Bathetic Humor, the Beats, and Walt Whitman's Idealism

The Dream and the Dystopia: Bathetic Humor, the Beats, and Walt Whitman’s Idealism

Andrew Vogel

ABSTRACT

Among the many influences on the Beats, none looms larger than Walt Whitman from whom they adopted an idealistic vision of democratic equality, potent artistic honesty, and forthright sexual expression. In the greedy, conformist, paranoid America of the 1950s, however, the actu- alization of such a vision seemed terrifically farfetched. The distance between Whitman’s vision of America and the dystopia described in “Howl,” for instance, animated the Beats’ literary project, but it also propagated an abiding sense of ideological doubt. This is one of the primary bases of the Beat ethos. Crucially, when the Beats invoke the distance between Whitman’s idealistic dream of democratic vistas and the dystopia of 1950s America, they frequently do so in ways that are comical or that depict characters laughing. Allen Ginsberg, John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and Gary Snyder, for example, all wrestled with doubts as to the idealism they inherited from Whitman, and they all associated this struggle with laughter. The distance between Whitman’s dream and the Beats’ dystopia is hardly a laughing matter, however, making such humor bathetic. Bathos can be defined as the laughable result of straining for a sublime ideal but tripping over hard reality into the absurd. Despite their range of forms and styles, Ginsberg, Holmes, Kerouac, and Snyder all reflect the bathetic impulse emerging from America’s failure to manifest anything resembling Whitman’s dream.

I am an idealist who has outgrown my idealism. Jack Kerouac, Mexico City Blues

Allen Ginsberg’s first full reading of “Howl” was recorded in the winter of 1956 at the Berkeley Town Hall in a follow-up to the infamous Six Gallery reading. Ginsberg is very serious in his reading of “Howl.” As he steps to the micro- phone, the crowd seems to anticipate some of the raucousness that accompanied the previous reading, during which Jack Kerouac had famously passed around a jug of wine and led the crowd by chanting “go.” Yet at this reading, Ginsberg discourages interruptions. “Cut out all the bullshit now,” he demands before starting; “I’d prefer reading without … hip static,” he insists, alluding to the heckling that accompanied his introduction. Throughout the reading of “Howl,” Ginsberg measures his pace and cultivates an incantatory tone so as to stifle breakouts of laughter, which he understood certain lines may encourage. Yet later that same evening, he is much more playful, clowning around while reading “America,” 390 Andrew Vogel

timing the delivery to elicit outbreaks of hilarity. The crowd titters as he earnestly pleads with America to send eggs to India, giggles as he adamantly questions why he can’t buy anything with his good looks, cheers when he swoons for the Wob- blies, and erupts when he gleefully exclaims, “I smoke marijuana every chance I get.” The audience also favors moments when Ginsberg deliberately satirizes the Cold War, worrying that the Russians might ferret the car from his garage or that Asia may be rising against him, leaving him without a “Chinaman’s chance.” Likewise, jokes aimed at the culture of mainstream conformity, like his worry that Time magazine may be running his emotional life or that everyone but he is serious and responsible, spark genuine mirth. Yet the greatest laughter greets the pivotal lines: “It occurs to me that I am America. / I am talking to myself again.” Here Ginsberg deprecatingly plays up the supposed schizophrenia that marginal- izes him from mainstream society, but the humor of the jibe overlays a very serious critique. If America has been talking to itself, it has not really been listening, and such ignorance could be disastrous. In 1993, listening back on those old recordings prior to release on Holy Soul Jelly Roll, Ginsberg acknowledges that the reading of “America” sounds somewhat like a stand-up comedy routine, but he hastens to add, curiously, “I’m a little ashamed of milking the gags when I hear this.”1 Shame? Why should Ginsberg distance himself from a poem and a reading that so clearly resonates with his thinking and the personality of his work? Why should he undermine a performance that so obviously distilled the feelings of many people during a turbulent moment in American history? The answer to this question can be found by exca- vating the influence of Walt Whitman on Ginsberg during the composition of the poems in Howl.2 In “Supermarket in California” Ginsberg asks Whitman, “what America did you have” when Charon delivered you to the far side of Lethe. Invoking the previous line of the poem, the question is whether Whitman ever actually enjoyed the “lost America of love” so vigorously promulgated throughout his writing (Howl 30). In “Composed on the Tongue” Ginsberg saw Whitman trying to make an ideal America which would be an America of comradely awareness, acknowledgment of tenderness […] gentleness…comradeship…adhesiveness… Because… If this country did not have some glue to keep people together…there was no possibility

1 This quotation can be found in the liner notes of Holly Soul Jelly Roll, the CD box set of Ginsberg’s recordings. Hearing the timbre of Ginsberg’s speech, as well as his laughter, under- scores the bathos of his performance. Although it is beyond the scope of this essay, it is worth noting that familiarity with this and other sound recordings by Ginsberg and his compatriots only makes the textual depictions more recognizable as bathetic. Ginsberg’s reflections on this performance can also be found in Hoffman 137. 2 Major and minor influences on Ginsberg in particular and the Beats in general include, but are not limited to, William Blake, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Arthur Rimbaud, Oswald Spengler, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Thomas Wolfe, Ferdinand Celine, and Jean Genet. Among these influential authors Whitman stands out because he articulated a comprehensive vision that the Beat writers could embrace. Whitman’s democracy was rooted in artistic and personal freedom, including the liberation of sexual expression, and it voiced the importance of tolerance and human dignity, values that the Beats considered deficient in Cold War America. The Dream and the Dystopia 391

