Brother-Souls; John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and the Beat Generation

A biography of the two comrades whose friendship defined what it meant to be one of The Beats

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It seems safe to say that while Cassady sparked him to action, Holmes laid the foundation during those daily visits. The resulting three-week period of speed, coffee, and typing which resulted in On the Road has since snowballed into an oft-told tale, but Brother-Souls reminds the reader that this was not all spontaneous prose.

Meanwhile, other key events fall into place: While most of the key players became victims of the fame, Ginsberg used it to his advantage. When City Lights got charged with obscenity for distributing Howl and Other Poems, more fuel was added to the fire — especially when presiding Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled it to be not obscene.

Curiously, Ginsberg slighted Holmes with the omission of his name from the dedication page. Kerouac, Burroughs, and Cassady got a nod from the poet, placing them forever in the highest order of Beats.

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The depiction of Ginsberg in the book posits a good theory as to why he was snubbed. Ginsberg for his part, had been disappointed in the account of his Blakean vision but, at the same time admitted to the veracity of the portrayal of himself. Six months after the appearance of On the Road, Kerouac published The Subterraneans to be followed in another six months by The Dharma Bums , heightening his fame but not his luck. With money in his pocket for a change, he traveled out of the United States.

As usual, he quickly returned to New York to stay close to his mother. One night, while trying to reach the proper degree of stupor in a local bar, he sustained a broken nose and arm from a beating by a homosexual professional boxer, who claimed he had slurred an insult at him.

Later, the depiction of Cassady as pothead led to his arrest and imprisonment. The whole Beat scene, which thrived in the underground, exploded across the media in , meeting curiosity, admiration, and derision. Nothing linked to Russia could be good in those days.

To word irked both men, as they saw it as a symbol of the manipulation, commercialization, and degradation of their once-pure vision. Every critic, pundit, journalist, and magazine writer had something to say about the phenomenon, ranging from suspicions of dangerous revolutions and proliferation of juvenile delinquents to dismissals of idle young hipsters with nothing important to do in life.

The second chapter appeared in Nugget, in October Although relations between he and Kerouac were deteriorating, Kerouac kept a promise and wrote a letter praising the novel to Hiram Hayden at Random House two months after the release of On the Road. Accepted immediately and published in July , it sported a recommendation from Kerouac on the cover.

Selling well enough to require a second printing, mainstream reviews failed to reach the depth of it but it was warmly embraced by the cognoscente, including Studs Terkel and Ralph Gleason. Landesman read it on radio in St. Louis for half an hour, showing how taken he was with it.

Perhaps the most ambitious and meticulously-constructed of all the Beat novels, The Horn fascinates, not just by intricacy, but in the marvel of a writer dreaming up such a concept.

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The real origin of the book…lay in my feeling that the jazz artist was the quintessential American artist — that is, that his work hang-ups, his personal neglect by his country, his continual struggle for money, the debasement of his vision by the mean streets, his oft times descent into drugs, liquor, and self-destructiveness — all this seemed to me to typify the experience of our great 19 th Century American writers: The novel as it evolved, then, was to be about the American-as-artist. I wanted each of these characters to represent an American writer, which is the only reason why I put those two little epigraphs in front of each chapter.

But I also wanted him to represent a particular kind of jazz musician, and I had to create a fictional character doing these things, so that Edgar Pool, for instance, is Edgar Allen Poe. As a kind of dual narrative, each of the narrative streams illustrating and complementing the other. With the quotations he was suggesting an identification in each chapter between the jazz musician and the individual writer, and he tied the substance of the quotation as closely as he could to the chapter itself….

The quotation for the first Chorus is from Thoreau, and the name of the musician is Walden Blue. The quotation is taken from Melville, whose fourth novel was titled Redburn …. A quotation from Hawthorne introduces the Chorus representing the pianist Junious Priest…the musician who was the model for Junius was the avant-garde jazz pianist Thelonious Monk…. He then wrote the Riffs sections, creating the narrative around his fictitious characters…. The recognition of its brilliance only grows with time, as will the brilliance of Brother-Souls. In , while Kerouac felt his first anxiety over waiting for royalties from the movie version of On the Road a state of anxiety similarly affected Kerouac fans that waited impatiently until for its release , Holmes grew increasingly frustrated with the media attention and his realization that the movement they had created ultimately distanced the once close-knit pair.

