There has been so much publicity recently about the San Francisco Renaissance and the New Generation of Revolt and Our Underground Literature and Cultural Disaffiliation that I for one am getting a little sick of writing about it, and the writers who are the objects of all the uproar run the serious danger of falling over, "dizzy with success," in the immortal words of Comrade Koba. Certainly there is nothing underground about it anymore. For ten years after the Second War there was a convergence of interest - the Business Community, military imperialism, political reaction, the hysterical, tear and mud drenched guilt of the ex-Stalinist, ex-Trotskyite American intellectuals, the highly organized academic and literary employment agency of the Neoantireconstructionists - what might be called the meliorists of the White Citizens' League, who were out to augment the notorious budgetary deficiency of the barbarously miseducated Southron male schoolmarm by opening up jobs "up N'oth." This ministry of all the talents formed a dense crust of custom over American cultural life-more of an ice pack. Ultimately the living water underneath just got so damn hot the ice pack has begun to melt, rot, break up and drift away into Arctic oblivion. This is all there is to it. For ten years or more, seen from above, all that could be discerned was a kind of scum. By very deti-nition, scum, ice packs, crusts, are surface phenomena. It is what is underneath that counts. The living substance has always been there-it has just been hard to see-from above.

It is easy to understand why all this has centered in San Francisco. It is a long way from Astor Place or Kenyon Col-lege. It is one of the easiest cities in the world to live in. It is the easiest in America. Its culture is genuinely (not fake like New Orleans-white New Orleans, an ugly Southron city with a bit of the Latin past subsidized by the rubberneck buses) Mediterranean-laissez. faire and dolce far niente. I for one can say flatly that if I couldn't live here I would leave the United States for someplace like Aix en Provence-so fast! I always feel like I ought to get a passport every time I cross the Bay to Oakland or Berkeley. I get nervous walking down the streets of Seattle with all those ghosts of dead Wobblies weeping in the shadows and all those awful squares peering down my neck. In New York, after one week of living on cocktails in taxicabs, I have to go to a doctor. The doctor always says - get out of New York before it kills you. Hence the Renaissance. I wrote a sociological job about it last winter in the Nation, you can read all about it there or in my forthcoming collected essays. But - like all squares if you don't know already you won't know anymore than you did before.

In the first place. No literature of the past two hundred years is of the slightest importance unless it is "disaffiliated." Only our modern industrial and commercial civilization has produced an elite which has consistently rejected all the reigning values of the society. There were no Baudelaires in BabyIon. It is not that we have lost sight of them in time. The nearest thing in Rome was Catullus, and it is apparent, reading him, that there stood behind him no anonymous and forgotten body of bohemians. He was a consort of the rich, of generals and senators, Caesar and Mamurra, and the girl he writes about as though she was, in our terms, an art-struck tart from the Black Cat, was, in fact, a notorious multimillionairess, "the most depraved daughter of the Clodian line." Tu Fu censured the Emperor, but he wanted to be recognized for it—he wanted to be a Censor. So the Taoism and Buddhism of Far Eastern culture functions as a keel and ballast to the ship of state. The special ideology of the only artists and writers since the French Revolution who deserve to be taken seriously is a destructive, revolutionary force. They would blow up "their" ship of state-destroy it utterly. This has nothing to do with political revolutionarism, which in our era has been the mortal enemy of all art whatever. When the Bolsheviks, for a brief period, managed to persuade the culture bearers, demoralized by the world economic crisis and rising tide of political terrorism, that the political revolutionary and the artist, the poet, the moral vates were allies, Western European culture came within an ace of being destroyed altogether and finally. Capitalism cannot produce from within itself, from any of its "classes," bourgeois, petit-bourgeois, or proletariat, any system of values which is not in essence of itself. The converse is a Marxist delusion. This is why "Marxist aestheticians" have gone to such lengths to "prove" that the artist, the writer, the technical and professional intelligentsia, are not declassés in modern society, but members of the petit bourgeoisie, and must "come over," in the words of Engel's old chestnut, "to the proletariat," that is, become the prostitutes of their brand of State Capitalism. Nothing could be more false. Artist, poet, physicist, astrono-mer, dancer, musician, mathematician are captives stolen from an older time, a different kind of society, in which, ultimately, they were the creators of all primary values. They are exactly like the astronomers and philosophers the Mongols took off from Samarkand to Karakorum. They belong to the ancien régime-all anciens régimes as against the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And so they could only vomit in the faces of the despots who offered them places in the ministries of all the talents, or at least they were nauseated in proportion to their integrity. The same principles apply today as did in the days of Lamartine. Caught in the gears of their own evil machinery, the bosses may scream for an Einstein, a Bohr, even an Oppenheimer; when Normalcy comes back, they kick them out and put tellers in their place. The more fools the Einsteins for having allowed themselves to be used - as they always discover, alas, too late.

There are few organized systems of social attitudes and values which stand outside, really outside, the all corrupting influences of our predatory civilization. In America, at least, there is only one which functions on any large scale and with any etfectiveness. This of course is Roman Catholicism. Not the stultifying monkey see monkey do Americanism of the slothful urban backwoods middle-class parish so beautifully satirized by the Catholic writer James Powers, but the Church of saints and philosophers - of the worker priest movement and the French Personalists. So it is only to be expected that, of those who reject the Social Lie, many today would turn towards Catholicism. If you have to "belong to something bigger than yourself" it is one of the few possibilities and, with a little mental gymnastics, can be made quite bearable. Even sometimes feel that the only constant, consistent, and uncompromising critics of the World I11 were the French Dominicans.

Allen Ginsberg's Howl is much more than the most sensational book of poetry of 1957. Nothing goes to show how square the squares are so much as the favorable reviews they've given it. "Sustained shrieks of frantic defiance," "single-minded frenzy of a raving madwoman," "paranoid memories," "childish obscenity" - they think it's all so negative. Also - which is much more important - they think there is something unusual about it. Listen you - do you really think your kids act like the bobby soxers in those wholesome Coca-Cola ads? Don't you know that across the table from you at dinner sits somebody who looks on you as an enemy who is planning to kill him in the immediate future in an extremely disagreeable way? Don't you know that if you were to say to your English class, "It is raining," they would take it for granted you were a liar? Don't you know that they never tell you nothing? That they can't? That faced with the system of values which coats you like the insulating rompers of an aircraft carrier's "hot papa" - they simply can't get through, can't, and won't even try any more to communicate? Don't you know this, really? If you don't, you're headed for a terrible awakening. Howl is the confession of faith of the generation that is going to be running the world in 1965 and 1975 - if it's still there to run. "The Poetry of the New Violence"? It isn't at all violent. It is your violence it is talking about. It is Hollywood or the censors who are obscene. It is Dulles and Khrushchev who are childishly defiant. It is the "media" that talk with the single-minded frenzy of a raving madwoman.