A Hunger to Participate the Work of John Clellon Holmes 1926-1988

PDF hosted at the Radboud Repository of the Radboud University Nijmegen The following full text is a publisher's version. For additional information about this publication click this link. http://hdl.handle.net/2066/113712 Please be advised that this information was generated on 2021-10-10 and may be subject to change. «•• 1* \ ν ^i',i JAAP VAN DER BENT A HUNGER TO PARTICIPATE THE WORK OF JOHN CLELLON HOLMES 1926-1988 A HUNGER TO PARTICIPATE THE WORK OF JOHN CLELLON HOLMES 1926-1988 A HUNGER TO PARTICIPATE THE WORK OF JOHN CLELLON HOLMES 1926-1988 Een wetenschappelijke proeve op bet gebied van de letteren PROEFSCHRIFT ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Katholieke Universiteit te Nijmegen, volgens besluit van het college van decanen in het openbaar te verdedigen op maandag 4 december 1989 des namiddags te 1.30 uur precies door JACOB WILLEM VAN DER BENT geboren op 14 september 1948 te Den Haag Promotor: Prof. dr. G.A.M. Janssene Privately printed Copyright Jaap van der Bent, 1989 CIP Data Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague Bent, Jacob Willem van der A hunger to participate : the work of John Clellon Holmes, 1926-1988 / Jacob Willem van der Bent. - [S.l. : s.n.] Proefschrift Nijmegen. - Met blbliogr., lit. opg. ISBN 90-9003140-5 SISO eng-a 857.6 UDC в20(73)"19"(043.3) Trefw.: Holmes, John Clellon (werken). oonnrs ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 111 Chapter One INTRODUCTION 1 Chapter Two GO 6 Chapter Three THE HORN 52 Chapter Four GET HOME FREE 87 Chapter Five NOTHING MORE TO DECLARE 13A Chapter Six WALKING AWAT FROM THE WAR 161 Chapter Seven TWO UNPUBLISHED NOVELS 195 Chapter Eight MISCELLANEOUS PROSE 243 Chapter Nine POETRt 302 Chapter Ten CONCLUSION 348 ROTES 353 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 376 SUMMART 381 CURRICULUM VITAE 385 AauKNumoKHTS I wish to acknowledge my gratitude to the Fulbrlght Program and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, which both provided grants that enabled me to carry out an essential part of my research in the United States. I am grateful to the staffs of the Mugar Memorial Library of Boston University and of the Butler Library of Columbia University In New York, for permitting me to examine unpublished material in their collections, and for providing me with photocopies. Thanks are due to the Sterling Lord Agency, which also supplied photocopies of material relating to John Clellon Holmes. Further thanks are owed to Allen Ginsberg and Jay Landesman, who •bared their views on Holmes with me. I thank my family and friends, both in the Netherlands and In the United States, for sustaining me through the writing of this study. Special thanks are due to Russell Freedman and Dave Moore, who critically read my manuscript. I thank Karin Schreurs, who typed the manuscript. I wish that I could once more thank John Clellon Holmes and his wife Shirley for their help and hospitality. As it Is, I can only dedicate this study to their memory. A HUNGER TO PARTICIPATE THE WORK OF JOHN CLELLON HOLMES 1926-1988 Chapter One imoDDcnai Soon after World War Two, Americans began to wonder about the war's impact on literature, and who would be the young writers of the postwar generation to catch the spirit of the new times. Anthologies such as American Vanguard and Discovery devoted themselves in particular to writing by young authors. However, the work published in these anthologies was largely imitative and strongly influenced by the writers of the twenties and thirties. This also applied to many of the postwar novels. The Naked and the Dead (1946) by Norman Mailer owed much to Hemingway and Dos Passos, for instance, while Jack Kerouac's The Town and the City (1950) was clearly reminiscent of the novels of Thomas Wolfe. Yet the young writers possessed a certain distinctiveness which could not be denied. Although stylistically they frequently looked back to an earlier period, their subject matter was often new. Their attention focussed on derelict young people, while the rootless characters which the writers of the twenties and thirties wrote about were usually older. The best example of this development is probably The Catcher In the Rye by J.D. Salinger, published in 1951. Because of the war and what Norman Mailer has called "the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb," the young authors also tended to write about experiences related to "madness, drugs, religious ecstasies, dissipation, and amorality."2 This tendency found expression, in 1952, in four novels which dealt with all of these 1 subjects and which had the same bohemlan setting: Who Walk In Darkness by Chandler Brossard, A Cry of Children by John Home Burns, Flee the Angry Strangers