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133 John Clellon holmes and exIstentIalIsm Ann Charters “Yes, hell must be like that,” Camus has said, “streets filled with shop signs and no way of explaining yourself.” Full of choice Existentialist texts, I walked along 57th Street one icy morning, the solemnly radical veteran, certain he understood the anxiety and bewilderment of the middle class while studying the sparkling Impressionist paintings in the sparkling Christmas windows: so many menacing shadows had swarmed up out of those dappled hues. I threw up my first real belly-full of martinis, right over the side of the bed, after a party arguing about the “reactionary rot” in Koestler. . . . A passion for order was my reigning passion then: that the world would be coherent, after all. —John Clellon Holmes, Passionate Opinions When Holmes wrote this statement he was remembering back to the Christmas of 1947, when he was a twenty-one-year-old unpublished, aspiring novelist living in Manhattan at Fifty-Sixth Street and Lexington Avenue, soon to meet another young aspiring novelist, Jack Kerouac. In the autumn of 1948, shortly after they had met and become friends, they were deep into a long conversation in Holmes’s apartment when John—always temperamentally a writer in search of order and coherence—asked Jack to come up with a term describing the “questing” quality of their group in the fervent years after the end of World War II. As Holmes recalled: “Everyone I knew felt it in one way or another—the bottled eagerness for talk, for joy, for excitement, for sensation , for new truths. Whatever the reason, everyone of my age had a look of impatience, unreleased ecstasy, and the presence of buried worlds within.”1 134 Ann Charters Inspired by Holmes’s question, Kerouac replied: “It’s a kind of furtiveness . Like we were a generation of furtives . . . a kind of beatness . . . a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world. . . . So I guess you might say we’re a beat generation,” and he “laughed a conspiratorial, the Shadow knows kind of laugh at his own words and at the look on my face.”2 At the moment they were talking, existentialism was so fashionable among intellectuals in New York City that had Kerouac shared Holmes’s passion for philosophy, he might have said “we’re an existentialist generation,” and the word “beat” might not have come up at all. Just as well. No doubt the multisyllable word “existentialist” quickly would have been abbreviated to “X,” and who would have remembered for very long the writers associated with the bland name “the X Generation”? Let alone the term “X-nik” instead of Beatnik, a word coined a decade later by a hostile San Francisco columnist who might have been implying that the Beats were a “Russian secret weapon” during the Cold War.3 Unhelpful as the word “beat” is, at least it’s better than “X.” And of course it’s in the spirit of a true American literary rebellion to reject all previous labels—especially European—and come up with one of your own. Yet for what would become the loosely associated group of postwar American writers known as the Beats, the existentialist quest to redefine the meaning of existence would be at the heart of their poetry and fiction. Existentialism is the name used for several different revolts against tradition in philosophy carried on for more than a century by European philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Jaspers, though Gabriel Marcel was the first philosopher to call himself an existentialist.4 The vagueness of the label “existentialist” is similar to the inexactitude of the label “Beat,” which loosely describes the condition of the group of American writers in the 1940s and 1950s associated with Kerouac and his friends Holmes, Ginsberg, and Burroughs, in revolt against tradition in literature , social conformity, and, as Kerouac later said, “something but not everything.”5 The word “existentialist” as a philosophical term preceded the word “beat” by only a few years, emerging into the consciousness of a large public in 1945, when Sartre lectured on existentialism in Brussels and Paris in the immediate aftermath of World War II and presented his philosophy as a doctrine for the postwar age.6 A year later, in Existentialism and Human Emotions, Sartre clarified that existentialism actually began at the point when the Russian writer Dostoevsky wrote, “If God didn’t exist, everything would be possible.”7 The assertion that God does not exist and...

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