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

balzac's feast

Honoré de Balzac died today in 1850 at the age of 51, leaving behind an enduring legacy in French literature.  His life was generally busy with writing and living amid the intrigues of Parisian society, and he loved food.  While working on a book, he kept his appetites in check, eating little and opting instead for pots of coffee to keep his pen moving across the page.  At other times, dining to delicious excess was more his style, with no oyster safe from his appetites.  This is all well-detailed in Anka Muhlstein's Balzac's Omelette:  A Delicious Tour of French Food and Culture with Honoré de Balzac, translated from the French by Adriana Hunter.  If you're a Balzac fan, you already know how food is a frequent backdrop in Balzac's works -- and you've probably already read this book since it was initially published in the U.S. in 2011.  If new to Balzac, the focus on the delights of the table and on 19th century French cuisine -- combined with the captivating character and words of the author himself -- will make Balzac's Omelette a tasty read.

Flicoteaux's restaurant is no banqueting-hall, with its refinements and luxuries; it is a workshop where suitable tools are provided, and everybody gets up and goes as soon as he has finished. The coming and going within are swift. There is no dawdling among the waiters; they are all busy; every one of them is wanted.

The fare is not very varied. The potato is a permanent institution; there might not be a single tuber left in Ireland, and prevailing dearth elsewhere, but you would still find potatoes at Flicoteaux's. Not once in thirty years shall you miss its pale gold (the color beloved of Titian), sprinkled with chopped verdure; the potato enjoys a privilege that women might envy; such as you see it in 1814, so shall you find it in 1840 ... When the whiting and mackerel abound on our shores, they are likewise seen in large numbers at Flicoteaux's; his whole establishment, indeed, is directly affected by the caprices of the season and the vicissitudes of French agriculture.  By eating your dinners at Flicoteaux's you learn a host of things of which the wealthy, the idle, and folk indifferent to the phases of Nature have no suspicion, and the student penned up in the Latin Quarter is kept accurately informed of the state of the weather and good or bad seasons. He knows when it is a good year for peas or French beans, and the kind of salad stuff that is plentiful; when the Great Market is glutted with cabbages, he is at once aware of the fact....

From A Distinguished Provincial at Paris (Lost Illusions) -- Honoré de Balzac

the literary legacy of philomena guinea

I had read one of Mrs. Guinea's books in the town library--the college library didn't stock them for some reason--and it was crammed from beginning to end with long, suspenseful questions:  "Would Evelyn discern that Gladys knew Roger in her past? wondered Hector feverishly" and "How could Donald marry her when he learned of the child Elsie, hidden away with Mrs. Rollmop on the secluded country farm? Griselda demanded of her bleak, moonlit pillow."  These books earned Philomena Guinea, who later told me she had been very stupid at college, millions and millions of dollars.

From The Bell Jar -- Sylvia Plath

Pictured:  Woman Reading -- Kuroda Seiki, circa 1890 (Tokyo National Museum)

mango pain

. . . Aziz turned to topics that could distress no one.  He described the ripening of the mangoes, and how in his boyhood he used to run out in the Rains to a big mango grove belonging to an uncle and gorge there.  "Then back with water streaming over you and perhaps rather a pain inside.  But I did not mind.  All my friends were paining with me.  We have a proverb in Urdu:  'What does unhappiness matter when we are all unhappy together?'  which comes in conveniently after mangoes."

A Passage to India -- E.M. Forster (1924)

Pictured:  Mangoes (detail) -- Francisco Oller, circa 1901

rich shaw, poor shaw

Irwin Shamforoff, better-known as Irwin Shaw, was born on February 27, 1913 and grew up in Brooklyn, New York, where he most likely did not live in the lap of luxury.  Shaw followed a similar path as other NYC-connected literary men of his generation (J.D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, Herman Wouk):  sons of immigrant families who attended college then served in World War II, with the war experience later providing inspiration for acclaimed fiction and/or film and theater adaptations. 

In Shaw's case, his 1948 novel The Young Lions put him on the literary map, with a later movie version starring Marlon Brando, Dean Martin and Montgomery Clift earning its share of award nominations.  Shaw, who also wrote for radio, theater and film himself, continued to have success on the big and small screen, and while this and particularly Rich Man, Poor Man surely boosted his bank accounts, he did seem to lose some of his purely writerly reputation along the way.  He produced some very well-crafted short stories, however, including "The Girls in Their Summer Dresses" and "The Eighty-Yard Run," the latter of which -- about the downward slide of a 1920s college football hero -- is excerpted here:

That was the high point, Darling thought, fifteen years ago, on an autumn afternoon, twenty years old and far from death, with the air coming easily into his lungs, and the deep feeling inside him that he could do anything, knock over anybody, outrun whatever had to be outrun...[h]e had practiced the wrong thing, perhaps.  He hadn't practiced for 1929 and New York City and a girl who would turn into a woman.

Irwin Shaw died in 1984 in Switzerland.  Unfortunately, the troubled marriage and heavy drinking of "The Eighty-Yard Run" were also reflected in his life beyond the typewriter, but if Shaw's boyhood dream was to be a successful writer, he surely managed that long football pass.

rest in peace miss lee

I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks.

To Kill a Mockingbird -- Harper Lee (April 28, 1926 - February 19, 2016) 

dumas and the duel

I had wished the duel to be one with swords; M. Gaillardet insisted it should be with pistols. I have a strong repugnance to that weapon; it seems to me brutal and more that of a highway robber, who attacks a traveller from the shelter of a wood, than that of the honourable combatant defending his life. The thing I dread most in pistol-duelling (but I have only fought twice with this weapon) is unskilfulness, much more than dexterity. Indeed, two or three years before the period in which the events I am relating took place—namely, before 1834—I had had a pistol-duel; I have not spoken of it, not being able to give the name of the man against whom I fought, nor to tell the reasons why I was fighting. In that duel, which took place at seven in the morning in the Bois de Boulogne, in the neighbourhood of Madrid, my adversary and I were placed at twenty paces distance from one another. Lots were drawn as to who should fire first and the advantage fell to my adversary. I planted myself, with pistol loaded, at a distance of twenty paces and I waited for the firing with the muzzle of the barrel of my weapon in the air....

My Memoirs, Vol. VI -- 1832-33 -- Alexandre Dumas (The Macmillan Company, 1909) 

Pictured: Alexandre Dumas circa 1832 (from Wikimedia Commons)