Holmes, John Clellon

(1926–1988)

   John Clellon Holmes (born March 12, 1926, in Holyoke, Massachusetts) was an important figure in the original circle of Beats in New York in the late 1940s and early 1950s when he was a close friend of both jack kerouac and allen ginsberg, whom he met by chance in 1948 at a Fourth of July party. From 1949 through 1951, while Kerouac was working on different versions of on tHe road, Holmes was writing Go, a novel that, like On the Road, features characters based on Kerouac, Ginsberg, and neal cassady and that dramatizes their nonconformity and search for value, intensity, and transcendence. Unlike On the Road, Go (published in fall 1952 by Scribners) is set primarily in New York and emphasizes what was happening off the road during this period. Perhaps because Go was more conventional in its style and narrative structure, Holmes was able to publish his Beat novel more quickly than Kerouac was; Go appeared five years before On the Road. While it was seen as promising, Go had relatively little impact until On the Road helped make the Beat Generation a media phenomenon. Holmes later published two more novels: The Horn (1958), and Get Home free (1964).

   Like Kerouac, Holmes was acutely aware of the fluidity and rootlessness beneath the surface of conformity in post–World War II America. The son of John McClellan Holmes, Sr., (a salesman) and Elizabeth Franklin Emmons (a descendant of Benjamin Franklin), Holmes grew up primarily in Massachusetts, but his father’s economic difficulties during the Depression and his parent’s unstable marriage, which ended in divorce in 1941, meant that the family (Holmes had two sisters, one two years older, the other seven years younger) moved frequently and were occasionally separated. While the family’s moves were primarily within New England, Holmes also lived as a child in New York, New Jersey, and Southern California. When he was 15, he returned to California, supporting himself for the summer as a movie usher and as a lifeguard; then he returned to New York, dropped out of high school, and took a job in the subscription department of Reader’s Digest. In June 1944 Holmes was drafted and entered the U.S. Navy Hospital Corps. Following basic training, he married Marian Miliambro, a Reader’s Digest coworker. Holmes spent the last year of the war working in naval hospitals in San Diego and Long Island, caring for the physically and mentally wounded and working his way alphabetically through a list he had developed of a major writers (he had reached the W’s by the time he was discharged in June 1945 for recurrent migraines). Following his discharge, Holmes studied briefly at Columbia University on the G.I. Bill and set about to become a writer. He published several early poems and essays in Partisan Review, Poetry, and other mainstream journals before his friendship with Kerouac and Ginsberg led him away from his efforts to become part of the more academic literary establishment.

   In Go, an account of this period, the central character, Paul Hobbes, is both drawn to the nonconformity of the Beat characters who are his friends and yet never fully gives himself over to it as he tries (and ultimately fails) to become part of the Beat scene while preserving his marriage. Like his persona Hobbes, Holmes, too, participated in the fluidity of the Beat rejection of restrictive moral codes without ever fully giving himself to it, and his marriage to Marian Miliambro, similarly, failed to survive his attempts to negotiate these two worlds. In Go Holmes the writer and Hobbes the character are deeply engaged in the Beat Generation but not, finally, fully aligned with it. The book’s strength is its meticulous observation, the candor of its analysis, and its generally lucid style. Where William S. Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac emphasized vision and experiment, both personally and aesthetically, Holmes emphasized reflection and a certain degree of critical distance and control. If his innate reserve and awareness of the needs of others kept him from giving himself as fully as some other Beats to personal and artistic experimentation, these same traits, which cast him as both an insider and outsider to the group, made him perhaps the most acute observer of the Beat scene and its most astute analyst.

   In late 1953 Holmes married Shirley Allen, and the couple used the proceeds from the sale of the paperback rights to Go to Bantam Books to purchase a house in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, which they renovated and made their permanent home in 1956. In and around developing The Horn and Get Home Free, Holmes helped to pay the bills by writing speeches and ad copy and by writing essays and stories for large circulation magazines. His piece “This Is the Beat Generation,” published November 1952 in the New York Times Magazine, remains an important document, and from the late 1950s through the 1960s his essays on contemporary culture and society figured prominently in such magazines as Esquire and Playboy. In 1967 E. P. Dutton published Nothing More to Declare, a collection of what would now be termed creative nonfiction and that gathered Holmes’s most important essays on the Beat Generation, as well as new essays evoking and analyzing his relationships with Kerouac and Ginsberg, as well as such significant 1950s cultural figures as Jay Landesman, who founded and edited the journal Neurotica, and Gershon Legman, whose critiques of the dialectic of sex and violence in contemporary American culture challenged America’s chaste image of itself in the 1950s. The pieces on Kerouac and Ginsberg remain among the most insightful and sympathetic introductions to these two key Beat writers. Holmes’s next project underscores his growing involvement with creative nonfiction in this period. Holmes was deeply troubled by the Vietnam War, and in May 1967 he and Shirley left for Europe with thoughts of settling there permanently. During the next eight months they visited cities in Great Britain, France, Germany, and Italy. The trip became the basis of a series of travel essays that, like his earlier pieces on the Beat scene and his Beat friends, imaginatively participate in the immediate moment, while yet standing back and reflecting on such matters as the war, the nature of place, exile, friendship, and belonging. Although he managed to place some of these essays in magazines (ranging from New Letters to Playboy), there was little market at the end of the Vietnam War for pieces such as these, and Holmes was unable to find anyone who was willing to publish the whole set, “Walking Away from the War,” as a book until the University of Arkansas Press included it intact in Displaced Person: The Travel Essays (1987), the first in a three volume series, Selected Essays by John Clellon Holmes. The work originally gathered in Nothing More to Declare is included, along with a number of previously uncollected pieces and introductions written specifically for the series, in the second and third volumes: Representative Men: The Biographical Essays (1988) and Passionate Opinions: The Cultural Essays (1988).

