The Beat Vision: A Primary Sourcebook ed. by Arthur and Kit Knight (review)

Reviews 65 While the text offers nothing new to anyone familiar with the author’s work or the history of the Beat Generation, Beats & Company is just the kind of book that might spark a young student to seek the important books of the movement and read them for the first time. It isa perfect companion to all the biographies and roman-a-clef novels for which the movement isknown. Critics have said the Beats may be the last of the literary “generations.” The Beat Generation, with its flurry of manifestoes, was a movement that evolved from certain hungers and common causes that today may seem passé to some. Perusing the pages of Beats & Company, however, one cannot help but wonder what forces may enliven our literature again with the spirit and guts that fueled the urgent convictions of the Beats. RICHARD ARDINGER Boise, Idaho The Beat Vision: A Primary Sourcebook. Edited by Arthur and Kit Knight. (New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1987. 292 pages, $18.95.) The editors offer two explicit reasons for publishing this collection: it documents “the only serious literary movement indigenous to this country,” and it strikes a blow for freedom “because the complacency and the totali­ tarian atmosphere that characterized much of the 1950s is again with us.” To accomplish these ends, the editors have brought together eight interviews, one journal excerpt, four letters, four poems, four miscellaneous prose pieces, and numerous photos to recreate the atmosphere, explore the personalities, and articulate the values of the Beat Generation. Substantial space is devoted in the survey to Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, Bob Kaufman, John Clellon Holmes, and Gary Snyder; less space is given to Philip Whalen, Leroi Jones, Pete Orlovsky, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Carl Solomon, Ted Joans, Diane di Prima, and others. The quality of the selections ranges from the thoughtful to the silly. The street priest Pierre Delattre, who received Cassady’s body in San Miguel, pro­ vides useful details about Cassady and Kerouac and the ambience of the age, but he concludes that he cannot “think of a single piece of the so-called Beat literature that holds up very strongly as what you might call great literature.” Diane di Prima earnestly defends Beat poetry as an attempt to “speak directly to the hearts of the people.” Gregory Corso plays a variation on that theme in his revelation that “the first feeling I had when I wrote my first poem was like music coming through a crack in the wall, and I felt good writing it.” The poetry in the volume, though, is undistinguished. Carolyn Cassady gives a stilted, disingenuous account of her life with Neal and Kerouac, and Eileen Kaufman provides a purple Harlequin-romance version of her infatuation with Bob Kaufman. Kerouac’s letters riddle the paper with Gatling-gun patterns of drunken confession, sophomoric gossip, Zen admonitions, boyish enthusiasms, and whirlwind plans. The interviews are uneven but too often 66 Western American Literature trite and sometimes laughable, to wit, Gary Snyder’s split-level diction: Corso has “really shit on a lot of scenes, egregious shit, as it were.” And everywhere one hears the old talk: pad, man, like, crash, daddy, vibes, and like, karma, you know. The quality of the editing is simply bad. The introduction is mainly irrelevant, non-analytical, and embarrassingly personal and solicitous. There is no concluding chapter, no bibliography. No principle of selection is offered, and individual chapters are devoid of necessary editorial commentary or foot­ notes. Research is inadequate (e.g., the “unidentified girl” in the photo on page 55 is Katrina Daniels, a.k.a. Stark Naked), layout is erratic (e.g., a photo that appears on page 188 is not referred to until page 193), and no material in the book justifies the inflated aesthetic and political claims made for it off­ handedly in the introduction. Despite these weaknesses, the book is interesting as a kind of nostalgically annotated photo album. M. GILBERT PORTER University of Missouri—Columbia The Silent Screen and My Talking Heart. By Nell Shipman. (Boise: Boise State University, 1987. 256 pages, $13.95.) This is the story of Canadian-born Nell Shipman, spirited star and mav...