from Jim's Introduction
This fourth collection of essays and reviews hopefully
provides a useful and entertaining survey of various writers and others who
might be said to slot easily into the category of bohemians. I have,
admittedly, included some writers who perhaps wouldn't have welcomed being
called bohemians. Kurt Vonnegut ,
Gilbert Sorrentino , and James T.Farrell , for example. But it can be argued that most writers have at least a touch
of the bohemian about them, and only those desperate for respectability need
to deny it. It may all depend on how you define a bohemian. It's a term that
extends far beyond the popular conception of someone who has a free-and-easy
life-style that has links, however tenuous, to the arts.
There are several essays dealing with little magazines.
They seem to me to be essential to any study of 20th Century literature.
This Quarter, Blues, and Contact
between them say a great deal
about the literature of the 1920s and 1930s if you want to look beyond the
well-known. Likewise, The Floating Bear,
Evergreen Review, and Kulchur offer insights into activity in the late-1950s and early-1960s. One of the
pleasures of looking at little magazines of the past is that they have work
by writers who never became famous or perhaps produced only a few poems or
stories, but who nonetheless made a contribution to the writing of their
time. I have to admit to not caring to spend too much time writing about
successful authors. Lots of critics and literary historians already do that,
so why should I bother? It's the "dusty side-streets" (as someone described
them) that interest me.
Paperback 6" x 9" 299pp ISBN 978-1-291-32093-0
published June 2013
From
Times Literary
Supplement No 5652
July 29 2011 NB back page
Among the more agreeable
features of the literary world is the proximity of the ivory tower to the
dusty side street. The critical sage, whether he likes it or not, is
neighbour to the offbeat prowler. Jim Burns is such a one. For half a
century, he has inhabited the zone of small press and little magazine,
tracking rebel writers and syncopated songsters. The title of a collection
of essays, Beats, Bohemians and Intellectuals (2001), sums him up.
Now Mr Burns, who lives in the unlikely setting of Cheadle, Cheshire, has
issued Radicals, Beats and Beboppers. Its thirty items appeared
originally in publications many readers of this journal will not have heard
of: Beat Scene, Prop 3, Penniless Press. Many of its characters are
likewise tributarial: Maxwell Bodenheim, Walter Lowenfels, Anatole Broyard.
Mr Burns can tell you
what Jack Kerouac was reading in 1941 - the novels of Albert Halper, whoever
he was - how the screenplay of The Sweet Smell of Success by Clifford
Odets differs from the novella by Ernest Lehman, on which it is based; what
sort of music Jackson Pollock listened to while painting. Burns dismisses
the suggestion that Pollock found in the "speed and jarring harmony" of
bebop "an apt analogue to his own work". Sometimes he listened to classical
music.
An essay on Robert
McAlmon, owner of Contact Editions which issued Hemingway's first book,
Three Stories & Ten Poems, begins with the unarguable assertion, "Few
people today read McAlmon's poetry". Mr Burns shows how McAlmon moved from
"poetic language" to "ideas" to a sort of sub-Waste Land verse. By
the time he reaches McAlmon's toilet-paper poem ("Inferior goods make scabs
/ that turn the best people to crabs"), you might think forgetting is the
kindest treatment; but you remain grateful to Mr Burns for having done the
legwork. Radicals, Beats & Boppers is available from Penniless Press
Publications.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
LA VIE DE BOHEME
HARRY KEMP, THE TRAMP POET
BEATS, BUMS AND BOHEMIANS
THIS QUARTER
CAFÉ SOCIETY
GILBERT SORRENTINO
IN PRAISE OF BOOKSELLERS
JOHN CRAXTON
BLUES
CONTACT
KURT VONNEGUT’S JAILBIRD
THINGS ARE NOT AS THEY SEEM
THE INDIGNANT GENERATION
THE MASSES
THE GREAT FEAR
JAMES T. FARRELL
B. TRAVEN
BEATS IN BRITAIN
HOW FAR UNDERGROUND?
PRE-BEATS
TED JOANS IN PARIS
GREGORY CORSO
THE FLOATING BEAR
ORIGINS OF THE BEAT GENERATION
EVERGREEN REVIEW
KULCHUR
JACK KEROUAC’S JAZZ SCENE
WHAT’S YOUR SONG, KING KONG?
THE NAMES OF THE FORGOTTEN
NICA’S DREAM
THE HIPSTER
CENTRAL AVENUE BREAKDOWN
LET THE GOOD TIMES ROLL
NOTES
INDEX
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