Word: manically
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...agent of his undoing is the narrator of the book, Jacob Horner, one of the most fascinatingly dreadful characters to appear in a long time. He is self-described as "owl. peacock, chameleon, donkey and popinjay, fugitive from a medieval bestiary." In more modern terms, he is also a manic-depressive, and a fugitive from a psychotherapeutic institution called the Remobilization Farm...
Even when he is not being bitten by foam-teeth, the hipster is a chronic manic-depressive ("Crazy, man!"; "Everything drags me now"). A kind of urban waif in the asphalt jungle, he regularly tastes despair, or what Kerouac calls "the pit and prunejuice of poor beat life itself in the god-awful streets of man." Sometimes he "flips," i.e., goes mad. Allen Ginsberg, 32, the discount-house Whitman of the Beat Generation, begins his dithyrambic poem Howl (which the New York Times's Critic J. Donald Adams has suggested should be retitled Bleat) with the lines...
...mellow old youth-novel capers as fornication, abortion, homosexuality and illicit Negro-white love affairs. These goings-on take place at or near an Ivy Leaguish college named Arden that physically resembles Cornell, but the true locale is hipsterland, and the hero's quest for identity is as manic as if he were looking for a hypodermic needle in a haystack. Stylistically, Author Gutwillig tries to evoke Scott Fitzgerald but merely invokes him. His novel's value is as a minority report of a post-Korean war generation that is less interested in revolting against society than seceding...
...derangement of the senses" from which Rimbaud concocted his visions of hell. The difference is that Jack Kerouac, ex-merchant seaman, ex-railroad brakeman, is not Rimbaud but a kind of latrine laureate of Hobohemia. The story line of The Subterraneans is simple and stark: it concerns a short, manic-depressive love affair between a "big paranoic bum" and occasional writer named Leo Percepied and a near-insane Negro girl named Mardou Fox. Says Kerouac: "I wrote this book in three full-moon nights," and it reads that way. The details of the Leo-Mardou relationship are explicit and near...
Patricia Adel has a face that can freeze into a vividly discomforting mask; her movement is sometimes less successful, although properly awkward. Lucienne Schupf, extremely energetic, skillfully emphasizes the over-theatrical, nearly manic-depressive moods of her pitiful character. She throws sparks into an atmosphere that is designed to baffle and perhaps poison the audience. Katherine Kitch, as Madame, seemed nervous, and acted in a series of poses...