King of the Beatniks by Arthur W. Knight (review)

216 Western American Literature King of the Beatniks. By Arthur W. Knight. (Sudbury, Massachusetts: Water Row Press, 1986. 58 pages, $6.95 paper.) Arthur Knight’s play, based on Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and Gregory Corso, details the last months of the “King of the Beatniks.” As Knight explains in his introduction, the play is not biographical so much as “about men who are baffled by the meaning of existence.” One uses alcohol to stave off a reality he no longer understands; the other uses sex and drugs. Unfor­ tunately, they spend one entire act statically explaining their guilt, their fathers, their friends’ suicides, and their “mess.” Knight uses masturbation as a central metaphor for his characters’ selfindulgence and sexual egocentrism. His introduction says that he seeks “the poetry of the obscene.” If so, he would do well to drop “coming . . . as a . . . mystical experience . . . [with] the face of a saint” in favor of studying the master Jean Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre’s critical exegesis of the theme. Granted, Kerouac’s milieu itself may be at fault, substituting the putative grandeur of the obscene for mere adolescent nastiness. The play does contain some fine moments, notably John’s (Kerouac’s) memories of Mazatlan, his realistically uncomfortable reunion with a nearly forgotten daughter, and Logan’s (Corso’s) outbursts in the last act. The play touches on but unfortunately does not explore a fascinating dynamic: how much of Jesse (Cassady) did John create? For all its highights and lowlights, the play feels as if we have picked up where Long Day’s Journey Into Night left off—but without O’Neill’s monu­ mental characterization, cosmic struggle and terrifying collapse. Knight’s play does end, however, with a senseless stabbing, the perfect objective correlative for the undirected, uncommitted, and unconnected quality of Kerouac’s last days and, by extrapolation, of his entire generation. ADEN ROSS Utah State University Left Out in the Rain: New Poems 1947-1985. By Gary Snyder. (San Fran­ cisco: North Point Press, 1986. 209 pages, $15.95.) Ben Jonson named one of his collections The Forest; another was called Under-wood. Snyder might well have called this wide-ranging selection of uncollected work Underbrush. Some of it isquite negligible, but it all makes a contribution to his ecology. The arrangement is generally chronological, so we learn something about the strong continuity of his work: the first poem, ...