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Hip Sublime: Beat Writers and the Classical Tradition

2020; Penn State University Press; Volume: 57; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/complitstudies.57.3.0555

1528-4212

Hassan Melehy,

Poetry Analysis and Criticism

One of the contributors to this well-executed volume, Stephen Dickey, suggests that it's “no longer necessary” to address the widespread misconception that the Beat Generation writers had no literary culture (32). I wish that were true, but my impression as someone who writes about the Beat Generation is that this misconception is still quite persistent. Nonetheless, the editors of and contributors to Hip Sublime do an excellent job of avoiding a defensive posture, instead matter-of-factly discussing and analyzing the many ways that the Greco-Roman classics play a role in the writing of a whole range of authors in various proximities to the loose movement known as the Beat Generation. Through old-fashioned erudition, careful writing and editing, and rigorous close readings, the essays in Hip Sublime tacitly but definitively dispel any doubt concerning these writers' sometimes deep, sometimes oblique, sometimes awe-struck, but always sophisticated engagements with the classics. The contributions also show, in the kind of transperiod perspective that is usually missing in contemporary literary studies, what these authors' engagements with the classics might bring to the study of the latter.The book broadens the circle of those writers typically characterized as “Beat.” Although the “big three” of Kerouac, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg are strongly present, so are their associates Gregory Corso, Diane di Prima, and Philip Whelan, fellow travelers Robert Creeley, Ed Sanders, Robert Duncan, and Charles Olson, patron-cum-adversary Kenneth Rexroth, and comrade-in-arms Charles Bukowski. The thread that ties all these authors together is their common response to the classics, a canon from which they draw inspiration and toward whose cultural authority they remain suspicious, oftentimes treating the suspicion as integral to the inspiration. In this respect, the volume's cohesion is impressive.The volume's introduction, by contributor Dickey and co-editors Ralph M. Rosen and Sheila Murnaghan, lays out the stakes and scope of the book clearly. The writers examined, the introduction explains, though far from having “a monolithic aesthetic or literary agenda,” were all “responding to the same nexus of cultural forces” (1). Dickey, Rosen, and Murnaghan continue, “In the wake of World War II, values were being rigorously challenged in every sphere” (1). They detail the ways that the arts, alongside the massive cultural upheavals taking place in the West, reconfigured their relationship with historical time and its traditions, while at the same time aiming for a transcendence of the uncertainties and degradations of the era's everyday life. “In such moments,” they write, “it was classical authors who provided, on the one hand, a discourse of sublimity to help some Beats articulate their desire for a purity of experience, and, on the other, a venerable literary tradition that attracted them precisely because of its uncanny ability to be as ‘hip’ as it was ‘square’” (1). The case for an interest in the volume's topic, following studies of the Beats' engagements with both English and American romanticisms, is thus simple and solid, made with a capacious view of Beat interests and practices.The first chapter, Dickey's “Beats Visiting Hell: Katabasis in Beat Literature,” begins with a 1959 assessment by Dorothy Van Ghent that the Beat Generation writers, their freight trains and jazz bars notwithstanding, were thoroughly informed by a myth that “follows authentic archaic lines” (15). Dickey extends this idea to an exploration of katabasis, the journey downward to the sea or to the land of the dead that shapes the epic throughout Western history, as it figures in Ginsberg and Kerouac, with asides to Burroughs and Corso. The next chapter, Christopher Gair's “‘Thalatta! Thalatta!: Xenophon, Joyce, and Kerouac,” details the complement of katabasis, anabasis, the journey back to the surface or upward from the sea, as it operates in Kerouac's narrative works. Gair demonstrates an almost ornate reworking of classical sources on Kerouac's part. Logically following these two chapters, in “‘The Final Fix’ and ‘The Transcendant Kingdom’: The Quest in the Early Works of William S. Burroughs,” Loni Reynolds demonstrates the mythic plots that pervade Junky, Queer, and Naked Lunch—a more elusive subject since, as Reynolds signals, Burroughs rarely makes direct classical references (64).The volume then steps from epic to lyric, starting with the most familiar ancient poet in the Anglophone curriculum, the Roman Catullus. In “The Invention of Sincerity: Allen Ginsberg and the Philology of the Margins,” Matthew Pfaff addresses Ginsberg's retooling of the classics into