   A few years before the trip to Europe that was chronicled in “Walking Away from the War,” Holmes had begun to teach as a writer in residence at various universities. Holmes began this phase of his career in 1963 with a stint at the Iowa Writers Workshop. He also taught at Brown University and Bowling Green State University before accepting a permanent position at the University of Arkansas in 1977, where he taught (spending the school year in Fayetteville and the summers in Old Saybrook) until health problems led him to retire. Holmes died March 2, 1988, in Middleton, Connecticut, following a series of surgeries and treatments for what began as lip cancer. Holmes continued to write until the very end of his life. In addition to the new writing included in The Selected Essays, he returned to writing poetry and worked on a final novel. In the years since his death, excerpts from Holmes’s reportedly extensive journals have appeared in some journals.

   Holmes’s reputation as a Beat writer rests primarily on Go; his essays such as “This Is the Beat Generation” (1952) and “The Philosophy of the Beat Generation” (1958), which attempt to explain the Beat phenomenon; his interpretive portraits of Ginsberg and Kerouac (“The Consciousness Widener” and “The Great Rememberer”) from Nothing More to Declare; and several later memoirs in which he traces the later years of his friendship with Kerouac. The importance of these texts is clear. They are firsthand accounts of Beat experience and key Beat figures written by a peer who was never willing to let his desire to celebrate his friends overwhelm his desire to understand them and to probe the cultural, historical, and aesthetic significance of their careers and their work. In these pieces, Holmes sees the Beats as they saw and understood themselves while also seeing the Beats as others saw them, and he treats this divide as itself worthy of mapping, bridging, and interpretation. Holmes, in this work, is our most insightful and empathetic commentator on the early Beats. But in focusing on Go and such pieces as “The Great Rememberer,” it is all too easy to overlook the cumulative achievement of his three volumes of Selected Essays, which deserve to be recognized as major texts in the Beat canon. In part, the importance of these essays is formal and historical. They help document the importance of the Beat project to the emergence of the New Journalism of the 1960s, typified by Tom Wolfe’s early work (their closest approximation in the Beat canon is Kerouac’s lonesome traveler). The essays are also important because they so fully and transparently convey Holmes’s voice and sensibility (Get Home Free is the only one of his novels that approaches the best of his essays in this regard). In the pieces from “Walking Away from the War,” Holmes’s sensitivity to the details of place, responsiveness to the implications of mood, and awareness of the complexity of consciousness have a kind of moral weight that at moments might be termed Jamesian. Also, in “Clearing the Field,” the memoir that introduces Passionate Opinions, Holmes probes his memories of the later 1940s with such candor, yet compassionate lucidity, that it becomes the most compelling glimpse we have into the social and historical moment from which the Beat Generation emerged. Finally, the importance of these essays is that many of them do not focus specifically on the phenomenon of the Beat Generation or on Beat writers. They deal with the sexual revolution and the despair of the Vietnam era. They reflect on such forefathers as W. C. Fields and talk perceptively about such writers as Nelson Algren (in some ways a precursor of the Beats) and Norman Mailer who shared some of their concerns. In these essays Holmes, in part because his eye and critical intelligence ranges well beyond Beat figures and Beat practice, projects a vision of his era in which Beat consciousness and Beat concerns are informed by the broader cultural field and become, as well, representative of it. In Holmes’s vision, the achievement and significance of the Beats is that they are simultaneously authentically distinctive and individualistic and yet representative of their place and time. This paradox is, at root, Emersonian, and Holmes signals his awareness of this by titling the second volume of his Selected Essays after Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1850 collection of essays: Representative Men. By invoking Emerson, Holmes signals what is implicit throughout his essays: that the individualism of the Beats matters not because it is eccentric but because it is spiritually genuine, grounded authentically in primary experience, and representative. In his essays, then, Holmes enacts the case for the cultural importance of the Beats and the significance of their aesthetic achievement—both in those essays that have explicitly Beat occasions and in those that do not.

 Bibliography

■ Holmes, John Clellon. Displaced Person: The Travel Essays (Selected Essays, Volume I). Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1987.

■ ———. Representative Men: The Biographical Essays (Selected Essays, Volume II). Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1988.

■ ———. Passionate Opinions: The Cultural Essays (Selected Essays, Volume III). Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1988.

■ ———. Night Music: Selected Poems. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1989.

   Tim Hunt