of democracy working and we’d just be a lot of people fighting for advantage, iron advantage, coal advantage, silver advantage, [and] gold […]. (426-28) If compassion and sensitivity were “squelched,” Ginsberg clarifies, democracy would be “squelched”; it would be “debased […] made into a paranoid, mechano- megalopolis congregation of freaks afeard of each other” (429). Bill Morgan’s biography of Ginsberg sheds some additional light on Whitman’s complicated influence on Ginsberg in the mid-1950s. One evening while arguing with W. H. Auden, who did not much care for Whitman, Ginsberg vehemently contended that Demo- cratic Vistas represented “the best statement I’ve seen anywhere on what [an] American poet should be and do” (251); however, during the same period in 1957 Ginsberg had begun to “formulate a theory about the fall of America” (261). Thus for Ginsberg, who was clinging to Whitman’s vision of a loving democracy, the question of “Supermarket in California” is considerable. Ginsberg poignantly wonders whether it isn’t ‘absurd’ to hold out hope for his country. Almost answer- ing the question, “America” portrays a nation systematically dismantling compassion and sensitivity in favor of fear, militarism, and greed. In a word, “America” is an elegy for the ‘lost America of love’ that Whitman had envisioned. So in spite of its comedic lines, “America” is not funny, as the laughter and Ginsberg’s performance would imply; rather, it is deeply sorrowful. The humor is bathetic, and the ruefulness Ginsberg later expressed stems not from the fact that he made people laugh but rather from the possibility that by playing up the comedy the deeply serious concerns may have been obscured. The incident is exceptionally telling because it illuminates more than a single poem; it highlights a condition common to Beat writing. Deeply influenced by Whitman aesthetically, politically, and spiritually, the Beats yearned for the ac- tualization of his vatic vision. As Gordon Ball has noted, they channeled that “‘subtle and tremendous force infusion’ Whitman called for” in Democratic Vis- tas (99). Following Whitman, they set themselves in opposition to a mainstream culture bent on vapid consumerism and paranoid militarism. In a country where alternative viewpoints were villainized and the lines between real threat and harmless critique were indiscriminately blurred by casting all protests as ‘un- American,’ the Beats rebelled.3 Unable to directly combat America’s misplaced values, their solution in the 1950s was to drop out of the mainstream, celebrate the fringe, and critique the insane status quo with art. Since dropping out left them generally poverty stricken and adrift, they embraced such marginalized positions

3 Numerous critics have drawn out the Beat writers’ countercultural position in 1940s and 50s America. For example, Oliver Harris has observed that “Whitman’s ideal of open com- munication stood, for Ginsberg, as the definitive indictment of Cold War culture”; however, the social context pressured Beat writers to internalize the anxiety fomented by the national paranoia and “falsify” themselves in their writing (174). Likewise, Bradley Stiles draws out the Beat’s influence from the tradition of transcendentalism (in which Whitman is central) to argue that the characteristic feature of Beat writing is a shared ethos defined by the difficulty they had in locating themselves within the landscape and the culture (67, 69). One manifestation of the Beats’ identity crisis, which Stiles describes colorfully as “a self-created monster devouring its own tail,” may be bathos (137). Marjorie Perloff situates “Howl” squarely in the post-World War II context where soldiers were celebrated but poets ridiculed (38-40). 392 Andrew Vogel as delinquents, drunks, hoboes, junkies, homosexuals, and petty criminals that often led to dangerous encounters with authorities. Creating art that was largely ignored when it was not ridiculed, at least through most of the 1950s, seems therefore an almost laughable strategy for countering the American mainstream; the Beat artists were painfully aware of this fact. For instance, in a letter to Gary Snyder explaining his and Ginsberg’s ludicrous interview with syndicated humorist Art Buchwald, Gregory Corso complained that since readers were not getting it, he “felt inclined to be silly” (qtd. in French 25). Likewise, in 1952 Ginsberg wrote to Kerouac: “Actually we’re crazy, and that’s no joke, that’s why I don’t want to go so much to Europe and play the Whitman character in front of well meaning admirers, who I’ll vanity like take foolish”4 (Morgan and Stanford 155). Marginalized by America, Ginsberg was drawn to Europe, but he undercuts the impulse by reckoning it a clichéd performance. Ginsberg’s sensitivity on this point is somewhat justified, as Time magazine would later dub him a “discount-house Whitman” (Hyde 54). In this context, performances of silliness and self-deprecation emerged in Beat writing as a strategy for reconciling their idealism and their disillusionment. To some extent, critics have struggled to pinpoint precisely what unifies the Beat writers across the variety of styles they developed.5 In light of this problem, this essay posits that bathetic humor stemming from faltering Whitmanic idealism runs through Beat writing, particularly the early work of Ginsberg, Kerouac, John Clellon Holmes, and Gary Snyder, demonstrating the ways in which bathos provides a conceptual framework for interpreting both the shared ethos and the formal choices of the Beats. Holmes and Snyder are studied alongside Ginsberg and Kerouac not only because their intellectual contributions were essential to

4 In this letter, Ginsberg’s spontaneous and informal rhetoric clouds his message. Primarily he seems to mean that he would take admirers who might compare him to Whitman to be fools. Yet the statement is ambiguous. It also suggests his vanity will compel him to take the attention he would be getting foolishly. The two meanings complement one another, underscoring Gins- berg’s sense that playing the role of a modern-day Whitman is clownish and entirely bathetic. 5 Bill Morgan has observed that “the entire Beat Generation phenomenon could be seen as a group of writers who had little in common stylistically, but who were united by their friendship with Allen Ginsberg. There are few similarities in their works of many of these writers, except a possible sharing of sensibilities, which defines their friendship more than it defines a common literary style” (145). Alternatively, Gregory Stephenson has described the Beats as “diverse and variegated,” but he insists a “distinctive group identity” develops around their commitment to “primitive” and “archetypal patterns of consciousness” (172). Warren French has sought corre- spondence by citing Ginsberg’s corrective of the assumption that the Beats were protest poets; rather, Ginsberg insisted that they declared a vision of love that “‘cannot change the world to its desire.’” French links this “vision [that] is beyond attainment” to Whitman, and he describes the tension between nihilism and redemption with which they all wrestled (xix, 58). Similarly, Michael Davidson has cogently argued that the vatic and utopian impulses that the San Francis- co Renaissance writers inherited (at least in part) from Whitman translated into “unstable and insecure” performances of “heightened” rhetoric; however, their performances of immanence were colored by a frequently elegiac mode resulting from the loss of those democratic vistas imagined by Whitman (19, 22-23, 66). While Davidson occasionally alludes to the comedy of the Beat condition—court jesters to the Fair Deal society—he neither takes up the bathos nor the comedy. The Dream and the Dystopia 393 the development of Beat thought and writing, but also because the juxtaposition reveals the stylistic range through which permutations of disillusioned bathos developed in Beat writing. In the remainder of this essay I will sketch out the features of Whitman’s idealism that the Beats found so compelling and establish the social context in which the Beats found themselves impelled toward bathetic humor as a cover for their idealism. Then I will define bathos and proceed to analyze articulations of it in Holmes’s novel Go, Kerouac’s On the Road and Dharma Bums, and finally Snyder’s Rip Rap and Cold Mountain Poems.

