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Go
The novel that launched the beat generation's literary legacy describes the world of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Neil Cassady. Published two months before Kerouac began On the Road, Go is the first and most accurate chronicle of the private lives the Beats lived before they became public figures. In lucid fictional prose designed to capture the events, emptions and essence of his experience, Holmes describes an individualistic post-World-war II New York where crime is celebrated, writing is revered, and parties, booze, discussions, drugs and sex punctuate life.
352 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1952
About the author
John Clellon Holmes
27 books45 followersJohn Clellon Holmes, born in Holyoke Massachusetts, was an author, poet and professor, best known for his 1952 novel Go. Go is considered the first "Beat" novel, and depicted events in his life with friends Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg. He was often referred to as the "quiet Beat," and was one of Kerouac's closest friends. He also wrote what is considered the definitive jazz novel of the Beat Generation, The Horn.
Holmes was more an observer and documenter of beat characters like Ginsberg, Cassidy and Kerouac than one of them. He asked Ginsberg for "any and all information on your poetry and your visions" (shortly before Ginsberg's admission into hospital) saying that "I am interested in knowing also anything you may wish to tell... about Neal, Huncke, Lucien in relation to you..." (referring to Herbert Huncke and Lucien Carr), to which Ginsberg replied with an 11-page letter detailing, as completely as he could, the nature of his "divine vision".
The origin of the term beat being applied to a generation was conceived by Jack Kerouac who told Holmes "You know, this is really a Beat Generation." The term later became part of common parlance when Holmes published an article in The New York Times Magazine entitled "This Is the Beat Generation" on November 16, 1952 (pg.10). In the article Holmes attributes the term to Kerouac, who had acquired the idea from Herbert Huncke. Holmes came to the conclusion that the values and ambitions of the Beat Generation were symbolic of something bigger, which was the inspiration for Go.
Later in life, Holmes taught at the University of Arkansas, lectured at Yale and gave workshops at Brown University. He died of cancer in 1988, 18 days after his 62nd birthday.
Holmes was more an observer and documenter of beat characters like Ginsberg, Cassidy and Kerouac than one of them. He asked Ginsberg for "any and all information on your poetry and your visions" (shortly before Ginsberg's admission into hospital) saying that "I am interested in knowing also anything you may wish to tell... about Neal, Huncke, Lucien in relation to you..." (referring to Herbert Huncke and Lucien Carr), to which Ginsberg replied with an 11-page letter detailing, as completely as he could, the nature of his "divine vision".
The origin of the term beat being applied to a generation was conceived by Jack Kerouac who told Holmes "You know, this is really a Beat Generation." The term later became part of common parlance when Holmes published an article in The New York Times Magazine entitled "This Is the Beat Generation" on November 16, 1952 (pg.10). In the article Holmes attributes the term to Kerouac, who had acquired the idea from Herbert Huncke. Holmes came to the conclusion that the values and ambitions of the Beat Generation were symbolic of something bigger, which was the inspiration for Go.
Later in life, Holmes taught at the University of Arkansas, lectured at Yale and gave workshops at Brown University. He died of cancer in 1988, 18 days after his 62nd birthday.
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September 9, 2020
“At Ian MacArthur’s the party went on. Ian MacArthur is a wonderful sweet fellow who wears glasses and peers out of them with delight.” Jack Kerouac – On the Road
Ian MacArthur, of course, was John Clellon Holmes…
John Clellon Holmes was rather a chronicler of the beat generation than a card-carrying partaker. And the narration turns, mostly, around two notorious beat figures:
Allen Ginsberg…
And Jack Kerouac…
Beat movement was a vivid page in the annals of the twentieth century and John Clellon Holmes was the one filling this page with his keen and quite analytical observations…
Beatniks resided in the destructive milieu and, as a result, their stormy and rebellious existence could come to nothing but ruination…
Some persons are like ships without a rudder… They drift and drift… And for them there are no ports of call.
Ian MacArthur, of course, was John Clellon Holmes…
John Clellon Holmes was rather a chronicler of the beat generation than a card-carrying partaker. And the narration turns, mostly, around two notorious beat figures:
Allen Ginsberg…
It was Stofsky’s habit to burst in full of news, for he was one of those young men who seem always to be dashing around the city from apartment to apartment, friend to friend; staying a few moments to gossip and ingratiate, and then running off again. Although he had no job, his days were crowded with vague appointments up and downtown, and for a large group of people he was the unofficial bearer of all sorts of tidings. His sources were multitudinous and his candor so infectious that it made the more suspicious of his friends question his motives.
