The Blazing & the Beat

YOUNG MR. KEEFE (369 pp.)--Stephen Birmingham--Little, Brown ($3.95).

THE SUBTERRANEANS (III pp.)--Jack Kerouac--Grove Press (clothbound, $3.50; paperback, $1.45).

Some novelists are so infatuated with the brimming gutters of experience that they might be classed as members of the sluice-of-life school. Young Mr. Keeje, by Stephen Birmingham, 28, and The Subterraneans, by Jack Kerouac, 35, are both sluice-of-life novels, although First Novelist Birmingham explores the parqueted upper depths of the well-heeled while Novelist Kerouac, author of On the Road (TIME, Sept. 16), roams the squalid lower depths of just plain heels. Each book purports to speak for a younger generation that Kerouac has dubbed "beat" and Birmingham, with Fitzgeraldian effulgence, likes to think of as "blazing."

Jugs of Martinis. "Our candle does more than burn at both ends," says a Millay-minded character in Young Mr. Keeje. "We toss the whole thing into the fire!" Young Jimmy Keefe, the novel's hero, resembles less a blazing youth than a defective flue. His ego is choked with remorse over a botched-up marriage and clogged with vague resentment over the $4,000,000 he will one day inherit from his father, a Connecticut tycoon. In self-imposed California exile, Jimmy measures out his woebegone life in thermos jugfuls of martinis. His chief drinking pals are Fellow Easterners Claire and Blazer Gates, a couple long on charm and short on character. Blazer is Jimmy's old roommate at Yale, and he treats life as an eternal Whiffenpoof Song. For kicks, the three sometimes bandy about "all the graphic, beautiful four-letter words of the Anglo-Saxon," but the revels turn sober when Claire and Jimmy end up in that old Anglo-Saxon place, bedd.

Author Birmingham captures the centrifugal chaos of a world spun away from its moral center. His characters are not admirable, but they are believable, even when their actions seem contrived. But their talk sounds less like the dialogues of lost souls in limbo than the callow chatter of the tables down at Mory's.

Hobohemian Thoreaus. The Subterraneans celebrates that "systematic derangement of the senses" from which Rimbaud concocted his visions of hell. The difference is that Jack Kerouac, ex-merchant seaman, ex-railroad brakeman, is not Rimbaud but a kind of latrine laureate of Hobohemia. The story line of The Subterraneans is simple and stark: it concerns a short, manic-depressive love affair between a "big paranoic bum" and occasional writer named Leo Percepied and a near-insane Negro girl named Mardou Fox. Says Kerouac: "I wrote this book in three full-moon nights," and it reads that way. The details of the Leo-Mardou relationship are explicit and near pornographic. But The Subterraneans is not really about sex. It is about an oddball fringe of social misfits who conceive of themselves as "urban Thoreaus" in an existential state of passive resistance to society. "They are hip without being slick, they are intelligent without being corny, they are intellectual . . . without being pretentious or talking too much about it, they are very quiet."

For Leo, Mardou and their ambisextrous and hipsterical pals, the road to fulfillment leads through drink, drugs, jazz. Depending on the point of view, these are seen as evil escape mechanisms to evade reality, or accepted as strange techniques for intensifying reality. Primed with tea (marijuana) or benny (Benzedrine), the "kicks" of ecstasy become the "flips" of madness. Virtually all the characters in The Subterraneans flip. But Author Kerouac has known beat characters to do a reverse flip: "The hero of On the Road is now a normal settled-down adult. He's a railroad conductor with three kids. I've seen him put the kids to bed, kneel down and say the Lord's Prayer, and then maybe he'll sit down and watch television."

"O Grayscreen Gangster." Author Kerouac is a cut-rate Thomas Wolfe, and he writes in vivid if not always lucid gushes and rushes, a style he attributes to the rambling reminiscences of his French Canadian mother. Sample, describing movies : "O grayscreen gangster cocktail rainy-day roaring gunshot spectral immortality B movie tire pile black-in-the-mist Wild-america but it's a crazy world!" In one sense, Author Kerouac's dithyrambic denial of mind may be salutary in an age that overrationalizes and overanalyzes existence. But if the concept of the beat generation can be reduced to its philosophical origins, it is simply U.S.-style existentialism. The Subterraneans, in its tawdry, slapdash way, testifies to one of Kierkegaard's precepts: "Life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced."

Jack Kerouac is mightily busy experiencing. He says he has ten books on tap to follow The Subterraneans, and the chief spokesman of the beat generation may soon make his mark in other fields. Says he: "I promised God a month of meditation in the woods or in the desert if the movies buy On the Road"

So far, no deal.

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