go holmes go

John Clellon Holmes (1926-1988) was a key member of the Beat Generation's founding circle, having met Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg at a party in 1948 and thus beginning decades-long friendships.  Holmes and Kerouac -- both born on March 12th but Kerouac being older by four years -- became creative comrades as well, encouraging each other to observe and write and transform the happenings of their lives into literature.  Holmes' Go was published in 1952, before 1957's more famed On the Road, and though the novels involve many of the same characters in the roman à clef style, the tone of each book is quite different.

While On the Road has a generally more energetic, driven, Beat zeitgeist feeling, with the American post-war landscape rushing by, Go is New York-centric, at times claustrophobically so.  Bars "forlornly gathered the discontented into gaudy islands of warmth and alcohol," and the Manhattan backdrop is urban and landlocked.  Holmes' alter ego in Go is Paul Hobbes, a bright aspiring young writer living with his wife Kathryn.  And here we have another major difference between Go and On the Road -- the emotional and romantic complications of a true marriage.  In On the Road, Sal Paradise's marriage is mentioned as a thing of the past, in the rearview mirror, a vague relationship that's run its course.  Paul Hobbes is both anchored and grounded by his marriage to Kathryn, who works a day job to support him while he writes at home, and who is a strong-willed, passionate woman.  For the most part, Kathryn outrightly disapproves of Paul's "wild" friends and their excessive drinking, smoking, drug use and ambiguous morality, yet she also has a certain fascination for the likes of Gene Pasternak (Kerouac), David Stofsky (Ginsberg), and Hart Kennedy (Neal Cassady), and can't help but be drawn into their world.  She and Paul fight often, adding another claustrophobic element to Go, namely the drunken or sober squabbles in the Hobbes' apartment, but despite all the tension and friction, some sort of earthy magnetism seems to keep them from breaking apart.

In essence, Hobbes stays behind in New York while Pasternak and Kennedy surge westward into the pages of On the Road.  The prose of Go is more measured and dense than Kerouac's flowing narrative, but there are many fine moments and observations in Holmes' earlier novel.  Beyond a deeper perception of some of the female characters, Go gives a sense of this is probably how things really were among the NY Beat social set, warts and all.  Like the cruel, self-destructive tendencies of Bill Agatson (Bill Cannastra), the moody impulses of Pasternak, or the quirky, almost naive brilliance of David Stofsky.  And while On the Road is a definite American literary classic, Go surely should have a prominent place on the Beat bookshelf to add nuance and layers to the story, and for an intriguing variation of the same scene.

This generation may make no bombs; it will probably be asked to drop some, and have some dropped on it, however, and this fact is never far from its mind. It is one of the pressures which created it and will play a large part in what will happen to it. 

"This is The Beat Generation" -- John Clellon Holmes, The New York Times Magazine, Nov. 1952