The Disorganization Man

THE BEAT GENERATION AND THE ANGRY YOUNG MEN (384 pp.)--edited by Gene Feldman and Max Gartenberg--Citadel ($4.50).

"We gotta go and never stop going till

we get there."

"Where we going, man?"

"I don't know but we gotta go."

--Jack Kerouac's On the Road

The idea of man in motion grips the two most talked-about literary movements of the late '50s. Britain's Angry Young Men fret about social mobility, the harsh grind of shifting class gears. The "go, go, go" men of the U.S. Beat Generation are caught in a frantic physical reverie of "a fast car, a coast to reach, and a woman at the end of the road." The question ultimately juts up: Are these self-appointed spokesmen for the 20th century young moving in a quest for meaning, or a flight from it?

The merit of the new anthology, edited by TV Producer Gene Feldman, 37, and Literary Agent Max Gartenberg, 32, is that it answers this question better collectively than any one of the semi-articulate Beats and Angries has done on his own. The editors have culled the best from both schools (the U.S.'s Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Clellon Holmes; Britain's Kingsley Amis, John Wain, John Osborne) and leavened the lot with sharp-eyed critical commentaries from both sides of the water. U.S. readers will find the Beat section more interesting, if only because it helps to illuminate such postwar phenomena as the James Dean cult, the Elvis Presley and rock-'n'-roll crazes, and the gratuitous ferocity of juvenile delinquency.

Jungle Waif. The central Beat character that unintentionally emerges is a model psychopath. The hipster has a horror of family life and sustained relationships. In a brilliant, poignant story, Sunday Dinner In Brooklyn, Anatole Broyard recounts the ordeal of a highbrow Greenwich Village bohemian returning for an hour or two of strained parental nuzzling. Says the hero plaintively: "I realized that I loved them very much. But what was I going to do with them?" The hipster is also estranged from nature. In George Mandel's The Beckoning Sea, the suicide-bent hero runs screaming along a beach, and "with a roar the ocean came up and bit at him with its foam-teeth."

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: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix . . ."

A good mind is hard to find among the Beats, but the leading theoreticians of hipdom are probably Jack Kerouac and Clellon (Go) Holmes. Each insists that the Beat Generation is on a mystic search for God. To be beat, argues Holmes in a recent Esquire, is to be "at the bottom of your personality looking up." Says Kerouac: "I want God to show me His face." This might be more convincing if Kerouac's novels did not play devil's advocate by preaching, in effect, "Seek ye first the Kingdom of kicks," e.g., drink, drugs, jazz and chicks.

Eager to Belong. The Angry Young Men are scarcely beat; yet British reserve merely muffles several striking similarities in theme and attitude. When Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim) virtually dismisses politics as a "mug's game," any hipster would reply "Yes, man, yes!" When one of John Wain's characters in Hurry on Down tries to avoid introducing his parents to a friend because he is ashamed of their working-class manner and appearance, there is more than an echo of Sunday Dinner in Brooklyn. When Colin Wilson proclaims that the Outsider "is the one man who knows he is sick in a civilization that doesn't know it is sick," he echoes the basic charge of the hipster against the square.

There is also a central difference between the Beats and the Angries. Where the hipster is asocial--society's Underground Man--the Angry Young Man is eager to belong, feeling as he does that the welfare state has given him the credentials of a gentleman without the cash to be one. George Scott, a young Tory by conversion, puts this plaint best in a section of his autobiography Time and Place: "And so here we are, with our degrees and our posh education, our prideful positions in the public service, our ambitious names in print, trying to get on with the work brought home in the bulging briefcase, while the baby cries in the next room or even in the same room, or while the mortgage slowly and respectably strangles the life, the love, the adventure and the talent out of us . . . Whether they know it or not, the revolutionaries have bred a generation of counter-revolutionaries." Such whines suggest that the Angry Young Man is a rebel with a cause, a disorganization man in transition who will eventually make his peace with a society in which he means to make good.

Self & Sensation. The case of the hipster is not so hopeful. He is a rebel without a cause who shirks responsibility on the ground that he has the H-bomb jitters. His disengagement from society is so complete that he treats self as the only reality and cultivates sensation as the only goal. But the self-revolving life is a bore, a kind of life-in-death that requires ever intenser stimulants to create even the illusion of feeling. Stepping up the tempo, "go, go, go" becomes the rhythm of madness and self-destruction. The future of the Beat Generation can be read in its past--the James Deans and Dylan Thomases and Charlie "Yardbird" Parkers--and the morbid speed with which its romantic heroes become its martyred legends.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.