NEW NOVELS
All This Franticness On the Road. By Jack Kcrouac. (Andre Deutsch, 15s.) IN this country the received idea at present is that writers should stay at home and cultivate their neighbours. In America, on the evidence of Jack Kerouac's On the Road, a kind of nomadic bohemianism is very much the thing with the post-war, the 'beat' generation. The narrator, a writer by the name of Sal Paradise, tells us about his friends who, each spring, take the road west or south from New York looking for 'kicks' : girls, liquor, drugs, stealing, progressive jazz, rest- less movement for its own sake. They live it up to prove they are alive.
The ultimate in their mode of life is Dean Moriarty, an ex-reform-school boy, who comes to Neiv York so that Chad, the poet of the group, can 'teach him all about Nietzsche and all the wonderful intellectual things that Chad knew,' and who talks like this : 'Man, wow, there's so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung up on like literary inhibi- tions and grammatical fears. . . .' He is a crazy man, an aficionado of madness in others, with as few restraints as it needs to keep alive and out of jail. The rest, Paradise especially, look on him as a saint, an angel.
Certainly the book contains a lot of special pleading, but it is not easily dismissed on that account. These people are worth knowing about, and it is unlikely that anyone but an insider who accepted their attitudes could have described them as knowledgeably. Kerouac is fluent in their sub- bop idiom. He has a keen sense of what it means to be a native of a country that is almost a con- tinent. If he is easy to parody and patronise, so is Hemingway. When all the sentimentality and mannerisms of both have been discounted, it must be said that both writers expressed the mood of a post-war generation with considerable under- standing, and for the reason that they identified themselves with it.
Hermann Hesse's short novel, Demian, lucid in style, complex in its ideas, clearly the work of a writer of exceptional intelligence, nevertheless re- quires of the reader a certain like-mindedness. Its theme—a child's growing concern with the two apparently irreconcilable worlds of good and evil —will get little response from those who take both for granted or who are unaware that eithe exists. Good, for Emil Sinclair, is represented b' an orderly Christian home, and bad by the villag, lout, Franz Kromer, into whose power he ha fallen by boasting of a theft he did not commit The hope of reconciling good and evil comes fron Max Demian, a strangely self-possessed school fellow. In their first conversation together Demian explains to Sinclair his own interpreta tion of the Cain-Abel story : that the sign Call bore was not physical, but the presence of greate courage and intelligence than men were used t4 perceiving in their fellows, and which had induce( them to invent the fratricide story out o cowardice and ignorance. Demian, who also bear the mark of Cain, recognises it in Sinclair, deliver him from Kromer's grasp, and teaches him hov to accept the world of evil : 'each one of us mus discover for himself what is permitted and wha is forbidden as far as he himself is concerned.'
Sinclair's attempt to duck this problem 13: taking refuge in drink and companionship, hi eventual acceptance of the need to discover wha is right for himself, and his ultimate success (of the tangible effects of which the book seem fairly evasive) comprise the story. Rejec the assumptions made in the book, and all you an left with is an intellectual exercise; accept then and you can still fairly take exception to till arrogance implied in the attitude that those wrn bear this mark of Cain constitute an elite.
At Dunbar's Cove, the scene and title of Bor den Deal's naturalistic saga, a work of greate length than depth, is assembled a cast of long familiars : stubborn patriarch, home-girl elde daughter, knowing younger daughter, virile son (one with an unfaithful wife) and old grandpa up in the attic. The Tennessee Valley Authorit: begins work in the neighbourhood, threatens thi family with eviction, and introduces a clean-cut idealistic engineer. It's to be a struggle betwee: the old order and the new. It cannot fail to d(
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