And Jack Kerouac…
“Well, I’ve decided I wrote it because I wanted fame and money and… and love; not for any sterile artistries,” Pasternak went on disconsolately. “I was just wooing the world with it, being coy. That’s why anybody writes a book, for Christ’s sake! Why should you fool yourself, Paul? I’m feeling geekish because the world isn’t interested in my clumsy valentine.”
Beat movement was a vivid page in the annals of the twentieth century and John Clellon Holmes was the one filling this page with his keen and quite analytical observations…
He came to know their world, at first only indirectly. It was a world of dingy backstairs “pads,” Times Square cafeterias, bebop joints, night-long wanderings, meetings on street corners, hitchhiking, a myriad of “hip” bars all over the city, and the streets themselves. It was inhabited by people “hungup” with drugs and other habits, searching out a new degree of craziness; and connected by the invisible threads of need, petty crimes of long ago, or a strange recognition of affinity. They kept going all the time, living by night, rushing around to “make contact,” suddenly disappearing into jail or on the road only to turn up again and search one another out. They had a view of life that was underground, mysterious, and they seemed unaware of anything outside the realities of deals, a pad to stay in, “digging the frantic jazz,” and keeping everything going.
Beatniks resided in the destructive milieu and, as a result, their stormy and rebellious existence could come to nothing but ruination…
“…And I came to many more remarkable decisions about what I should do next… a sort of campaign platform in fact. I’ve even formulated a mystical slogan for myself! The way to salvation is to die, give up, go mad!… To suffer everything to be! To love… well, ruthlessly!”
Some persons are like ships without a rudder… They drift and drift… And for them there are no ports of call.
January 11, 2020
Most people believe that On the Road (1957) is the first fictional portrayal of the Beat Generation. But it isn’t. No, the first Beat novel is Go (1952) by John Clellon Holmes.
In 1949, while Jack Kerouac was still revising and seeking a publisher for The Town and the City, a sprawling autobiographical novel in the Thomas Wolfe mode (with a few “beat” characters), John Clellon Holmes was working on a shorter, more concentrated fiction, bearing the working title of The Daybreak Boys: a roman a clef depicting the lives of his friends Jack Kerouac (Gene Pasternak), Allen Ginsberg (David Stofsky), Neal Cassady (Hart Kennedy), plus a few less significant, shadier figures of the era (Cannastra, Huncke) who connect these young artists to the darkness of crime, junk, alcoholism, and the death-wish which the young poets were never far from in the post-war Manhattan streets. Go was published in 1952, five years before On The Road.
It is an old fashioned sort of novel, in spite of its subject matter, an odd amalgam of the social chronicles of Balzac and the mad mystical dialogues of Dostoevsky. It depicts the rather conventional young novelist Paul Hobbes (fictionalized representation of the author) as he tries to complete a novel, hold on to his marriage to his wife Kathryn, and still explore the wild world of these young poets, immersed in their “tea-parties” and be-bop bars, precariously poised between genius and enlightenment on the one hand, and madness and criminality on the other. Both the narrator and the author are somehow detached from the life around him, and this detachment itself becomes one of the themes of the book. Is art essentially reflective or ecstatic? Does the poet say to himself "come, stay" in this moment, explore its meaning? Or does he become the moment, shouting "go, go, go"' like a hipster digging a "real gone"sax solo, until life itself comes to a stop?
The two personalities that come most vividly to life are those of Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg. Hart Kennedy (Cassady) is not the romantic, almost mystical figure that he is in Kerouac, but rather a transparent sociopath, subject to fits of violence (particularly against women), using his philosophy of being in the moment as a cloak for criminal and irresponsible behavior. It is David Stofsky (Ginsberg), though, who is the most memorable: desperately lonely and filled with love, consumed with both cosmic joy and dread, too neurotic to live in the moment but hungry for peace—an imperfect incarnation of God’s holy fool.
