The Know-Nothing Bohemians  

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"The Know-Nothing Bohemians" (1958) is a text by Norman Podhoretz published in Partisan Review.

The text was critical of the Beats and an attack on The Beats largely based on Kerouac's first two published books, On the Road and The Subterraneans, as well as, to a lesser extent, Ginsberg's Howl. The essay also reacts to an unidentified Norman Mailer piece (possibly "The White Negro").

Podhoretz was a fellow student at Columbia who knew Ginsberg and Kerouac (some of his poetry was published by Ginsberg before their falling-out).

The main thrust of his attack is that the Beat embrace of spontaneity is bound up in an anti-intellectual worship of the primitive directly opposed to civilization and can easily turn toward mindless violence.

Podhoretz asserted that there was a link between the beats and the delinquents:

I happen to believe that there is a direct connection between the flabbiness of American middle-class life and the spread of juvenile crime in the 1950s, but I also believe that the juvenile crime can be explained partly in terms of the same resentment against normal feeling and the attempt to cope with the world through intelligence that lies behind Kerouac and Ginsberg. Even the relatively mild ethos of Kerouac's books can spill over easily into brutality, for there is a suppressed cry in those books: Kill the intellectuals who can talk coherently, kill the people who can sit still for five minutes at a time, kill those incomprehensible characters who are capable of getting seriously involved with a woman, a job, a cause.

Podhoretz echoes the then-current characterization of delinquents as "rebels without a cause.":

The hipsters and hipster lovers of the Beat Generation are rebels, all right, but not against anything so sociological and historical as the middle class or capitalism or even respectability. This is the revolt of the spiritually underprivileged and the crippled of soul—young men who can't think straight and so hate anyone who can; [...]

The Bohemianism of the 1950s is [...] hostile to civilization; it worships primitivism, instinct, energy, "blood." To the extent that it has intellectual interests at all, they run to mystical doctrines, irrationalist philosophies, and left-wing Reichianism. The only art the new Bohemians have any use for is jazz, mainly of the cool variety. Their predilection for bop language is a way of demonstrating solidarity with the primitive vitality and spontaneity they find in jazz and of expressing contempt for coherent, rational discourse which, being a product of the mind, is in their view a form of death.

According to Podhoretz, Kerouac's anti-intellectualism was shown by his impoverished vocabulary:

Kerouac, however, manages to remain true to the spirit of hipster slang while making forays into enemy territory (i.e., the English language) by his simple inability to express anything in words. The only method he has of describing an object is to summon up the same half-dozen adjectives over and over again: "greatest," "tremendous," "crazy," "mad," "wild," and perhaps one or two others. When it's more than just mad or crazy or wild, it becomes "really mad" or "really crazy" or "really wild." (All quantities in excess of three, incidentally, are subsumed under the rubric "innumerable," a word used innumerable times in On the Road but not so innumerably in The Subterraneans.)

Podhoretz also criticizes Kerouac's racial attitudes:

[...] Kerouac's love for Negroes and other dark-skinned groups is tied up with his worship of primitivism, not with any radical social attitudes. Ironically enough, in fact, to see the Negro as more elemental than the white man, as Ned Polsky has acutely remarked, is "an inverted form of keeping the nigger in his place."

Ginsberg responded in a 1958 interview with The Village Voice (collected in Spontaneous Mind), specifically addressing the charge that the Beats destroyed "the distinction between life and literature.":

The novel is not an imaginary situation of imaginary truths—it is an expression of what one feels. Podhoretz doesn't write prose, he doesn't know how to write prose, and he isn't interested in the technical problems of prose or poetry. His criticism of Jack's spontaneous bop prosody shows that he can't tell the difference between words as rhythm and words as in diction ... The bit about anti-intellectualism is a piece of vanity, we had the same education, went to the same school, you know there are 'Intellectuals' and there are intellectuals. Podhoretz is just out of touch with twentieth-century literature, he's writing for the eighteenth-century mind. We have a personal literature now—Proust, Wolfe, Faulkner, Joyce.

See also

• On Bohemia: The Code of the Self-Exiled