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Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, The Beat Generation, and America

1980; Volume: 8; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/saf.1980.0020

2158-415X

Warren French,

Poetry Analysis and Criticism

Studies in American Fiction251 ambitious fiction; and his unwillingness to resolve his narratives without ethical discrepancies rather than "merely stopping" action. If, as Trachtenberg persuasively argues, Bellow's creative act is "fundamentally passive" (p. xv)—a method of discovering rather than inventing fictional ideas—even these complaints may reflect the variety, complexity , and equivocalness of his subject as much as they do the eclecticism of his method. Upholding the pieties of the faithful among the "post-political intelligentsia" may finally prove to be less troublesome than surviving gracefully as one of the post-Partisan Review intelligentsia. Indiana UniversityJames H. Justus McNaIIy, Dennis. Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, The Beat Generation, and America. New York: Random House, 1979. 400 pp. Cloth: $15.00. Desolate Angel is one of those books that make reviewers uncomfortable because they do adequately, but without special distinction, something that did not need doing. While one, therefore, cannot simply dismiss them, neither can one recommend them. Dennis McNaIIy has, it is true, turned up some new material, examined hitherto unexploited documents, and established dates of events like the famous poetry reading at the Six Gallery on October 13, 1955 that really launched the San Francisco Renaissance; but he has not supplanted Ann Charters' Kerouac: A Biography, which remains in print, nor has he given us as fresh a look at his subject as Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee's Jack's Book (1978). It is especially unfortunate that this book follows too closely on the heels of that biography in the form of statements by Kerouac's contemporaries for McNaUy to have taken advantage of these documents in his chronicle. He also makes occasional disconcerting mistakes like calling California's spectacular Highway 1 that goes through Big Sur, U.S. 1, which is some 3,000 miles away (p. 282). The only reason for another Kerouac biography right now—especially by someone too young to have known the novelist—would be the development of a fresh, surprising thesis that would give new implications to familiar facts. This, unfortunately, McNaIIy does not provide. He never even seems to get his own view of Kerouac clearly focused. He seems to be developing a promising approach early in the book when he argues in response to William Burroughs' dismissal of Jack and Neal Cassady's wild, cross-country trip as "pointless"; Yet to view it as futile, or, as did many critics later, as an insane parody of the mobility of automotive America or as an escape from "civilization" à la Huck Finn was to miss the point. There was no escape from the pervasive fog of the technocratic culture. Rather, a trip such as theirs was like stepping off a cliff—and flying: ultimately their road led within (p. 114). Here McNaIIy suggests that Kerouac possessed the quality of a romantic whom Thomas Wolfe described in Look Homeward, Angel as escaping not "out of life, but into it." Wolfe exercised an enormous influence on Kerouac as a young man; but Kerouac has yet to be consistently presented as Wolfe's heir. Such an account, of course, would be a history of loss and failure that no one might want to write or to read. Although McNaIIy admits Kerouac's steady deterioration after the success of On the Road, he fails to make the most of his own start because his strategy is to tell the story of Kerouac against a background of the changing United States of the Beat years. In practice, however, this historical dimension of Desolate Angel provides nothing more than interpolated paragraphs resembling the "newsreels" of John Dos Passos* U.S.A. The informa- 252Reviews tion is never integrated into the book because one is always conscious that Kerouac is little involved in most of the events mentioned, often even little conscious of them. If Kerouac was engaged principally—and I believe he was—in a confused and frustrated inward quest, the well-lost world around him means little. McNaIIy, however, fails to make use of one of his most provocative contributions to our understanding of Kerouac—documentation of his addiction to auto-eroticism, which is a powerful evidence of his divorce from the outside world long before...