by George Mandel, and Go by John Clellon Holmes. Because these books shared a number of themes with Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road, which made the Beat Generation famous when It was published In 1957, In retrospect Brossard, Burns and Mandel have been called the "pre-Beate." Of these three authors. Chandler Brossard probably became best known, while John Home Burns received the highest critical praise. This was not for A Cry of Children, however, but for The Gallery, a war novel Burns published In 1947. George Mandel never really broke through as a novelist, although he went on to write three more novels and a book of cartoons and commentary about the Beat Generation, Beatvllle U.S.A. (1961). John Clellon Holmes's Go Is usually held to be the first Beat novel. Although Holmes achieved some fame with the book, he has nevertheless remained relatively unknown. Yet, his second novel. The Horn (1958), Is one of the most interesting novels about the American Jazz world. His third novel, Get Home Free (1964), as well as his essays, stories and poetry, have never been widely read. Since the late seventies there has been a renewed Interest In Holmes, however. Go and The Horn were reissued In 1977 and 1980 respectively, and new editions of these books, as well as of Get Home Free, came out In 1988. As a three-volume edition of Holmes's essays has also appeared recently, and a new selection of his poems Is forthcoming, the time seems ripe for a critical revaluation of his work. John McClellan Holmes was born in 1926 in Holyoke, Massachusetts. His father was a sales representative for sporting goods firms· Because 2 Jobs were scarce during the Depression, the Holnes family had to move frequently, and John grew up In Massachusetts, Long Island, New Jersey, New Hampshire and California· Another reason why John's homellfe was very unstable, was the fact that the marriage between his parents was not a good one. They had a trial separation In 1930 and when, In 1941, they finally decided to divorce, John and his mother and two sisters went to live In Chappaqua, New York. One result of being uprooted so frequently may well be the preoccupation with homelessness, which Holmes sees as one of the red lines running through his work.* Holmes started to write In his early teens, first poetry, but soon fiction as well. After dropping out of high school, he took a menial Job at the Reader's Digest subscription department In Mt. Klsco, New York. Knowing that he would be drafted as soon as he reached eighteen and feeling the lack of a formal education. In the summer of 1943 he took some courses In philosophy and literature at Columbia University. From June 1944 to June 1945, Holmes was In the United States Navy Hospital Corps. He worked In a navy hospital In San Diego, and later on Long Island, tending paraplegics and amputees. The experience shocked him and strengthened the pacifist convictions he already had. Yet his time In the navy also allowed him to catch up on his reading. During night shifts he read Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Spengler, and Blake. In August 1944 he married Marian Mlllambro, whom he had met the previous year. When Holmes was discharged, he and Marian settled down in New York. Although he did not have the necessary high school diploma, he spent most of 1945 and 1946 at Columbia University on the G.I. Bill. Much of his time was taken up by writing, however. From 1948 onward his poems started to appear in magazines such as Poetry and Partisan Review, at 3 first under the name Clellon Holmes to avoid confusion with the poet John Holmes. In New York he met other struggling young writers. In July 1946 one of them, Alan Harrington, introduced him to Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Both of them would have a lasting Influence on Holmes's life and work, and especially with Kerouac he was soon very close. After the publication of Go and the break-up of his marriage with Marian, Holmes went to live in Connecticut with his second wife, Shirley Allen, In 1955. Since then, apart from paying extended visits to Europe in 1957 and 1967, he divided his time between writing and teaching. He taught literature and creative writing courses at the Iowa Writer's Workshop In 1963-1964, at the University of Arkansas in 1966 and 1975, at Brown University in 1971-1972, and at Bowling Green State University in 1968 and 1975. From 1977 to 1987 he taught at the University of Arkansas, where he was promoted to full professor in 1980. Holmes died in March 1988. All too often, attention has been paid to Holmes's work primarily because of his connections with the Beat Generation, whose writers he defended against frequently hostile critics.

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