a means to challenge their institutionalized authority. For example, by digging through the bowdlerization of Catullus, still the norm in editions available through the mid-twentieth century, Ginsberg puts the organs and orifices of the Carmina on the page to valorize his own challenge to obscenity codes. In the next chapter, “Radical Brothers-in-Arms: Gaius and Hank at the Racetrack,” Marguerite Johnson explores Bukowski's contrasting rewrites of Catullus: unlike Ginsberg, Bukowski works entirely from a translation, “amalgamating Catullan themes and imagery to write poems free from creative anxieties or a misguided imperative to capture linguistic fidelity” (104). The next chapter, Nick Selby's “Riffing on Catullus: Robert Creeley's Poetics of Adultery,” the adultery in question is not only the marital infidelity of which Creeley was accused and to which he was responding, but also the infidelity of Paul Carroll's translation of Catullus, as well as Creeley's proximity or fidelity to the Beat poetics he was inclined to take distance from (117).The following chapter, Jennie Skerl's “Sappho Comes to the Lower East Side: Ed Sanders, the Sixties Avant-Garde, and Fictions of Sappho,” moves to the Greek poet who was one of Catullus's major inspirations. In fact, Sappho's historical priority in the Western tradition of lyric poetry makes her, Skerl suggests, ripe material for a young poet looking to the classics for cultural authority in remaking traditions (144, 150). The volume's next lyric poet is another Greek: Victorial Moul begins “Robert Duncan and Pindar's Dance” with Duncan's “A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar.” From this line, Moul shows, Duncan writes a Pindaric poem—“long, with a complex structure, and […] marked by elaborate metaphors, strings of related images, multiple mythological and historical allusions […], and by the poet's references to himself and to his work” (161–62)—that bears on the present day through its treatment of contemporary politics. Moul argues that Duncan found in Pindar things that connect him, “perhaps surprisingly, with the poetic tastes of the Beat Generation” (180). The volume's cluster of chapters on lyric poetry is rounded out by Gideon Nisbet's “Kenneth Rexroth: Greek Anthologist,” on Rexroth's update of the widely reprinted Greek anthology, the source of Greek poetry for numerous drawing rooms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rexroth's version (still in print) aims for a much wider audience: but as Nisbet cleverly shows, Rexroth's claims that his free, seemingly spontaneous English renditions of the Greek entail “no pretense of scholarship” echo the populist poses of preceding editors of the anthology.Next, in “Philip Whalen and the Classics,” Jane Falk presents a poet who, though having some education in the classics (without Greek or Latin) and identifying with some major figures of antiquity, in the wake of concentration camps and nuclear explosions sees major shortcomings in the Western tradition. Whalen answers these with Buddhism. Falk concludes with Whalen's notion that “Western civilization has kinks that need hammering out, and the hammers come from India and China” (224). Following this chapter is a more elaborate study of a poetic intertwining of the Western tradition with Buddhism, Nancy M. Grace and Tony Trigilio's “Troubling Classical and Buddhist traditions in Diane di Prima's Loba.” Grace and Trigilio do a careful, detailed job of mapping di Prima's immense set of references, which threads its way through many cultures. The effect is a radical global poetics that, in placing especially Buddhism alongside the Greco-Roman tradition, challenges the ascendancy of Western culture and its male domination. The last chapter, Richard Fletcher's “Towards a Post-Beat Poetics: Charles Olson's Localism and the Second Sophistic,” also examines a poet's expansive engagement with classical sources, focusing on “the period of Greek literary activity in the Roman Empire of the first three centuries CE known as the Second Sophstic” (254). Fletcher sees Olson's interest in this phenomenon of late antiquity as stemming from his own project, in parallel with that of these Greek writers, of both recovering the past and bringing its locales into the present.In the afterword, “Standing at a Juncture of Planes,” veteran Beat scholars Grace and Skerl provide an assessment of the volume's scholarly significance: the topic has been neglected “because of the dominance of Beat authors' persistent criticism of post-World War II mainstream culture in tandem with their equally persistent rhetoric of eschewing a hegemonic past” (271). Grace and Skerl add an extra knot of cohesion to a volume marked by superb organization and range. I find little that isn't satisfying in Hip Sublime, much that's stimulating, and fewer factual errors than in most scholarly books. Its thoughtful writing and editing make it widely accessible, of interest to a beginning student or an advanced scholar.