The Big Out
Protest is a bag of English and American anger,- of dissents and slaps in the eye, and it will be read for its versions of the new order of experience we hear about in American cities, the new 'beat' heaven with its illuminati and its trinity of hood- lum, junkie and poet. The American part is about, and by, people who behave like delinquents in the belief, that delinquency is right and that its shocks will provide literature with a great new set of hypodermic themes and cures. The second book, by Mr. Harrison Salisbury, is about the people who really are delinquents, the city boys who form themselves into gangs, who kill and maim each other in organised conflict, who have ideas of loyalty and 'heart,' who often develop into anti-social thugs or drug addicts and who can often neither read nor write. The book moves between snatches of case history and short, excited generalisations. The author considers that the gang ethos begins in the poverty and anxiety of slum life though its fashions have spread to middle-class areas as well, that a collapse of parental authority is mainly to blame but that intensified programmes of social work, better housing and a less corrupt and ignorant police could bring the elements of reform. He feels that reform is possible, and that these `disturbed' young men may be persuaded to serve America's national ambitions. But his bdok is a little shook-up itself. Never very radical or original, it talks no more than the West Side Story does about blaming or resisting the gangs and a judicious delinquent (and many of them, it turns out, are this) could frame a fair alibi from certain of its chapters. Also it is never sure of the scale of. these disorders, and on the evidence he presents it is doubtful whether his kind, sensible, limited remedies will work. Still, the evidence itself is very vivid and interest- ing. The tribal ways of the Chaplains, the Stone- killers, the Enchanters, the Englishmen and so on were devised to meet the strains of empty and ruinous surroundings and they are, among other things, a decent enough human achievement.
What about the literary delinquents—who shall reform•theiti? Protest cashes in on the stir already created by its writers and is a digest of their novels and testaments : the bit by Clellon Holmes, for instance, conies from his novel Go, which helped to fix the terms and flavours of the 'beat' elect and which has now been issued here as a paper- back under the title The Beat Boys. The collection is souped up with frantic editorial comments and with the notion that the two movements.in either country are ultimately one—that John Wain will lie down with Jack Kerouac in the same `beat' heaven. I suppose there are resemblances, just as there are similiar gangs elsewhere in Western society. Each of these writers is out to dive to the bottom, to feel truly and strongly, to explode the shams of his society and its middle-class ideas of success. But the editors' idea of a single gang of dissenters, 'the new barbarians,' rests on nothing more than one or two vague profundities. And the only English writer they include who has
any claim on the American elect by virtue of definite affinities of tone and argument is Colin
Wilson. And he, as a religious dissenter, might find that the thoroughgoing mystics of Spanish Ha rl-ir have tended to queer his pitch.
The juvenile delinquents, most of whom are
sick of fighting and grow out of the gang through marriage, frequently seem to know far more about their condition than the 'beats' do. But at their best they are both alike in their startling youthful energy and willingness and in their search for feel- ing, which naturally takes them into tight and comic corners but which it would be stupid to despise. 'Heart' and 'soul' are words they both use, and use hard. The gangs want their actions to be sealed with pain and honour, while for Norman Mailer, who is featured with Kenneth Rexroth as the hipster's impresario, 'the heart of Hip is cour- age.' A lot of these people are showing off and pretending, and a lot of the writers must surely be in it for the noise and the money. But several of these, however wildly, are concerned with an attempt at personal honesty, at healing or quicken- ing their emotional life by means of violence and suffering. The `beats' mumble ambiguously; as Thoreau said of Whitman, 'it is as if the beasts spoke.' But the kind of eagerness they represent has come and gone before in literature and it is not surprising that young writers should now be picking up the masks and styles of delinquency. In any case a writer is not judged by the nominal sources of his inspiration but by what he does with them, and an imagery of leather jackets, the white negro, cool jazz or the frontier is better than a good many. Of course he should know where his symbols and addictions are taking him, but there is no reason why someone shouldn't eventually appear who can act critically on 'beat' experience in this way. Even Kerouac and Holmes have sometimes been able to bring out the penal- ties, and longueurs, of their long nights' manic journeys. `Stofsky,' Holmes writes, 'began a babble of confessions the moment they met.' And the piece here from Kerouac's first novel is full of dispassionate observation and humour.
The `beat' novel which is better than its kind, however, has yet to arrive. Holmes's sweet, con- fessional college stuff is well enough; the horrible nonsense of Ginsberg's 'Howl' is not; and most of these pieces are of such terrific incompetence that it is worth looking further in the attitudes themselves for some inherent cause. I think this exists in their ambiguous insistence on courage and feeling. Feeling is kicks. These open hearts are shut in narrow, tired, obsessive ways, trapped in the instruments 'of their release, their dreary drugs and chicks and jags. A long time ago there were families, and interests, and efforts. But not now. And those technical and critical qualities which have always been associated—it can hardly be a middle-class deltAion—with literature itself are absent from their work. There is seldom any sign of talent because there is seldom any sign of skill. Skill is square, and so is literature : they suggest application, character and complex social standards. The odds are that writing badly will always be a part of being 'beat.'
The 'beat' writer's delinquency lies somewhere between style and reality. And although none of them writes like a real delinquent, as if the gangs spoke, the real limitations of the tough world pass freely into their books. Mr. Harrison Salis- bury explains how gang boys can go to extremes of anti-social violence and apathy and how their destructiveness is basically suicidal. The values, real or pretended, of 'beat' fiction seem to depend on the same states of mind; much of their 'dissent' is nervous incapacity, nothing to do with literature at all; and the hipster's road is 'the big out.' That old tag from the American Twenties deserves a place in the new slang, which shows a blank at 'suicide. You would never guess from the `beats' that the business of literature might be, in Pound's fine phrase, `to incite humanity to continue living.'
KARL MILLER
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