Fridoy, October 8, 1971 THE MICHIGAN DAILY Page Five THE MKHIGAN DAILY Page Hve THE BEAT GENERATION On the Road Bruce Cook, THE MEAT GEN- ERATION, Scribner's, $6.95. Ann Charters, SCENES ALONG THE ROAD, Portents/Gotham Book Mart, $3.00 By R.C. GREGORY A couple of years ago The New Yorker published a poem by Allen Ginsberg; then Jack Kerouac was lamented; and not long ago, with lugubrious eulogy by Charles Reich, counter cul- ture, nee Beat Generation, was laid out. Dissected into frag- ments, the best work of a gen- eration, like the bones of me- dieval saints, has been interred in reliquary reading lists around the country. In America when literary movements and the writers who make them die, they do not, as in olden days, go to Pere La- chaise; they go to universities: the dead care for the dead. In the fullness of time, which is always too late, the medieval sow neither recognizes her er- rors and rejections nor admits her canibalism; she recognizes her dead offspring and proceeds to bury them beneath piles of theses. But there is a chance with The Beat Generation. Bruce Cook who wrote this book about the Beats is a literary journal- ist, not a professor. That has not diminished the poignancy of the dead lives and it certain- ly hasn't reduced the goodness of Bruce Cook's study. The Beat Generation is a good piece of work of a kind not often done adequately. It is history, report- ing, interviews and reminis- censes; it is personal, although the author never assumes an importance greater than that of his subjects. Bruce Cook's book makes clear at least two things: Americans generally h a v e rarely found a place or a way in which to be at home in this land and, consequently, have an imperfect sense of what is or can be. That is one thing. The other is more obvious and more ominous: as a direct consequence of War Two, the decay in American intellectual and ar- tistic life set in at the top- in the universities, about the time the Beat Generation was forming. This decay would not be ob- vious, except that the effect of Beat books, if not their intent, has been to show how obsolete universities, among other insti- tutions, are. The age of admin- istration has made it impossible ofAm to distinguish government de- partments from universities: administrators have become in- terchangeable parts. This is ominous because art and intel- lect do not thrive in Washing- ton nor under administrators. What's good enough for Wash- ington is not good enough for Harvard or Michigan, although no one wants to say as much. It is not so much that there were no Establishments before War Two; there were. It is more that since War Two, the same establishment of admin- istrators is everywhere and more or less identical. Nearly all prominent administrators are veterans of War Two; they do not miss the killing and dying- but they miss their war. Mili- tarized at an early age, veter- ans, especially those' who re- turned to academic or govern- ment posts or those who stayed in, have never adjusted to non- belligerency. Perhaps it is natural that all institutions should grow imper- sonal; it does not follow that universities need become deper- sonalized repo-depots, adminis- tered by ruptured ducks. This nation is occupied. The Beat Generation,. f r o m Kerouac's On the Road to now, has ex- posed the occupation and sought alternatives. The Beats were the first to open guerrilla warfare; they simply went out of univer- sities, out of cities, on the road. Bruce Cook writes. There must be nearly a hundred quotably eloquent examples of Kerouac on the art of travel. And in all them there is such freedom, such an obvious feeling of opti- mism and joy that it seems almost superfluous to empha- size the deeply and specifical- ly American quality that per- The literary Fifties were ex- acerbated by the dead and dy- ing New Critics who kept moaning about the lack of liter- ary culture, while Wellek and and Warren defined a poem as a system of systems, thus giv- to the world the confusion that pedagogy and literary criticism are identical and systems analy- sis is superior to both. The Fifties of the intellectual quarterlies were soiled by the Partisan Review et al., relict from the thirties and infected with Miss Mary McCarthy's What they were to find and to make is impressive; Bruce Cook writes, "It was not only that they touched something es- sential and responsive in their younger readers and listeners. The Beats also had behind them the force of a long, rich, and deeply American tradition." They made books from their journey. If some of them travel- led without finding a way, if few of them have charted home, they nevertheless made a Re- naissance. Nor was it just a San Francis- co Renaissance, although it headed there. It was an Ameri- can Renaissance because, in brief time, it affected millions where they had not been living and because, above all else, it was not dedicated to war or death or universities but to peace and the land and love. From San Francisco the word went over the land; and the bell was not cracked. Jack Kerouac returned to fiction the strong, joyous narrative line, the sense of story, that readers could, and thousands have, retell by re- enactment. Readers and young- er Beats discovered in Kenneth Rexroth a beautiful poet, whose sense of the word and the word's resources, is matched by a pur- ity and precision unique and lovely. Gary Snyder brought to his poems and journals and essays