This is by no means a great novel, but everyone interested in the Beat Generation should read it. It balances the ecstatic visions of Kerouac and Ginsberg with the observations of a clinical middle-class eye. Holmes gives us a more realistic, less romantic, vision of the Beats, and this helps us put this generation of poets in perspective.
Holmes is especially good when he is describing bars, after-hours joints, and marijuana parties. To conclude, I give you this description of the end of one of the latter:
The lights were out, an all-night bop program hummed out of the radio, and a single candle made a quivering finger of light upon the table. The room seemed full of dusky subsidings, a shambles of butts, strewn glasses and books, the sad mementos of a carouse that had swept on elsewhere.
December 12, 2011
Go is generally regarded as the first novel of the Beat Generation, written between 1949 and 1951, and first published in 1952, nearly sixty years ago. I first read it when I was 20, fifty years ago, and rereading it after all that time is a rather strange experience.
It is set in the late 1940s, and that was another generation, a generation that I don't connect with. They are the people who came home from the war, whom I used to meet in bars around Durban, those boozy old men. In 1972 I used to go for lunch at the Grosvenor Hotel in Soldiers Way across the road from Durban station and sip my solitary beer and eat my 15c curry for lunch, and hear them talking about Smiler Small, who used to frequent the bar in Malvern, and I used to look at all the World War II memorabilia decorating the bar. It never occurred to me that those people, who frequented bars like that, were the Beat Generation, and yet they were. Jack Kerouac was the same age as my father-in-law, who occasionally used to go drinking at the Malvern Hotel.
Yet it was only ten years later, in 1960-61 that I was reading their books, envying their life, and wondering if had really happened the way John Clellon Holmes and Jack Kerouac described it. But they are the generation I associate with alien things like Frank Sinatra, and males in suits and hats, and women wearing lipstick and nylon stockings, and people trying to get back on their feet after the war. So reading Go is very strange. It was only 20 years before 1970, yet 1970 is now forty years ago. And the Durban station is no longer there, and Soldiers Way is probably called something else, and if the Grosvenor Hotel is still there it too is probably called something else now.
But then I remember that I too was like that, even when longing to be like that and thinking it must be different somehow, and somehow more exciting. But it only sounded more exciting than the lives we lived in the 1960s. We too experienced that restless rushing around in the, rushing to Meadowlands to see Cyprian Moloi, or to Springs to see Noel Lebenya, travelling many miles to see if a friend was home, and finding that they were out, travelling many more liles to see another. Not as many boozy parties, and no one was writing a book, but perhaps our conversations were even more intelligent, even when we smoked pot, which was rare. And that was only fifteen years after it all happened in Holmes's book. Fifty years ago somehow seems quite close to the present, yet ten years earlier, when Holmes wrote, seems another world, another eon, another universe. In the sixties Holmes's world of New York seemed like some magic golden age, and looking back from now to the sixties, that seems like the real golden age. The times Holmes wrote about, I realise now, were different, not just because it was another generation, but another world and worldview.
And rereading it fifty years later, I see that Holmes actually tried to create the new vision that made us look back on his world with rose-tinted spectacles. What he longed for became part of our vision.
The essence of the book is summed up in the dream of one of the characters, Stofsky (a thinly-diguised version of the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg). Stofsky dreams that he meets God, in a rather shabby dusty room, sitting on a very shabby throne, and God tells him to "Go, and love without the help of any Thing on earth."
For us in the sixties, that was the starting point. It was a kind of presupposition. It was the presupposition with which I read Go the first time. And so it all seemed rather wonderful, transported out of its time and place into some kind of beautiful timeless realm. I could not imagine them as part of the same world as the suits and hats and nylon stockings.
But rereading it fifty years later, I see it in a very different perspective. Another of the characters in Go, Paul Hobbes (who represents Holmes himself) doesn't have dreams and visions like Stofsky, but gradually comes to realise that their values and their life of endless boozy partying are rather shallow. He thinks of his friends, including one who had died, and wonders if anyone had actually loved them. And it is in this seeting of lovelessness, hopelessness, selfishness and despair that God appears to Stofky in a dream and says "Go, and love without the help of any Thing on earth."