II.

The Beats were drawn to Walt Whitman because he articulated an inspired and compelling vision of a nation defined by honesty and acceptance. Whitman’s idealism is most energetic when voicing the interrelationship he perceived between democracy, progress, and spirituality. The barbaric yawp that Whitman joined to the “varied carols” of “I Hear America Singing” articulated a vision of “form, union, plan,” as he put it in “Song of Myself,” democracy in the service of progress, and progress in the service of eschatological spirituality (12, 88). In “Starting from Paumanok,” a sort of poetic mission statement for Leaves of Grass, Whitman announces, “Democracy! near at hand to you a throat is now inflating itself and joyfully singing. […] I will make the songs of passion to give [the people] their way” (22). Democracy, as Whitman sang of it to his country- men, is the political order of equal individuals freely sharing in labor, leisure, and love. Love, both philial, “the dear love of man for his comrade” (121), and erotic, “bathing songs in Sex” (107), shores up the political order. The melding of voices in “I hear America Singing” indicates the joyousness and harmony of American life coming out of the confluence of individualism and mutual support that, Whit- man insists, is the real engine of national progress. In “Song of the Exposition” Whitman characterizes the many feats of modern invention—canals, bridges, en- gines, railroads, factories—as the products of democracy because it equalizes all producers and consumers. This formula will continue to produce more and more excellent works and continue to unite the whole world, not merely for “lucre,” he insists, but for “the soul” (205). The idea that political, technological, and social progress are only the material evidence of spiritual health is picked up in “Passage to India,” where Whitman links technological wonders to spiritual progress. The technologies point the “Passage to more than India”; these material accomplish- ments indicate the soul’s direction to God because they accelerate the spread of democracy and progress, which together nurture spiritual growth (420). This is a bold, optimistic vision of free, happy people sharing in the labor to build a peace- ful, united, and spiritually gratified world—the form, the union, the plan. Whitman’s vision of an amative democracy and a united spiritual world in- vigorated Beat writing; yet the Cold War 1950s were a far cry from the proud, comradely republic Whitman imagined. The Second World War had culminated in the ultimate destructive technology, and the increasing tensions of the Cold War were accelerating the quest for greater weapons. The Truman Doctrine, the 394 Andrew Vogel

Korean War, and the escalating tensions with China and Vietnam draped old- fashioned national imperialism in the farcical motley of preventing the spread of Communism. Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee had created a social paranoia that terrorized those sympathetic to any and all alternative positions, including the political Left, the Civil Rights Move- ment, and alternative sexualities. Meanwhile, reports of Soviet abuses had thrown the old Left into a tailspin. The recovery from the Depression had translated into obsessive materialistic consumerism that sneered at art and the Romantic cel- ebration of the imagination. The Supreme Court’s decision in Brown versus the Topeka Board of Education registered a major victory for Civil Rights, but it un- leashed an incendiary racist backlash. In this context it is not surprising that the Beats, who were looking back from this nightmare of bigoted, conformist American paranoia, were inspired by Whit- man’s fantastic vision. Yet they could not ignore a glaring problem. If Whitman was right, why then had American democracy devolved so precipitously into a culture shaped by prejudice, paranoia, and alienation? If this reality meant that Whitman’s espousals of equality, amity, frankness, and innovative aesthetics amounted to little more than jingoistic pap, then what would that mean for the Beats as they deliberately cleaved to a similar ethos? Such uncertainty fomented anxiety at the root of the Beat writers’ sense of themselves as artists. Questioning Whitman’s vision, questioning themselves, questioning their country, questioning the dominant literary scene, questioning the relevance of art in society, Ginsberg, Holmes, Kerouac, and Snyder voiced a provocative humor rather than uncritically parroting Whitman’s visionary and vatic rhetoric. Critics have long observed the Beats’ interest in and use of humor. For instance, Marjorie Perloff has observed that Ginsberg’s “Howl” is “laced with self-mockery and deflation,” articulating a desperation that “is almost comic” (33).6 Similarly, while Warren Tallman remarks on Ginsberg’s characteristic melding of Whitman and Chaplin (381), George Monteiro evokes Whitman’s influence to analyze “A Supermarket in California,” which he describes as “a comedic poem [that] has turned at the last into something else.” John Muckle has noted Ginsberg’s “con- stant milking of Whitmanic rhetorical grandness for its humour” (30), and Neeli Cherovski has alluded to a link between Whitman’s influence on Ginsberg and the “cartoon elements, bordering on the slapstick” that salvage his poetry from “rhetorical ‘overdrive’” (219). Critics have observed the trend in Kerouac as well. In his 1957 review of On the Road, Arthur Oesterreicher lauds Kerouac for dis- tilling the “hilarity” and “despair” that comes from the “horror of being alive in today’s America” (5). James Miller groups Kerouac among mid-century novelists who demonstrate a tendency toward “sardonic humor” stemming from postwar era alienation (qtd. in Blair and Hill 470). R. B. Gill has suggested that a link ex- ists between Whitman’s influence on Kerouac (92) and the “fidelity to sad truth over comic desire [that] marks On the Road” (94). Gill identifies Kerouac’s “comic dilemma” as stemming from an “idealism never made real” (88). R. J. Ellis argues

