The American Century: Literature since 1945 631Sicilian custom of celebrating a first son’s birth by planting a fig or olive tree as
“a sign that the earth has one more life to bear.” “We plant you in the corner of the
grove,” the poet declares, “bathed in western light”; and the “you” here, the “slender
shoot” so planted, it is clear, is both the living tree and the dead son. Even “when our
family is no more,” Gioia concludes, “I want you to stand among strangers ... /
Silently keeping the secret of your birth.” The tree will testify, in silence, to the brief
life of his lost boy, the love that bore him and then buried him – just as this poem
testifies in another way, through the music of common speech. In another poem,
“Corner Table,” Gioia regrets the fact that, as he sees it, “What matters most / Most
often can’t be said.” A poem like “Planting a Sequoia,” however, shows that what
matters most can sometimes be said – and said in ways that disclose just how
flexible, how responsive to the variable rhythms and deeper resonances of life the
traditional forms of poetry can be.Resisting orthodoxy: Dissent and experiment in fiction
In prose, resistance to orthodox culture took various forms, even among those
predominantly white male writers who formed the major part of the beat movement.
Just how various these forms could be, within the ranks of those associated with the
beats, is suggested by the contrast between Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) and William
Burroughs (1914–1997). Outside the movement, a similar contrast is registered by
other major figures of literary dissent: Henry Miller (1891–1980), J. D. Salinger
(1919–2010), Charles Bukowski (1920–1994), Richard Brautigan (1935–1984), and
Ken Kesey (1935–2001). Dissent has not, of course, been the monopoly of these
writers. On the contrary, dissent and its literary corollary, experiment, could be said
to be the American way. What these writers have had in common, however (and it
was sometimes all they had in common), is a primary, pivotal interest in the
aesthetics and politics of rebellion. There has been a thin, sometimes invisible line
between their own lives and the lives of their protagonists, disaffiliated from
mainstream culture, driven or directed by their own choice to the social margins.
And there has been a similarly narrow line between the status of their work as
imaginative document and as social handbook. Their writing, with its search for an
alternative to what Kerouac once called “the whorey smell” of orthodox America,
has influenced several generations not just to imagine but to try out different lives,
to create a separate territory for themselves. The consequences of that attempt have
been various social movements; while Kerouac inspired the beats, Burroughs has
clearly influenced both the beat and the psychedelic movements, and Kesey and
Brautigan, in turn, have helped to shape hippie and other, later forms of alternative
culture. Which is, in its own way, another, honorable American tradition, from the
time of the Puritan preachers and writers through to the Transcendentalists. Behind
the hippie commune, after all, hovers the shadow of earlier attempts to live the lives
of the visible saints; behind the lonely, mobile heroes of Kerouac, Kesey, and even
Salinger lie many other romantic egotists, bragging or yearning for humanity as
much as for themselves.GGray_c05.indd 631ray_c 05 .indd 631 8 8/1/2011 7:31:35 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 35 PM