It is set in the late 1940s, and that was another generation, a generation that I don't connect with. They are the people who came home from the war, whom I used to meet in bars around Durban, those boozy old men. In 1972 I used to go for lunch at the Grosvenor Hotel in Soldiers Way across the road from Durban station and sip my solitary beer and eat my 15c curry for lunch, and hear them talking about Smiler Small, who used to frequent the bar in Malvern, and I used to look at all the World War II memorabilia decorating the bar. It never occurred to me that those people, who frequented bars like that, were the Beat Generation, and yet they were. Jack Kerouac was the same age as my father-in-law, who occasionally used to go drinking at the Malvern Hotel.
Yet it was only ten years later, in 1960-61 that I was reading their books, envying their life, and wondering if had really happened the way John Clellon Holmes and Jack Kerouac described it. But they are the generation I associate with alien things like Frank Sinatra, and males in suits and hats, and women wearing lipstick and nylon stockings, and people trying to get back on their feet after the war. So reading Go is very strange. It was only 20 years before 1970, yet 1970 is now forty years ago. And the Durban station is no longer there, and Soldiers Way is probably called something else, and if the Grosvenor Hotel is still there it too is probably called something else now.
But then I remember that I too was like that, even when longing to be like that and thinking it must be different somehow, and somehow more exciting. But it only sounded more exciting than the lives we lived in the 1960s. We too experienced that restless rushing around in the, rushing to Meadowlands to see Cyprian Moloi, or to Springs to see Noel Lebenya, travelling many miles to see if a friend was home, and finding that they were out, travelling many more liles to see another. Not as many boozy parties, and no one was writing a book, but perhaps our conversations were even more intelligent, even when we smoked pot, which was rare. And that was only fifteen years after it all happened in Holmes's book. Fifty years ago somehow seems quite close to the present, yet ten years earlier, when Holmes wrote, seems another world, another eon, another universe. In the sixties Holmes's world of New York seemed like some magic golden age, and looking back from now to the sixties, that seems like the real golden age. The times Holmes wrote about, I realise now, were different, not just because it was another generation, but another world and worldview.
And rereading it fifty years later, I see that Holmes actually tried to create the new vision that made us look back on his world with rose-tinted spectacles. What he longed for became part of our vision.
The essence of the book is summed up in the dream of one of the characters, Stofsky (a thinly-diguised version of the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg). Stofsky dreams that he meets God, in a rather shabby dusty room, sitting on a very shabby throne, and God tells him to "Go, and love without the help of any Thing on earth."
For us in the sixties, that was the starting point. It was a kind of presupposition. It was the presupposition with which I read Go the first time. And so it all seemed rather wonderful, transported out of its time and place into some kind of beautiful timeless realm. I could not imagine them as part of the same world as the suits and hats and nylon stockings.
But rereading it fifty years later, I see it in a very different perspective. Another of the characters in Go, Paul Hobbes (who represents Holmes himself) doesn't have dreams and visions like Stofsky, but gradually comes to realise that their values and their life of endless boozy partying are rather shallow. He thinks of his friends, including one who had died, and wonders if anyone had actually loved them. And it is in this seeting of lovelessness, hopelessness, selfishness and despair that God appears to Stofky in a dream and says "Go, and love without the help of any Thing on earth."
May 1, 2008
“Go” is The Melrose Place of Beat Generation books, no boy’s club writing here. The same cast of characters are on board: Allen Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, Neal Casady and the gang, but John Clellon Holmes gives equal space to their women and their tempestuous relationships. That’s why this book is so cool; it’s got a real nighttime soap opera vibe about it that’s more exciting and sexy than the sausage fest style the other Beat boys write with. “Go” read “Go”.
April 9, 2023
So many conflicting things in my head to say about this. First of all, I made the terrible mistake of reading it back-to-back with On the Road. If you want to do this--and it is interesting as the two novels have almost the same dramatis personae and do overlap a bit--for heaven's sake read this one first and Kerouac's novel afterward--the order in which they were published (a fact that shames the publishing industry to this day). The exciting new freestyle prose that Kerouac came up with just towers above Holmes' very, very pedestrian and often downright awkward and stilted prose. It's like George Elliot among the Beats. I imagine it's not as bad as it seemed to me--really only a century or so out of date--but it seemed like another world compared to Kerouac's amazing stylistic breakthrough. Turgid as it could be.