the deepest, cleanest sense of earth since Thoreau--or certain Japanese or the American In- dians-taught what no one else the members of this genera- tion see themselves. For all that was against them -reviews, universities, "south- ern reactionary literary gentle- men," and other cops-the Beats found an audience and wrote for it and read to it. Robert Frost, among a few "reading" poets, had been saying lieder unac- companied for decades; Dylan Thomas and Theodore Roethke, as much as anyone, started the new round of poetry readings- although Kenneth Rexroth was first to read poems with jazz back-up. The Beats took up reading, with a difference. They made their readings more powerful by reading the audience as well as their poems: they sensed both how and what to read. Ginsberg's readings, especially, have always been exchanges of verbal and other energies, where Dylan Thomas's were aria perform- ances. The importance of the Beat Generation is simple and enor- mous and Bruce Cook's study makes both aspects clear. The Beats made a Renaissance and they made it outside the gates, in this broad awakening land. They made their lives and this brought something missing back to American literature. They brought back to literature a con- cern for words and form that had been carried on almost alone by William Carlos Williams and Charles Olson. They picked up bardic strains silent since the death of Yeats. They found D. H. terican Renaissance booksbooks Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Lucien Carr, 1953 Advance Man. Jerry Bruno and Jeff Green- field, THE ADVANCE M A N, William Morrow, $5.95. By WILLIAM GAUS Jerry Bruno is a former fac- tory worker for whom God had a special plan. In the nineteen- fifties, he chanced to go to a political meeting in his native Wisconsin, centering around the campaign of a Democratic as- pirant for the governorship named William Proxmire. Prox- mire happened to chat person- ally with Bruno and, in the manner of politicians, solicited Bruno's help and advice. As Bruno remembers it, so novel an experience was it for his opinions to be sought that he plunged into the Proxmire cam- paign, and stayed with Prox- mire through subsequent cam- paigns that sent him to Wash- ington as a U.S. Senator. Dur- ing Proxmire's re-election bid, Bruno handled arrangements for a series of in-state speeches on Proxmire's behalf by then- Senator John Kennedy of Mas- sachusetts. When Kennedy be- gan to gear up for the pri- mary campaigns that would eventually carry him to the Pre s i d e n cy he remembered Bruno and recruited him away from Proxmire. For the next nine years, Bruno served, with distinction as a political tech- nician for Presidential aspir- ants and Presidents. The Ad- vance Man is a winning ac- count of those years. That this is not a pretentious book can be seen by its brevity and by the photographs which appear on the inside front cover. They show Bruno, a dour, chunky man in the background of a series of famous men of the nineteen - sixties. The principal subject is sometimes smiling, sometimes solemn and always in the light. Bruno's face is al- ways blank and often blurred and he stands away from the center of the picture, looking bored, and slightly pained. Bru- no wisely lays no claim to knowing Kennedy's true feel- ings on any question of policy, or to have been present when the important decisions of that administration were made. Can- didly related is the infrequency with which he saw the Presi- dent privately, and what a prize it was to be asked-and you had to be asked-to join the President at the pool, or the Candidate in the forward cab- in of the plane. Nor does Bruno try to hold interest with infor- mal glimpses of the late Presi- dent and his family, though there is some of that. Instead, the book is primarily about advancing political visits for the two politicians who had the keenest intuitive sense of the importance of such prepara- tion and the natural gifts to exploit Bruno's talents to the fullest. It was Bruno who would see to it that crowds were held back behind some non-intimi- dating barrier, a single strand of rope, say, held by plain- clothes marshals, and that the. barrier would be dropped at the right moment, allowing the de- lighted crowd to press close to the waving, handshaking can- didate. It was Bruno who would oversee distribution of 10, 000 tickets to an event in an auditorium that couldn't seat 3,000 and Bruno who would see to it that nobody was turned away merely because he had no ticket. History will little note, per- haps, nor long remember, how many times Kennedy spoke "be- fore an overflow crowd" because Bruno deliberately booked the smaller of two facilities, but one cannot read this book with- out being impressed with how very helpful Bruno's kind of savvy was to the men he served. In part, this is a text- book on the necessity for shrewd and painstaking culti- vation of appearances. In addition, the careful de- scription of how it was all put together helps stir the memo- ry, makes the reader able to recall how very exciting and en- tertaining the Kennedys could be, and this can make pleasant reading for those who recall those years with a special fond- ness. Bruno has an agreeable way of telling it, not like a member of the elite, but as an ordinary sort of fellow who chanced to be present at a time and place rich with excitement, camaraderie and fun. Gary Snyder, 1956 Bourbonic ability to forget