In Norman Podhoretz’s “The Know-Nothing Bohemians”, he pens an article dripping with sarcasm that rails against the Beat Generation. Its opening catalogues forerunners of the Beat Generation writers, and names the works unable to find publishers. The list ends with one that has: “but thanks to the Viking and Grove Presses two of Kerouac’s original classics, On the Road and The Sutbterranea, have now been revealed to the world” (481). He goes on to suggest that Kerouac’s popularity as a cultural figure was in part due to his “photogenic countenance (unshaven, of course, and opped by an unruly crop of rich black hair falling over his forehead)” that was “showing up in mass-circulation magazines” alongside Kerouac being “interviewed earnestly” on television (481) even before his work was published. Podhoretz is upset that Kerouac et al. speak for the “young generation” even though they themselves are thirty-five and sometimes older, but then surmises there must have been a “relief by many people who had been disturbed by the notorious respectability and maturity of postwar writing” (482). He credits the popularity of the bohemian mindset to its ability to “exert a powerful fascination” to those living in American suburbia.
This sentiment is echoed by John Osborne in the article we read for today’s class, entitled “The Beats: A Problematic Canon”. He speaks about the “recycled classic American myth: quasi-frontier” the Beats hoped to cultivate, one that was “politically reactionary” and displayed the desire to “drop out, hit the road, head for the hills…and escape from domesticity, parenthood, heterosexual commitment” (187).
Podhoretz acknowledges the allure of this endeavor:
“On the surface, at least, the Bohemianism of On the Road is attractive. Here is a group of high-spirited young men running back and forth across the country (mostly hitch-hiking, sometimes in their own second-hand cars), going to ‘wild’ parties in New York and Denver and San Francisco, living on a shoe-string (GI educational benefits, an occasional fifty bucks from a kindly aunt, an odd job as a typist, a fruit-picker, a parking-lot attendant), talking intensely about love and God and salvation, getting high on marijuana (but never heroin or cocaine), listening feverishly to jazz in crowded little joints, and sleeping freely with beautiful girls” (482).
He then cites an excerpt from On the Road, in which Kerouac describes a Nebraska farmer with deep admiration. Podhoretz notes the author celebrates the “pure of heart” and seeks out “dispossessed urban groups (Negroes, bums, whores)” that display the “vitality and virtue in simple rural types” (483). Here, the article takes a slight turn that seems to want to observe motives, with Podhoretz’s underlying question of whether Kerouac and the Beats truly seek purity and virtue, or if their attention is more about enthrallment and fascination.
After all, bohemianism in the 1920’s looked a bit different, perhaps even a inversion of its successor:
“The Bohemianism of the 1920’s represented a repudiation of the provinciality, philistinism, and moral hypocrisy of American life — a life, incidentally which was still essentially small-town and rural in tone. Bohemia, in other words, was a movement created in the name of civilization: its ideals were intelligence, cultivation, spiritual refinement, merit. The typical literary figure of the 1920’s was a midwesterner (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sinclair, Lewis, Eliot, Pound) who had fled from his hometown to New York or Paris in search of a freer, more expansive, more enlightened way of life than was possible in Ohio or Minnesota or Michigan” (484).
Consider that alongside how Jack Kerouac defines the Beat mentality: “To be defeated, beaten down, dead beat, in a high-risk, go-for-broke, shoot the works, all-or-nothing attitude, such as writers associated with the best jazz music of the day…[to achieve] ecstatic consciousness where the self feels itself to have been momentarily eternalized” (Osborne 186). The Beats sought to develop themselves as “lunatic-saints” (Osborne 193), prophetic sages who express political radicalism in response to two world wars, to what they saw as suburbia and stifled culture, and overall repression of the individual.
The real turn in this article occurs when Podhoretz begins to examine what he calls the darker side of the Beat’s variety of bohemianism — the admired criminality, Kerouac’s assertion that “everybody in America is a natural-born thief”, that then turns his own stealing into “boyish prankishness” (485). In this vein, Podhoretz then discusses at length the Beat Generation’s idolization of sexuality as the ultimate expression of freedom while noting that “the sex in Kerouac’s book goes hand in hand with a great deal of talk about forming permanent relationships” and that “even more revealing is Kerouac’s refusal to admit that any of his characters ever make love wantonly or lecherously — no matter how casual the encounter it must always entail sweet feelings toward the girl” (486). In his closing pages, Podhoretz nearly scorns at the work of the “spiritually underprivileged” men “who are burdened unto death with the specially poignant sexual anxiety that America-in its eternal promise of erotic glory and its spiteful withholding of actual erotic possibility” (491-2).
This last bit about the simultaneous sexual freedom alongside the need to seem “sweet” — perhaps even chivalric, in a way? — especially harkens back to a distinct word Osborne uses in his article: that of the Beats “wobbling” between a reliance of their upbringing and intellect and a reaction against it. They seem to teeter back and forth between a reliance on past literary techniques and works, their suburban childhoods and mores, and an intense rebellion of “anti-intellectualism” (Podhoretz 488) against them.
One might wonder why Podhoretz is so scathing in his review of the Beat Generation. Consider one of his final quotes from the article:
“To tell the truth, whenever I hear anyone talking about instinct and being and the secrets of human energy I get nervous; next thing you know he’ll be saying that violence is just fine, and then I begin wondering whether he really thinks that kicking someone in the teeth or sticking a knife between his ribs are deeds to be admired. History after all — and especially the history of modern times-teaches that there is a close connection between ideologies of primitivistic vitalism and a willingness to look upon cruelty and blood-letting with complacency, if not downright enthusiasm. The reason I bring this up is that the spirit of hipsterism and the Beat Generation strikes me as the same spirit which animates the young savages in leather jackets who have been running amuck in the last few years with their switch-blades and zip guns…Being for or against what the Beat Generation stands for has to do with denying that incoherence is superior to precision; that ignorance is superior to knowledge; that the exercise of mind and discrimination is a form of death. It has to do with fighting the notion that sordid acts of violence are justifiable so long as they are committed in the name of ‘instinct'” (492-3).
Questions:
I’m interested in your reactions to Podhoretz’s critique of the Beat Generation, and the culmination of the article when he explains his deep concerns about what he calls “anti-intellectualism”. I’d also like to know what parallels can be draw between today’s hipster youth, and these writers: how extreme might similarities be, or not be?
I think today’s youth has a lot of pro-individualism, anti-traditional intellectualism. The focus seems to be on a rejection of traditional learning, learning styles, intelligences, and a redirect toward individualized intelligence. This is not just coming from the youth, but from educators and special needs advocates. I think these calls for change come from a better understanding of intelligence. On the other hand, some subcultures outright reject intellectualism and instead advocate for a more materialistic lifestyle, or for one that focuses solely on spiritual growth.