6 Perloff even cites Ginsberg’s The Annotated Howl (124), where Ginsberg shows that his word choice was meant to be bathetic, evoking a comic realism akin to Charlie Chaplin. The Dream and the Dystopia 395 that the series of comical misconnections that shape On the Road satirically dis- close the dubious mythology of an “egalitarian, democratic individualism” (39). And Warren French has observed that Kerouac was drawn to Snyder because of the singular melding of “Oriental Culture and American barroom humor” that he used to criticize American life (15). Nevertheless, critics have left the source and the form of Beat humor generally unexamined and somewhat ill defined.7 I would propose that the Beats were baffled by their country’s failure to aspire toward an all too obviously desirable ideal, and thus they charted the territory between Whitman’s dream and their dystopia with the versatile trope of bathos. Alexander Pope defined bathos in his evocation of Longinus, “Peri Bathous, Treatise on the Art of Sinking in Poetry,” published under the pseudonym Mar- tinus Scriblerus in 1728. The essay is a satire of ironic literary criticism meant to ridicule the state of English letters. Praising the ‘depth’ of contemporary writers, the essay ironically shifts the meaning of bathos from profound to absurd. Scrib- lerus argues that whereas a taste for the sublime in poetry that Longinus celebrated must be learned, a taste for bathos is natural, and he anticipates a happy return to bathos in English letters. Bathos is natural, Scriblerus insists, because just as when people have colds and must sneeze, they also must express “the generative faculty of the brain […] in a discharge of peccant humor, in exceedingly purulent metre” (199). As natural as bathos may be, it is far greater when cultivated by art. The aspiring bathetic artist, Scriblerus earnestly maintains, must eschew common sense and foster perverse, unaccountable ideas. Rather than mar his works by the direct observation of nature and the application of uniform principles of design inherited from the ancients, the profound poet ought to blend high and low and pervert good sense with “a great deal of flourishing” (201). Such effort will cause the work to glare and thus surprise and delight readers by the “bringing down of elevated thought to the level of their own ideas” (201). Through Scriblerus’s absurd argument, Pope lampoons his contemporaries’ tendency to pander to popular tastes and thereby cultivate a derivative and inane literature. Moreover, his critique implicitly links the failure of England’s writers to attain the sublime in poetry to eighteenth-century England’s failure to achieve anything resembling the civilization of the ancients. He sees his peers imitating the heights of the sublime but tumbling into the absurd due to a lack of substance. So transmuting his spleen into comedy by taking this observed trend to the radi- cal extreme, Pope presents bathos as though it were equal to Longinus’s sublime, and in so doing he outlines the failure of his contemporaries to understand, much less achieve, the excellence of the ages in thought and art. What would be needed, Pope smugly hints, is not to habituate the English imagination to the depths of baseness, as that is their current state; rather, a greater commitment to virtue and high ideals could lend itself to the development of an excellent and uplifting national literature. Ultimately Pope would hope to see literature spark a golden age with England at its center, but his satire suggests that he thinks this is unlikely.

7 John Clellon Holmes and Gary Snyder have been given significantly less critical attention than Ginsberg and Kerouac, so it is hardly surprising that humor and the representation of it in their work have gone unexamined. 396 Andrew Vogel

Building on Pope, rather than define bathos literally as a perverse descent from elevated to base ideas, I would like to pick up on the spirit of Pope’s satire to define bathos as couching an abiding disillusionment in unfunny comedy. Recent critics have studied uses of bathetic humor in American literature. John R. Clark and Anna Lydia Motto, for example, have observed that forms of bathos have proliferated in twentieth-century American literature and indeed have become a vehicle for the exploration of the complexities of interior life in the modern world (64-65). Stephen Tanner has observed that the self-deprecation of “high expectations comically transformed into disappointments” defines Ameri- can humor (54), but that twentieth century writers infused this traditional impulse with a high level of sophistication and subtlety (61). Similarly, Sanford Pinsker has argued that modernism demanded the development of new modes of humor ap- propriate to the social changes that were gripping people’s lives, and he charts the characteristics of modernist humor from Charlie Chaplin, E. B. White, and James Thurber to Woody Allen. Pinsker suggests that the modern humorist was, as Thurber put it, “one who ‘talks largely about small matters and smally about great affairs,’” a definition that clearly evokes the bathetic (185).8 Thus it is important to read the Beats’ use of bathetic humor as part of a larger culture of humor that struggled to come to terms with the unfavorable dimensions of modern existence. In this framework, Beat bathos materializes as both a rhetorical technique and a posture. It is at one level the ironic overplay of idealism, and at the same time it is the move to couch disillusionment in jocularity so as to veil naked demon- strations of frustrated idealism. For the Beats, the painful acknowledgement of the elusiveness of their ideals contributed to a cynical and deprecating facetious- ness. Inspired by idealistic visions, they pleaded with contemporaries to live up to Whitman’s vision, but finding American society generally resistant they ended up disgustedly or resignedly performing and representing bathos. Bathos became a rhetorical complement to their innovative lingo. It was a mode of ironic address that would be easily recognized by the initiated, the hip, but would remain inscrutable to squares. Thus shrewdly working the rhetorical valences of irony, the Beats’ use of bathos conceals their critical intentions to some extent while it simultaneously voices their pointed complaints for the initiated. The versatility of bathos, therefore, allowed the Beats to navigate the treacherous ideological ground between the ideal and the real, between the dream and the dystopia.

8 My thinking on bathos in modern American humor has been further informed by the following critics. Keston Sutherland has defined bathos as a form of satire that discloses “the ridiculous destitution of truth” inherent in a way of thought. It is, he argues, the “production of stupid- ity for public view” (22). Huntington Brown defines bathos as “an attempt at elevated discourse that misfires” and thus falls “from the sublime to the ridiculous.” He further observes that it is “often the stuff of parody” and can be “deliberate anticlimax, whether ironic, gay, or serious” (127). Matts Djos has grouped Ginsberg with writers whose struggles to reconcile themselves to a disappointing world impel them to substance abuse and bathos. These “prophet-cynic[s],” according to Djos, “elevate the mundane and incongruous” while simultaneously “discount[ing] their conclusions with a certain amount of humor and cynicism” (84-85). Vwadek Marciniak has situated Beat writers within a tradition of countercultural humor stemming from the horrors of modern America (41). The Dream and the Dystopia 397

III.

