Dorothy Parker on Kerouac
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The Portable Dorothy Parker
edited by Marion Meade
(Penguin Classic, 2006)
Since I can't get enough of Parker from my New Yorker archives I decided to pick up this 600 pg. "portable" Parker. It's already been come in quite handy while I was finishing up my review of A Jury of Her Peers for Critical Distance. I decided to check out some of Parker's reviews from the late 1950's which she published in Esquire and happily stumbled upon this review on Kerouac's The Subterraneans. Here's the opening paragraphs:
"Mr. Kerouac, possibly the inventor and certainly the historian of the Beat Generation, calls his latest work The Subterraneans. The Subterraneans are 'hip without being slick, they are intellignet without being corny, they are intellectual as hell and know all about Pound without being pretentious or talking too much about it, they are very quiet, they are very Christlike.' So those are the Subterraneans. The only point in the summary with which I can agree is that they are hip; or, as Grandma used to say, hep.
Doubtless my absence of excitement over Mr. Kerouac's characters is due to a gaping lack in me, for, and I regret the fact, I do not dig bop. I cannot come afire when I hear it, and I am even less ecstatic in reading about it. I am honestly sorry about this, for who could not do with a spot of ecstasy now and then? I envy the generation its pleasure in its music. And that is all I envy it."