Books: The Blazing & the Beat

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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."