The feeling that the youthful will to spiritual rejuvenation was being undercut by insane mainstream culture drives the representations of bathos in John Clellon Holmes’s relentless 1952 novel Go. The novel attempts to make sense of the disaffected youth of the postwar generation through the story of Paul Hobbes, a young writer who finds himself drawn to the Beat crowd. The members of this scene, though unsavory, appeal to Paul (thought to characterize Holmes himself) and his wife Kathryn because they represent an alternative to middle-class boredom on the one hand, and the “fashionably cynical” intellectual scene on the other (58). Something more vital, more authentic, and more attuned to the emerging shape of things emanates from the “rootless radicalism” of this crowd (35). These under- ground figures represent for Hobbes rumblings of something that he had glimpsed during the war: “the abandon that seized all these young people who had been torn up by the roots, regimented, shunted back and forth across the nighttime wilderness of a nation at war; […] who searched in bars and movie balconies and deadend streets for home and love, and, failing to find them, forgot” (32). Thus Paul seizes on the words of Gene Pasternak, (the character representing Jack Ker- ouac) who described the guiltless furtiveness of the Beat worldview as “a sort of revolution of the soul” (36). Whitman is never named directly in the novel, yet his ideas run through it pro- viding the characters a sense of America’s distance from its democratic promise.9 Echoing Whitman, David Stofsky (characterizing Allen Ginsberg) complains of intellectual “masks” and “mirrors” (65). Likewise, Pasternak craves “the sexual regeneration of the world […] when everyone [will be] just simple, natural” (57). Hobbes, too, yearns “for life to be easy, magic, full of love. How wonderful (and simple) it would be if we were all naked on a plain” (3). Performing his own barbaric yawp at a party, Stofsky climbs up on a chair and recites a poem entitled “I shudder with intelligence,” which is intended to “evoke mystical phenomena” (107). Later Stofsky dreams of a man sitting in a modest chair, a man “of once powerful physique, now vaguely weary, His untrimmed beard fanned out in white folds upon His chest, His eyes shining in muted brightness as only an old man’s can shine out of the limped stillness of an old face.” Clearly patterned on Whit- man, the old man, Stofsky’s image of God, tells him to spread love (245-46). These allusions to Whitman’s ideas and vocabulary of love and faith establish what the disaffected characters crave but cannot find in their fallen world. Against the Whitmanic world they desire, the reality of their lives is hellish. Pasternak acclaims the new generation as driving a “revolution of the soul” (36), yet he complains that the city beats all the love out of you (59). Attempting to overcome depression, he mimics Hart Kennedy and Albert Anke (who represent authors/poets Neal Cassady and Herbert Huncke) in their joyous ‘digging’ of

9 In 1949 when Kerouac and Holmes were closest, they both took classes at the New School. Kerouac studied American literature and wrote a paper on Whitman; he later cited a sense of connection to American Renaissance writers, including Whitman specifically, as part of the connection he shared with Holmes and other Beats. See Charters (152, 237). 398 Andrew Vogel the holiness in everything, but this explanation of Beat philosophy precedes the remark, “Oh I wouldn’t have committed suicide or anything like that,” which ex- poses the flimsiness of his new-found faith (121). Stofsky also struggles to sustain a grim idealism. Justifying his own reach for something to believe in, he wails, “we could destroy it all, and ourselves too. Think of it! And all the hopelessness today […] the horror […] the suffering! […] with all our knowledge, things have gotten worse, more hopeless” (66). “Things are so terrible,” he cries out to God in his dream, “The violence, the misery, the hate” (246). Hobbes suffers similar antipa- thies. Nauseated by a fistfight, he cries out, “People are damned, damned” (63). Hobbes sees his cronies as “living a trapped life in a city set for destruction” (207), and in such moments he bears witness to the Beats’ “desperation of disbelief, that bewilderment in the face of experience that […] always soured the conclusions he had sought so terribly to believe” (211). Hobbes’s feelings are representative; all the characters strain for belief in some ideal but run aground on stark realities. Deep into an all-night binge intended to memorialize Bill Agatson (representing Bill Cannastra), who dies late in the novel, Hobbes recalls the line from Dante’s Inferno: “Abandon hope all who enter here,” which characterizes his “reality of horror, without meaning, with no certain end” (309). Such an infernal vision illustrates how Whitman’s children are chewed up by the modern world, leaving their nervous laughter hanging in the air. Although the novel is filled with laughter, nothing is ever funny, which is the idea at the root of the bathetic posture. In the various bars he frequents, Hobbes disdains “all the brittle laughter, ceaseless smoking and drinking, and vapid jocularity which constitute sophistication” (59). Hopelessly processing a publisher’s rejection of his novel, a deep depression, and his friends’ lunacy, Pasternak of- fers Hobbes only “a perplexed laugh, shaking his head slowly” (121). Stofsky also laughs as he struggles to make sense of his world and find faith in something. He can hardly suppress his laughter while exclaiming to Hobbes his newfound faith in God (66). Later he seeks spiritual direction from a beggar but “could not resist the snorting, feverish laugh that beat in his throat” (123). Finally, when an old profes- sor pointedly asks Stofsky, “Do you believe in this society,” his only thought is, “Isn’t it funny” (298). The ambiguous “it” allows his question to cover the entire circumstance. Such laughter is characteristic of the generation. Alienated from the serious world of publishing and the academy, unable to take the work-a-day routine seriously, the characters in the novel cultivate a shared sense of the hilari- ous with which Hobbes sympathizes even though it leaves him uneasy. Surrounded by such hilarity, during a moment of pique Hobbes characterizes his Beat friends as a bunch of “giggling nihilists” (166), but he struggles to see how he is any different. This concern colors Hobbes’s observations of Bill Agatson, the embodiment of the generation’s nihilism: “He looked like a man who is witness- ing the vision of his whole unredeemable existence, seeing it as a savage mockery; but more, perceiving that all of life is a blasphemous, mortal joke at everybody’s expense, a monstrous joke in which everything is ignoble, ludicrous and without value or meaning” (273). At the end of the novel, after an infernal vision inspired by the bizarre memorial party held in the wake of Agatson’s death, Hobbes notes that “Trimble’s exaggerated laughter was actually a mask behind which was hid The Dream and the Dystopia 399 an emotion of which he was inordinately proud or ashamed” (309). The emotion is the defiant despair associated with the loss of hope, and Hobbes realizes that “when hope dies there is only irony, a vicious senseless irony that turns to the consuming desire to jeer, spit curse, smash, destroy” (310). While Hobbes wrestles with these thoughts, Kathryn, drunk, “clung to him with a gay, sorrowful little laugh at her own unsteadiness” (311). Fleeing the fiendish hilarity of eviscerated idealism, as the novel ends Hobbes and Kathryn go in search of that home they cannot yet see. Cynthia Hamilton has argued that Holmes’s novel struggles to sustain the leap of faith that he had characterized as the fundamental religious spirit of the Beat generation in his 1952 New York Times essay “This is the Beat Generation.”10 However, the generation’s spiritual and political ideals are continu- ally undermined by “their cynicism and their irony,” which are stronger than “the hope held out” (Hamilton 118). Clearly, Holmes is not a funny writer. Rather, he represents laughter, and the laughter he sympathetically portrays is rooted in a cynicism shared by a generation stripped of faith in the very ideals for which they yearn. Like Holmes, Kerouac is not a funny writer, and he, too, struggles against a dark vision such that a similarly mirthless jesting between the characters Sal Par- adise and Dean Moriarty (who represent Kerouac and Cassady) radiates through On the Road, which therefore can also be read as an allegory of the deflation of Whitman’s idealistic vision. Sal, for example, echoes Whitman’s fascination with the ‘Western character.’ To Sal, Dean represents “a wild yea saying overburst of American joy; it was Western […] an ode from the Plains, something new, long prophesied, long a-coming” (7-8). Dean also embodies energetic sexuality, which he conjures forth with his hypnotically seductive voice (195). Echoing Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road,” Sal observes that “the road is life” to the point where he feels “the road unwinding into” himself (212, 235). Traveling back and forth across the country, Sal and Dean search for Dean’s father, who becomes figu- ratively identified with Whitman. In Colorado Sal performs Whitman’s famous yawp as an invocation of the poet Whitman predicted in “Passage to India”: “We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell,” he exclaims, while “somewhere an old man with white hair was probably walking toward us with the Word, and would arrive any minute and make us silent” (55). Sal strains to remember something about a “Shrouded Traveler” that lingers on the tip of his “mind’s tongue” (124). Yet the memory never congeals; the patriarch-poet never arrives. Finally they turn from their east-west pinballing to travel south into Mexico. The road south intersects the equator, and here Sal has a vision of a belt stretching around “the equatorial belly of the world” linking Mexico to Benares and Cadiz (280). This vision, linking him and Dean to both Columbus’s embarkation point and the Hindu capital, is patterned on Whitman’s “Passage to India.” But they don’t find their “IT” in Mexico. Sal finds only sickness, and