He also bristled at being used as a substitute spokesman for the Beat Generation and the perception of himself as a replacement for Kerouac when the latter could not be found. In spite of this they still kept in touch via letters, proving the true durability of their friendship. Holmes would face his own problems later that year, in the bleak state of his finances and the emotional turmoil that engulfed him when his father suffered a heart attack in October, forcing an end to years of estrangement.

At their home in Old Saybrook, he and Shirley were just about to run out of firewood as the toughest part of the cruel New England winter fell upon them. Luckily, relief came when friends going on vacation asked them to sit their house. In early February, Landesman sent a hundred dollars in a letter after hearing about their difficulties.

These acts of kindness helped them through the winter, and in May, they were able to return to visit New York when Landesman staged the first and only Beat musical, The Nervous Set , and all performances sold-out. Kerouac showed up at the theater drunk and promptly fell asleep in his seat, vanishing during the intermission.

The trip gave them some respite but in July a rush-hour accident on the New Jersey Turnpike put his father back in the hospital in Camden and one of his hands had to be amputated as a result. Weeks spent keeping vigil at the bedside, trying to help nurse his father back to health led to exhaustion and near the end of August, John McClellan Holmes Sr. Old friend Alan Harrington, novelist and On the Road character, helped him with the hospital expenses. The chronic emotional devastation left him unable to write much outside of his journals and he slipped into one of the most unproductive periods of his life.

Days spent drinking and arguing with Shirley exacerbated the situation. An unpaid electric bill for eight dollars forced him to hide upstairs when the electric company worker came to shut off his power in September of and the following month he was arrested for shoplifting a few dollars worth of groceries at a local market.

The local press used the story to lampoon him with an embarrassing, supposedly-funny headline. At this point something snapped inside him. As is often the case, a great man finds his true measure at the worst of times, not the best. It is also worth noting that through it all, Shirley stayed with him, working where she could to support them both. His turn back to the positive side spurred an equally positive reaction from magazines he submitted his work to, after braving it through a short period of rejected stories. During this period of regeneration, she introduced the pair.

Once again, he enjoyed the luxury of intellectual stimulation that is peculiar to like-minded writers. For his part, Algren equally valued conversation with a mind sharp enough to write a book like The Horn. In his case, the violence turned inward and bespeaks the result of not being able to fully love a woman in a true manner. Sex is more than just a function of the genitalia. It is an outward expression of love and tenderness. He loved his mother, there is no doubting that, but his inability to correlate love and sex the Cassadian logic of all people being apples and we just need to pick them and eat them as we will may have been his undoing.

Although we suggest that Holmes sparked the kindling that ignited the Beat fire, it is commonly accepted that Kerouac is responsible for the Beat Movement gaining the momentum to be a worldwide cultural revolution, these sixty years later. He is the primary visual symbol. His radicalism and homosexuality may have been off-putting to a straight society.

Kerouac — the older brother who died as the younger, the televised, the Adonis — he is the symbol who put a face on the new culture at the piano with Steve Allen speaking cool and hip and mellifluous. The world of academia sought him out and he accepted residencies at several fine schools. More books appeared posthumously. His dedication to his craft supplied him with purpose and a way to communicate while fighting a recurrent cancer when it robbed his frantic gift of speech.

Brother-souls : John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and the Beat generation

He survived nineteen years after Kerouac and twenty after Cassady. In March, , he died at age sixty-two, his beloved wife Shirley with him as ever. In death, as in life, she followed him just two weeks later, a common fate of couples who share a true love. Earlier in the year, he learned that three of his novels would soon be reprinted on Thunder Mouth Press.

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Brother-Souls: John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and the Beat Generation

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