The Daybreak Boys: Essays on the Literature of the Beat Generation

6. Homeward from Nowhere: Notes on the Novels of John Clellon Holmes

6 Homeward from Nowhere: Notes on the Novels of John Clellon Holmes The body is hip. It is only themindthat knows Nowhere. John Clellon Holmes Nothing More To Declare Night and homelessness are central motifs in the fiction ofJohn Clellon Holmes, metaphors for the state of the human psyche in our century. The convulsive violence and vicious destructiveness of our age are seen by him as expressions ofa spiritual void, a vacuum at the heart of humanity. For Holmes, the psychic climate of the postwar world is one approaching an absolute zero ofthe spirit; we are at Nowhere: benighted, dispossessed, in exile, and overcome by darkness. The motive of his work is to discover an end to the night, to find a way home. Go, the author's first novel, opens with an image ofspiritual nostalgia, as Paul Hobbes, the central figure of the story, yearns for a return to innocence, longing for humankind to live "naked on a plain" (3). In stark contrast, though, to this Edenic ideal, Holmes portrays a world where (in Matthew Arnold's phrase in "The Buried Life") men and women "live and move trick'd in disguises," sharing only mutual fear and shame, a desperate ennui, and the secret craving for love. Such is the state of the soul not only of the mass of men but also of the group ofalienated young writers and bohemians on which the novel is centered. They are significant , however, for their attempt to transcend their condition, for their 90 Novels ofHolmes having undertaken a quest for a more authentic life, and for their search for some measure of meaning and peace. The poles ofGo are nihilism and vision, embodied respectively by the characters Bill Agatson and David Stofsky. The other characters of the novel, including the protagonist, occupy points along a continuum between these two extremities-between denial and affirmation, between fear and love, between zero and infinity. And the poles themselves sometimes meet, coexisting in the same person and ultimately in all humankind. Agatson, the negative pole, the "black prophet" of the novel, is a demonic, destructive, drunken monster of a man (195). His outrageous and often cruel antics derive from "a fatal vision of the world" and from his "inability to really believe in anything" (19). His death, near the end ofthe novel, is as absurd and meaningless, as squalid and wasteful, as was his life. Shortly before Agatson's death, Hobbes observes an unguarded expression on his face that seems to epitomize his dark, anarchic life: "He looked like a man who is witnessing the vision ofhis whole unredeemable existence, seeing it as a savage mockery; but more, perceiving that all of life is a blasphemous, mortal joke at everyone's expense, a monstrous joke in which everything is ignoble, ludicrous and without value or meaning" (273). And yet, Agatson, the monster, the nihilist, is ultimately seen to be an inverted idealist, a sort ofsaint turned inside out, an unconscious martyr to an unbelieving age. Precisely because he cares so deeply, he wills not to care at all. His essential sensitivity and vulnerability are glimpsed only when he involuntarily relaxes his will, as when he falls asleep once after a marathon binge revealing in sleep aa curious private softness" (74), a "boyishness," and an "innocence" (75). Only one other time does he let his mask slip for an instant in public, when he realizes that he has gone too far in baiting and mocking Verger, and he becomes suddenly contrite and gentle. Otherwise Agatson is determined to play the monster. But as Stofsky perceives, the monster in each of us is in reality no more than "a wnny-nosed little boy"- pitiful, miserable, and strangely vulnerable (109). Stofsky is the counterpart to Agatson. If Agatson may be seen to embody the psychic malady of our age, then Stofsky embodies the cure. Poet and mystic, Stof~ky is an eatnest quester who experiences a visionary breakthrough, a revelation of the essential duality of being: the material and the spiritual. He sees that the level of ordinary consciousness is 91 Daybreak Boys characterized by "a chemical piercing fright," but at a deeper level, beneath the dread, there is "an impersonal, yet somehow natural love, cementing the very atoms" (83). This love is the Divine Presence, the Holy Spirit. As a result ofthis vision, Stofsky embarks on a life ofcharity and humility, extending compassion and...