10 In “This is the Beat Generation” Holmes illustrates the character of the generation most vividly in “the giggling nihilist, eating up the highway at ninety miles an hour” (225). To this figure, the modernist soapbox manifesto seems “absurd,” because “the valueless abyss of modern life is unbearable” (226-27). 400 Andrew Vogel

Dean abandons him there. As Sal reenters the United States, “a tall old man with flowing white hair” walks out of the dark and, passing him, mumbles, Go“ moan for man” (303). Sal can’t figure what this means, but “moan” certainly isn’t the Whitmanic Word that would silence the “new beat generation” (54). Their world remains unredeemed. For all of the infectious exuberance that Dean and Sal invest in Whitmanic idealism, their purposes are perpetually questioned by the other characters. In- deed, Sal intends to somehow prove that Dean, and by extension himself, is not a fool (46). Yet their striving for some kind of faith in themselves and in each other is constantly eroding. Sal queries, “isn’t it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father’s roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life” (106). Promising to prove Dean was not a fool and keep faith in him, the best Sal can do is dub him the “HOLY GOOF,” the saintly idiot- clown who might save them all if only they could understand him. Yet this canon- ization bolsters him only so much as Dean destroys more and more in his wake. As the novel concludes, and despite his sympathies, even Sal sees Dean as a rat and cannot understand why Dean came all the way across country this last time. He leaves Dean, who goes walking off alone down a cold street. In the space between their exuberance and disappointment, Sal and Dean are bathetic clowns. In his security guard uniform Sal looks like Charlie Chaplin (63). Dean walks like Groucho Marx while giggling maniacally and twisting his face into the cynical sneer of W. C. Fields. Throughout the novel Sal is drawn to laughter. He admires a western man for his “hyaw hyaw hyaw” (19), and appreciates Mr. Snow, Remi’s Mill City neighbor, for “the one greatest laugh in all this world” (63). Remi’s anguished laugh “roared over the California woods and over Ameri- ca” (72). Sal tries to laugh genuinely amongst all this hilarity, but each time mirth overtakes him it is perverse. For instance, starving and disgusted he catches a ride with an ascetic and “laughed and laughed” at the irony (106). Likewise, when Sal and Marylou attempt to make love under Dean’s watchful eye, Sal “couldn’t do anything but laugh. It was horrible” (131-32). His strained laughter is tied to his remark that the times were, “as W. C. Fields said, fraught with eminent peril” (41). This humorlessly comical peril stems from living in a society busily inventing ways, as Bull Lee sneers, to “blow up the world” (153); Sal worries about the bomb “that could crack all our bridges and roads and reduce them to jumbles” (298). So when Sal echoes Whitman’s “Passage to India,” he twists it into an cataclysmic vision, musing: “when destruction comes to the world of ‘history’ and the Apoca- lypse of the Fellahin returns once more as so many times before, people will stare with the same eyes from the caves” of Mexico and Bali “where it all began” (280). Fenced in by a sick era, Sal imagines, “dark laughter would come again” (148). The laughter of The Dharma Bums is less bleak, but it is no less bathetic. In this novel Japhy Ryder (characterized by Gary Snyder) is Ray Smith’s (Kerouac himself) hero who points the way to a laughing, existential, Buddhist acceptance of the flawed world. Through Japhy, Ray learns that to achieve a patient, medita- tive posture of love for the world he must leave it, and with this idea the friends The Dream and the Dystopia 401 cultivate a certain distance from American values. Japhy describes his childhood feelings of alienation: “I didn’t feel I was an American at all, with all that suburban ideal and sex repression and general dreary newspaper gray censorship of all our real human values” (301). Ray likewise bristles at his friends and family’s dismissal of his emerging spiritual beliefs; “they knew,” he disparages, but they saw him as a fool “who didn’t understand the serious significance of this very important, very real world” (361). When a friend, terrified by this ‘real’ world, kills herself, Ray flees “that city of ignorance which is the modern city” (362). Together, Japhy and Ray refuse to submit, as Japhy puts it, to “the general de- mand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap that they don’t really want” (351). Rather, they adopt a vision of a rucksack revolution inspired by Whitman. Blending “Song of the Open Road” and “Passage to India,” Japhy envisions “young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray” (350). These spiritual wanderers, part Whitman and part Zen Buddhist, please people, compose poems, demonstrate freedom, and translate East into West. Japhy and Ray’s introduction of Eastern philosophy into their Western landscape is embodied in the figure of Han Shan, whom Japhy describes as “a Chi- nese scholar who got sick of the big city and the world and took off to hide” on a mountain (293). Indeed, during Japhy’s trip to Japan he hopes to find Han Shan type monks “meditating so much that when they come out of meditation they laugh at everything” (312). Ray soon dreams that Japhy is Han Shan, “a ragged hobo […] standing at the end of the market, surveying it with an expressionless humor” (433). Later, at the end of his own Cold Mountain experience serving as a fire lookout, Ray has a second vision of Japhy as Han Shan. Preparing for “the sadness of coming back to cities” he sees that “Chinese bum standing there in the fog, with that expressionless humor on his seamed face” (460). Han Shan is cast in the novel as a sort of giggling, Asian Whitman, weaving American vigor into monkish koan meditations yet baffled by the ignorance of the supposedly ‘real’ bourgeois world. Nevertheless, as the novel ends there is no “great world revolution” (430). “The usual American fuggup with appearances,” as Japhy calls it, holds sway despite the comrades’ meditation and prayers (431). Japhy and Ray simply cannot insti- gate a revolution on their own, which Ray eventually comes to realize whether Japhy does or not. At the opening of the novel, Ray hints that he has since lost faith and has become “a little hypocritical […] tired and cynical,” but he clearly still clings to his sense of humor in sorrowful sympathy (282). Ray remarks that long after the Zen Lunatics have passed away with “laughter on their dust lips,” people will still be watching their televisions (356). He imagines Japhy wandering outside their suburban houses, “his thoughts the only thoughts not electrified to the Master Switch.” This seems to be his only remaining shred of idealism as he composes a doggerel poem: “Who played this cruel joke, on bloke after bloke” (356). The cruel joke is the unfunny gag that the idealist plays on himself by hold- ing out for a spiritual revolution he knows is a fantasy. Although it is related to The Dharma Bums because Snyder and Kerouac were so close, a separate jocularity emerges from Gary Snyder’s collections Rip Rap 402 Andrew Vogel and Cold Mountain Poems.11 Read together, these collections echo and extend Whitman’s emphasis on transcendental sympathy for the human condition and the merging of Western and Eastern thinking. Inspired by Whitman’s call for an aesthetic blending of rough western labor and spiritual aspiration, Rip Rap is drawn from Snyder’s experiences as a trailhand, studying Buddhism, and serving in the merchant marine. Although very different from Rip Rap, the Cold Mountain Poems, which are loose translations of the T’ang Dynasty poet Han- shan, suggest parallels between Whitman and Han-shan, whose writing Snyder describes as “colloquial: rough and fresh” (35). Speaking of Han-shan and his giggling sidekick Shih-te in his preface, Synder might be describing an idea of Whitman: “you sometimes run onto them today in the skidrows, orchards, hobo jungles, and logging camps of America” (35). In these collections, Snyder extends Whitman’s transcendentalism by applying it to alpine ecology and merging it with ancient Buddhist thought. These comple- mentary ideas reveal the absurdity of bourgeois values, and this underlies Sny- der’s singular sense of Beat bathos. Like Whitman, for Snyder studying the elements—weather, water, stone—teaches a perspective that is increasingly foreign to mainstream America. The imagery of “Piute Creek,” for instance, wanders over a stone ridge, a gnarled tree, a creek, and finally the moon, to culminate in the realization that by the measure of “A million / Summers […] All the junk that goes with being human / Drops away” (8). The term “junk” bathetically descends from the enlarged perspective, creating a tension in the poem between the medi- tative intellectual distance and the circumscribed reality of an individual’s real experience. In “Milton by Firelight” Snyder doubts the relevance of “a silly story / Of our lost general parents, / eaters of fruit” to a miner who knows stone and understands that “In ten thousand years the Sierras / Will be dry and dead” (9). Here the fruit-eater’s remark undercuts Milton’s celebrated theology and replaces it, bathetically, with the folksy ecological perspective of a laborer. Similarly, while sitting on his mountain Han-shan watches “White clouds clinging to vague rocks” and reckons: “Now I’ve lived here—how many years […] spring and winter pass.” The poem concludes with a pithy rhetorical question aimed at people obsessed with silverware and cars: “What’s the use of all that noise and money” (40). In- stead, “contemplate the void,” Han-shan advises; “the spirit is enlightened of itself” (49). By casting human beings as transient souls, the greater perspective of

