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117 Chapter 8 this PArtiCulAr kind of mAdness My life seems to be disorganized again and I look to the end of the novel with hope and expectation. Perhaps a kind of sanity again, an end of worry for the time being, the graceful, careless reading of anything that falls my way, the indolent days, the plans planned and abandoned, the indulgences, getting jobs perhaps, living again. But certainly an end to this particular kind of madness, like the “Sweet Georgia Bop” that screams near my ear now. That has got to stop, like a debilitating drug saps me. I don’t make any sense out of it, but the pulse of the blood. I pick up a biography of Melville in the library, feeling compelled to read about him, and yet wary lest I get off the track. I veer to both sides of it now, eager to be done, to be done, to be done, at last to be done. I shall have to wait. Perhaps in a week it will be finished and then no matter what, something new. Poetry and short stories and a deliciously pointless intellectual life. Maybe . . . —JOHN CLeLLON HOLMeS, journal, February 24, 1949 In his disappointment with Kerouac for being drawn into the excitement of driving off with Neal Cassady to New Orleans and San Francisco on January 19, 1949, Holmes noted, almost in a scolding tone, that for Kerouac it was a way to avoid facing his own dilemmas. However in the doubts that became a recurring theme in Holmes’ journals and letters after the group finally left, it was clear that the weeks when Cassady was roaring around Manhattan—either “manna from heaven or the plague,”1 as Holmes had written in a letter to Harrington in Tuscon—had also given Holmes the chance to put off facing some of his own demons. In the stale silence of the months that followed, he had to return to his novel and face his growing uncertainty about the quality of the book he’d struggled with for so long. even when Kerouac came back to New York this ParticUlar kind of Madness 118 City a few weeks later, the spring months that lay ahead of Holmes were more difficult than he had ever imagined. At many despairing moments he was no longer certain he could deal with the self-doubt that was engulfing him. Soon he had an intimation of the depth of his confusions. On January 21, 1949, two days after the others had left, Holmes found himself facing an empty evening with Marian away, and he invited the woman who was acting as his literary agent, Rae everitt, out for drinks and dinner. It was a night that hinted at the turmoil he would go through over the next months. At the restaurant they talked casually, then since Rae had tickets for a showing of a new film, they went to the Museum of Modern Art to see a movie that had been produced, directed by, and starred Shankar, one of India’s best known dancers. Holmes was bored by the film, though Shankar was present with his wife and small son, and he also didn’t like the “mixed european yogi bunch”2 that was in the audience. He slipped away with Rae and they found a small bar on 52nd Street where they sat drinking and talking. Holmes suddenly heard himself opening up to her, telling her everything that was eroding his confidence. In his journal the next day he wrote, I opened to her, for reasons I never know when I open to anyone. I told her things about what I feel and think, my work, my concern with politics and mankind, Neal and Jack and Alan. I opened much too wide, leaving myself in left field and feeling, when it was over, as though I had made a complete fool of myself.3 His agent’s response was an effort to reassure him that he hadn’t looked foolish. “She kissed me across the table when she saw I was thus constrained and it was something of a perfect moment, because whether she actually understood or not, she made me feel once more at ease, as though getting through to someone is not the absurd dream I often think it is.”4 When they left the bar the night was cold and drizzling and the streets were empty. They walked slowly along Lexington Avenue, both of them...

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