Smoke Signals

American idealism and the mood of urban exhaustion which is also characteristically American tug two ways in Edmund Wilson’s private miscellany. I read Wilson (perhaps unwisely) as a guide to a still unsurveyed continent. One receives messages; one sees smoke-signals; but the subconscious life of the American people remains largely hidden. Edmund Wilson exposes the area where a regional and Puritan culture develops either to intellectual Marxism or hedonist art with a strong hankering for the flesh-pots of Europe. Fortunately he is a master of satire, unashamedly partisan, with several axes to grind. The whirring of the grindstone is particularly audible whenever he identifies the spoor of a Catholic.

In Doris Lessing’s play a man and a woman express their recriminations in a dual monologue, refereed by unhelpful friends. Mrs Lessing explored the same situation more expertly and more briefly in her remarkable novel, The Golden Notebook.

To go by the comments of recent English and American critics, Jack Kerouac’s stocks have fallen since he wrote On the Road, that masterpiece of the psychology of flight – flight from marriage, from settled occupation, and from what other people think of us. I must confess a prejudice in his favour. Lonesome Traveller is not his best book; but it still has the unique Kerouac flavour of unjarring self-absorption and Beat mysticism.

It is a tired book perhaps. The hero (in this case Kerouac himself ) works on shipboard and at firewatching in a forest reserve, and travels briefly to Europe – he has some reason to be tired. I find the sense of a pilgrimage without destination entirely moving and convincing. The Beat writer does not usually distinguish sharply between art and life, what a man does and what he is. Where the life grows thin the writing thins out also. Jack Kerouac’s effort to make sense of the gaps, to assert the value of meditation in a civilisation hysterically devoted to action and material function, seems to me both necessary and admirable; and he is at times a very good prose poet.

1963 (290)