11 Snyder has observed that he and Kerouac were influenced by the conversations they shared regarding Whitman (Gifford and Lee 201). Both Jacob Leed and Jeffrey Miles have elu- cidated the significance of Han-shan for Snyder and, through him, for Kerouac, but neither takes up the sage humor that Snyder translates into his early poetry. Tim Dean has drawn out the series of intertextual exchanges between Snyder’s self-projections in Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, Han-shan, and Walt Whitman (86, 158). David A. Carpenter has charted the channel of ‘inhumanism’ in Snyder’s writing, a posture inherited from Robinson Jeffers that reflects his dis- favor of destructive modern culture; although he identifies Snyder’s sense of the healing power of poetry, he neither takes up the influence of Whitman nor Snyder’s bathetic ironies. Louise Mills has noted Snyder’s weaving together of influences from Chinese poetry and Whitman, yet she concentrates on Snyder’s exploration of language’s mediation of subject and object. I would suggest that observing Snyder’s use of bathos complements these readings. The Dream and the Dystopia 403 life and time adumbrated by the mountain landscape decomposes the overvalu- ation of trivialities while the reference to silverware and cars weighs down the sage’s wisdom with tongue-in-cheek metonymies. Although Rip Rap and Cold Mountain Poems can be dismissive of petty ob- sessions, the collections, following Whitman, are not unsympathetic to quotidian experience. “Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout” captures a feeling of displacement from human attachment. “I cannot remember the things I once read / A few friends, but they are in cities” (3), Snyder muses. From his perch miles above his friends and their bookish conversations, he cannot quite remember why these things matter, but neither can he quite forget. Despite the posture of denial, the poet’s meditations are brought down by worldly curiosities and concerns. Likewise, Han-shan weeps for loved ones who have passed on since he’s been on Cold Mountain. The thoughts of life “slowly consumed, like fire down a candle” sting his heart (48). While Snyder leavens irony with pity for the man who thought he would hate to buck hay his whole life but finds at sixty eight, “that’s just what / I’ve gone and done” (15), Han-shan laments the wealthy man who “sets up a prison for himself” (54). Describing Japan in “A Stone Garden,” Snyder sees “cities rise and fall and rise again / From storm and quake and fire and bomb” (24), and likewise Han-shan, wandering through a wrecked town, states: “I pity all those ordinary bones, / In the books of the Immortals they are nameless” (42). Thus, while “Mind & matter, love & space” are seen as “frail as foam on beer” (29) in Snyder’s “T-2 Tanker Blues,” these poems cultivate sympathy for the small pleasures of humanity as Snyder’s persona prowls through streets “Tracking the human future / Of intelligence and despair” (23). Above the general sympathy of these collections, laughter lilts. The preface written by Lu Ch’iu-Yin, who originally collected Han-shan’s poems, explains that Han-shan would visit the Kuo-ch’ing Temple “calling and shouting hap- pily, talking and laughing to himself,” and when the monks would ridicule him he “clapped his hands, and laughed greatly—Ha Ha!” (35). He laughs, as Cold Mountain Poems opens, because “The path to Han-shan’s place is laughable” (39), hinting that there is something funny about Han-shan’s inability to fathom the necessity of “silverware and cars,” “noise and money” (40). The depreca- tory amusement limns the bathos of comparing himself to a “bug at Cold Moun- tain” walking “with his shirt and pants askew” (53). Han-shan portrays himself the clown, writing, “here am I, high on mountains, / Peering and peering, but I can’t even see the sky” (41). He cannot see the sky because the sky is not a thing that can be seen, which humorously implies that he stupidly decided to live on a mountaintop to learn something so simple. The hard-won spiritual truth is undercut by the supposed folly of his quest. Most people “Don’t know Han- shan / Don’t know his real thought / & call it silly talk” (56), one poem reads; nevertheless, Han-shan answers, “I have to laugh at him” (58). Han-shan allows that people do not understand him and think him crazy, but “Try and make it to Cold Mountain” he winks (62), hinting jovially at his riddle. While there is most certainly a transcendent wisdom alluded to in the poems, it is never defined. The poems come down from the heights of Cold Mountain to mingle with the mundane, and this descent is associated with humor. 404 Andrew Vogel

Reformulating Han-shan’s sense of the absurd, Snyder humorously plumbs the wisdom of his own clumsiness and yearning in Rip Rap. In “Goofing Again,” Sny- der dumps himself into the bilge while painting a ship, splashing red paint across the bulkhead with “spectacular results” (28). Dripping wet, he seems amused that must he redo the work and will salvage only an embarrassing poem from it (28). Similarly, in “Thin Ice” Snyder slips on a patch of ice while hiking. At first the ice holds, but just as he starts to laugh it cracks and drops him into eight inches of freezing water, indicating a greater spiritual truth that undermines egocentricity lurking beneath the cliché of walking on thin ice (16). “Damn me a fool last night in port drunk on the floor,” Snyder deprecates in “T-2 Tanker Blues,” but then recalling the laughter of Hawaiian workers he changes the tune: “Damn me not I make a better fool” (30). His revision ridicules self-pity as he jestingly attunes his perspective to the infinity of time and space, but his allusions to grand wisdom all pivot on the common and humble. Thus, by reading Whitman into Zen aesthetics, these collections grieve and giggle over human frailties, which for Snyder in the 1950s were coming to assume a terrifyingly destructive aspect.

IV.

In “My Legacy” Whitman named his bequest: “certain remembrances” and “little souvenirs […] I bind together and bequeath in this bundle of songs” (498). Such understatement bathetically belies the burden any writer who would follow Whitman must assume. The dream of literature catalyzing a turn from greed, competition, and destruction to unity, peace, and prosperity would be laughable if the alternative were not horrendous. The Beats aspired to Whitman’s vision but did so guardedly because they could not formulate an efficacious way to address what they saw happening in America. “America, this is quite serious,” Ginsberg theatrically complains in the 1956 recording of “America.” He continues incredu- lously, “this is the impression I get from reading the newspaper . . . is this correct?” The audience chuckles along while Ginsberg mocks the asininity of American values and simultaneously mocks himself for being unable to fit in with mainstream culture. He also implicitly ridicules his own attempt to combat that bourgeois mainstream with, of all things, poetry. His response is every bit as absurd as the state of affairs against which he reacts. Such absurdity is comical, but it is not really funny, it is sad. “America,” therefore, is a sorrowfully funny recogni- tion that Ginsberg could never be the poet that Whitman anticipated in “Passage to India” because no such person is really possible in the dystopia of modern America. After all, against Moloch, what can the jeremiad of an idealistic poet be but a joke? In a nation of avarice, jealousy, competition, concrete, steel, glass, machines, bombs, cash, and self-interest at all costs, how can the poet possibly expect to propagate comradely love? Like Pope, who hoped to see a neoclassical age blossom in eighteenth century England, the Beats clung to their idealistic vision for America. But when they found themselves tumbling toward perversities in their attempts to promulgate Whit- man’s vision, they covered their doubt and embarrassment with strained laughter. The Dream and the Dystopia 405

Ginsberg, Holmes, Kerouac, and Snyder all exhibit and represent the impulse to laugh off both their disappointment with the failure to live up to Whitman’s vision and their own impotency in the face of that problem. Recognizing the pattern of bathos provides a literary framework for comparing and contrasting these four diverse writers, and I would like to tentatively suggest that it can be applied across the greater spectrum of Beat writers including, for example, Lawrence Ferling- hetti, Gregory Corso, Richard Brautigan, Amiri Baraka, and William Burroughs. Possible extensions of this paper’s thesis notwithstanding, the Beats’ bathos grew out of the intersection of their primary literary influences and their historical moment, and therefore, identifying the play of bathos in Beat writing enables readers to interpret the Beats’ complicated reactions to their sense of the limitations of at- tenuated Romantic idealism, their grim determination to defy their real historical circumstances at all costs, their vigorous appreciation of literary comrades, and their uncertainty over the greater value of their own literary projects.

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