Geniuses all the time: A review of The Portable Beat Reader (Penguin Classics) by Ann Charters. “… When Allen Ginsberg introduced the world to ‘Howl’ at a now-fabled 1955 reading in San Francisco’s Six Gallery, everyone present knew ‘at the deepest level,’ declares McClure, ‘that a barrier had been broken, that a human voice and body had been hurled against the harsh wall of America and its supporting armies and navies and academies and institutions and ownership systems and power-support bases.’ Reading such slovenly, overheated prose in The Portable Beat Reader, edited by Ann Charters, one hardly knows which is more astonishing: that these men and their cohorts could ever have acquired significant literary reputations in the first place, or that, more than thirty years later, when many of their far more gifted contemporaries are virtually forgotten, every last member of the Beat fraternity who ever picked up a pencil (or, in the case of Neal Cassady, stole a typewriter) has been accorded an honored place in the history of American letters.1 Few have played so industrious a part in this enterprise as Charters, who has for three decades been what one must, I suppose, call a ‘Beat scholar’; the biographer of Kerouac and editor of a two-volume encyclopedia entitled The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America, Charters functions in the present Reader as an utterly uncritical tour guide, a literary version of the cordial, discreet lady from the PR office who shows you around corporate headquarters. Moreover, if in one sense Charters is the literary antithesis of the Beats—her prose as orthodox of syntax and as wearisomely academic in tone as theirs is frenzied and ungrammatical—in another sense she is their true compeer, for her writing evinces a thoroughly Beat-like ungainliness. ‘As a facet of our country’s cultural history,’ reads a typical sentence in her introduction, ‘clusters [i.e., literary cliques] have been an outstanding feature of our literature. . . . The discovery of the word ‘beat’ was essential to the formation of a sense of self-definition among the earliest writers making up the cluster that would later call itself members of a Beat Generation.’ By the time one has reached the end of the introduction (in which she identifies one of Burroughs’s favorite books as ‘Spengler’s Decline and Fall of the West’), one knows better than to expect from Charters anything resembling literary taste or critical intelligence. …”
The New Criterion
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1960s: Days of Rage
1960s: Days of Rage 