There's an iconic Clyfford Still canvas - it's extraordinary to reflect that estate problems still prohibit a comprehensive review of this painter's work. The single Rothko struck me as relatively minor, but Rothko is rarely at his best shown in mixed company. I was rightly pulled up for describing Alfred Leslie as a film-maker in an earlier Pink Pig article, and there's a fantastic, rich abstract by him in this show. The selections from Kline, Motherwell and Hofmann seem about as good as those artists get, which in the latter's case is very good indeed.
A spacious, airy show, and a welcome alternative to the Dutch masters scrimmage upstairs.
