Barbarians in the Gates: Recent Beat Scholarship

REVIEWS Barbarians in the Gates: Recent Beat Scholarship Michael Skau. "A Clown in a Grave": Complexities and Tensions in the Works ofGregory Corso. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. 248p. Omar Swartz. The Viewfrom On the Road: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. I42p. JamesT Jones.Jack Kerouac's Duluoz Legend: The Mythic Form ofan AutobiographicalFiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. 295p. Ben Giamo.Jack Kerouac, The Wordandthe Way: ProseArtistas Spiritual Quester. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000. 27Ip. John Lardas. The Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions ofKerouac, Ginsberg andBurroughs. Champaign: University ofIllinois Press, 2001. 326p. Kurt Hemmer Harper College Literary historians in the future may refer to the beginning of the twenty-first century as the heyday ofBeat scholarship. The Beats are not being embraced in all quarters and probably neverwill be, but the recent appearance ofseveral estimable scholarly texts published by Southern Illinois University Press and the University ofIllinois Press should be a harbinger ofthings to come. Perhaps it is not as big a surprise as it first appears that this burst of academic enthusiasm over the Beats comes from the heartland of America rather than from the coasts. After all, as Michael Davidson wrote over a decade ago, "To some extent [the Beats' accommodation to the canon] is a belated response to the fact that die Beats werefrom the outset part ofAmerican culture, not alienated from it" (94). The Beats have never been as popular in colleges and universities and given as much critical respect as they have garnered in the last few years. Considering recent news events, FALL 2001 * ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW * 81 the present academic attention received by the Beats can be viewed as part of a Zeitgeist ofnostalgia for the Beat era. The former enfant terribU ofthe Beats, Gregory Corso, died ofcancer in Minneapolis on 17 January 200 1 . The seventy-year-old poet was the last ofthe major Beat writers, who included Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. Though not present at the inception ofthe Beat movement in the mid19405 , and several years younger than his fellow Beat "daddies," Corso was considered one ofthe most promising ifnot the most promisingartist to emerge from the group in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Both popular magazines examining the Beats as a social phenomenon and literary critics analyzing the Beats' artistic worth focused much oftheir attention on Corso during this time. Michael Skau reminds us in "A CUwn in a Grave": CompUxitiesandTensions in the Works ofGregory Corso: Time and Newsweek seemed to be especially enamored of Corso. The former published an article on the North Beach and Venice West "beatniks," in which about one-third ofthe article consisted ofa passage from Corso's "Bomb," and a photograph accompanying the article, titled "Bang Bong Bing," showed just one member of the group—Corso. The Newsweek article, "Every Man a Beatnik?" reviewed a 1 959 New York symposium on the Beats with responses by Ginsberg, Corso, and Orlovsky and included a photograph of one of the three—Corso again. When MademoiselU featured the Beats in a 1959 article by Michael Grieg on "The Lively Arts in San Francisco," one literary work accompanied the article : "The Shakedown," a poem by Corso. In 1960, G. S. Fraser could assert that "Corso's verse seems to me to show more talent than Ginsberg's," and John Fuller too asserted "Corso's superiority" over Ginsberg. In Thomas Parkinson's 1 96 1 collection A Casebook on the Beat, the full-length essays with titles indicating a primary focus on a single Beat figure focused on just two writers: Kerouac and Corso. In 1963, Newsweek devoted more than two columns to Corso's first marriage as a "symbol of the Beats' eclipse." Hayden Carruth, in 1963, called him "an exceedingly talented poet who has written perhaps two dozen really good poems." Kenneth Rexroth wrote, "In my opinion Gregory Corso is one of the best poets of his generation." (129) Though it is generally believed by scholars that Corso did not realize his literary potential because ofhis problems with substance abuse in the 1960s and 1970s, he may still be the only Beat poet...