Word: kerouac
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...SUBTERRANEANS (III pp.)-Jack Kerouac-Grove Press (clothbound, $3.50; paperback...
Some novelists are so infatuated with the brimming gutters of experience that they might be classed as members of the sluice-of-life school. Young Mr. Keeje, by Stephen Birmingham, 28, and The Subterraneans, by Jack Kerouac, 35, are both sluice-of-life novels, although First Novelist Birmingham explores the parqueted upper depths of the well-heeled while Novelist Kerouac, author of On the Road (TIME, Sept. 16), roams the squalid lower depths of just plain heels. Each book purports to speak for a younger generation that Kerouac has dubbed "beat" and Birmingham, with Fitzgeraldian effulgence, likes to think...
...smoke-filled cellar cafés and cold-water flats of San Francisco's waterfront and Manhattan's Greenwich Village, the word these days is "beat." Patriarch and prophet of what he calls "the beat generation" is a 35-year-old writer named Jack Kerouac, whose recent novel On the Road (TIME, Sept. 16) chronicled the cross-country adventures in cars, bars and beds of a bunch of fancy-talking young bums. Last week, in newspaper interviews with TV's Mike Wallace, Novelist Kerouac and equally beat Poet Philip Lamantia explained that beatness is really a religious...
...Kerouac: Yeah. It's a revival prophesied by Spengler. He said that in the late moments of Western civilization there would be a great revival of religious mysticism. It's happening...
...Kerouac's use of pure Americana makes his language an effective vehicle at times. But it becomes merely amusing when he borrows from advertisements (A piece of apple pie is "nutritious, and ... delicious"), and elsewhere downright sickeningly romantic. ("Holy flowers floating in the dawn of Jazz America.") And when he tries to describe jazz, he reaches the heights of the ridiculous. ("ta-tup-EE-da-de-deraRup ...") It's difficult to see why, in the day of LP's, he thinks it necessary to compete with Charlie Parker on paper...