nothing - and to learn noth- ing. Chaplin's "Limelight" was picketed in Ann Arbor and elsewhere, as was Herbert van Karajan, although Werner van Braun got himself a spacious job. Young veterans gave up searching after lost generations and settled down in the coun- try of the old. Others came back from War to wage anoth- er one, in English courses. on the psychology department - and seem bent on fighting it out unto threescore and ten. secure in the fox hole of tenure; no one listens. Still others who had, in their opinions, held Michigan togeth- er during the war, relapsed into Miltonic behavior under the sweet assumption that behavior is textual exposition. But wait: Michigan did something for poetry in the Beat years; the University gave Edgar A. Guest an honorary doctorate. You know: "I'd rather flunk my Wasserman test . Than read a poem by Eddie Guest." Somehow, amid these down- and-out conditions, the Beat Generation -- Jack Kerouac, Al- len Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Kenneth Rexroth, Gregory Cor- so. and Michael McClure, among others. took off, went on the road. They sought and in seek- ing fought. It was a brave set- ting out, "the worst time . . For a journey, and such a long journey: / The ways deep and the weather sharp . Today's Writers .. . R.C. Gregory, a reviewer of long - standing for the Daily, works at Centicore Bookshop. William Gaus is a former al- gebra teacher who served two years as the outstanding Cau- casian Go player in Dallas, Texas. a change of heart, a change of consciousness, is a mighty thing. Bruce Cook's book is not and does not pretend to be a com- plete map of the Beat way. It is too soon, we are all mid-passage or dead. The Beat Generation compares favorably with Lewis Mumford's The Golden Day, all one could ask at this time. Scenes Along the Road is complimentary to Bruce Cook's book. Compiled by Ann Char- ters, with three poems and com- ments by Allen Ginsberg, and occasional comments by others, this is a small paperbound col- lection of "Photographs of the Desolation Angels, 1944-1960." Most of the photographs come from Ginsberg's collection-and it is easy to be grateful to him for having taken and, posed for snapshots; it is humbling and interesting to see pictures of men "before they became, as Jack Kerouac put it, famous writers more or less." These photographs show how Alvah Goldbrook, Dean Mori- arity, Japhy Ryder, Ray Smith, and quite a few others looked when they were beginning to write-about each other, among other things. These pictures are the persons, places, times; what is gone and what remains. If "Many ingenious lovely things are gone," there are these pictures as well as the books. Much remains; Allen Ginsberg's final memorial poem ends the book this way, Well, while I'm here I'll do the work- and what's the Work? To ease the pain of living. Everything else, drunken dumbshow. Jack. Kerouac, 1937 Jack Keronac and Peter Orlovsky, Tangier, 1957 meates all his writing. He is what the Beats have most in common with Mark Twain, . the Wobblies, Jack London, and all those hobo heroes of American literature. That was in the Fifties-and the Fifties were a strange time, longer ago than subtraction, more distant than the war. They were strange, depressing years. In addition to the post- war consumer-orgy, the times were poisoned by Senator Mc- Carthy's licensed rabidity. The House counterpart to his Sena- torial sub-committee was, in fact, bade welcome to Michigan. has succeeded in learning so well: "Only those who do not deny the web of being have vis- sion." Allen Ginsberg, since "Howl," has created a body of poetry which gives his role of nabi among the gentiles the vision-, ary intensity of Blake and the frank openness of Whitman: Listen, literary articulation, even of the long-haired gener- ation, is just a ripple of the giant wave of evolution that is taking place. What this whole generation feels is a c o s m i c consciousness, an awareness of being in the middle of the cosmos instead of this town or that valley or city. So if they perceive this big breath of this giant being, then there are real differences between them and the previ- ous generation who thought of themselves as individuals. Now it's as leviathan tendrils that Lawrence and read him-and not as a casebook. The Beats. in general, found what Gary Snyder says he seeks, voices for things that do not us- ually have voices. They set out, more or less consciously, to find the place, home, where, as Sny- der has said, "linguistic struc- ture and mythology intersect . very close to the center of poli- tics . . . where you can chanige the mind of a whole civilization." Wherever located inside the head, the Beats came nearer that intersection than any gen- eration of writers since The Golden Day. The Beats charted the possibility that one can learn to live in this continent, but that it will require an im- mense work from and in each person, To have found a way to NEED EXTRA CASH? Her's'How To Make It new, brand name audio equipment, blank tape, musical instruments and alt audio accessories. SENSELL and make that extra cash you need. You're the boss. You set your own profit picture. For catalogs and information, write or phone MR. MANN, c/o SMG DISTRIBUTORS, INC. 46-35 54th ROAD, MASPETH, N.Y. 11378 (212) 786-3337 THE You might be happier at Atna. In brewing Bud e, our choice is to go all the way. 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