Similarly, thematically, the novel is, a bit like On the Road about a more-or-less bourgeois character (Hobbes, Holmes's stand-in) wavering between his attraction to the Beat world and it's fringiest petty criminal, drug addict, and perhaps mad visionary members, and the so-called normal world of the American worker automaton TV viewer. (While America has technologically advanced since the 1950s, this weird downward mobility and intelligent and creative peoples' attraction to alternative ways of life have only grown since the 1950's, my own generation being the first to do, statistically, economically worse than our parents. My dad was only a couple of months older that Jack Kerouac, so there we are). And of course starting with the Hippy revolution, then punk, New Primitives, emo, etc., we've had many other pseudo-bohemian movements since the Beats, each espousing it's own version of the rebellion against the mechanical trappings of the bourgeois lifestyle via clothing, tattoos, piercing, ecstatic art and music always coming along for the ride.
(If it sounds like I'm being facetious or dismissive I'm not: I, too, have spent my life doing everything I could do to avoid ending up in a bank cubicle at a computer screen. I for one believe in Bohemia and, like Groucho Marx, remain against practically everything. It's just sad to me that we who protest seem to remain endlessly outliers to a society that changes only its veneer, it's rotten core remaining ever the same sad oligarchy of the rich and a depressing mass conformity to what amounts to slavery.)
Although the novel did slowly draw me more and more into its plot, despite the turgid prose, it doesn't really pay off in the end, nor are the stakes very high: either be a Beat or go to work in a bank, what's it to me? Either leave your wife or don't, what do I care? These are the stakes and they seem very small indeed next to the minor characters' greater and more interesting struggles with visions, crime, addiction, and desperate love. Thus the novel undoes its main plot by making the background and the minor characters a thousand times more interesting that its protagonist and his petty marital and conscience problems.
In the end this is much more like reading a rather dry history of the Beats rather than a novel, more interesting for its portraits of Kerouac and Ginsberg than for its own artistic merit. Thus the third person voice helps to create this panorama of concerns, but also drags the novel back to the nineteenth century again and away from the modernist's new subjectivity, much less Kerouac's seductive and scintillating be-bop prose poetry.
Similarly, thematically, the novel is, a bit like On the Road about a more-or-less bourgeois character (Hobbes, Holmes's stand-in) wavering between his attraction to the Beat world and it's fringiest petty criminal, drug addict, and perhaps mad visionary members, and the so-called normal world of the American worker automaton TV viewer. (While America has technologically advanced since the 1950s, this weird downward mobility and intelligent and creative peoples' attraction to alternative ways of life have only grown since the 1950's, my own generation being the first to do, statistically, economically worse than our parents. My dad was only a couple of months older that Jack Kerouac, so there we are). And of course starting with the Hippy revolution, then punk, New Primitives, emo, etc., we've had many other pseudo-bohemian movements since the Beats, each espousing it's own version of the rebellion against the mechanical trappings of the bourgeois lifestyle via clothing, tattoos, piercing, ecstatic art and music always coming along for the ride.
(If it sounds like I'm being facetious or dismissive I'm not: I, too, have spent my life doing everything I could do to avoid ending up in a bank cubicle at a computer screen. I for one believe in Bohemia and, like Groucho Marx, remain against practically everything. It's just sad to me that we who protest seem to remain endlessly outliers to a society that changes only its veneer, it's rotten core remaining ever the same sad oligarchy of the rich and a depressing mass conformity to what amounts to slavery.)
Although the novel did slowly draw me more and more into its plot, despite the turgid prose, it doesn't really pay off in the end, nor are the stakes very high: either be a Beat or go to work in a bank, what's it to me? Either leave your wife or don't, what do I care? These are the stakes and they seem very small indeed next to the minor characters' greater and more interesting struggles with visions, crime, addiction, and desperate love. Thus the novel undoes its main plot by making the background and the minor characters a thousand times more interesting that its protagonist and his petty marital and conscience problems.
In the end this is much more like reading a rather dry history of the Beats rather than a novel, more interesting for its portraits of Kerouac and Ginsberg than for its own artistic merit. Thus the third person voice helps to create this panorama of concerns, but also drags the novel back to the nineteenth century again and away from the modernist's new subjectivity, much less Kerouac's seductive and scintillating be-bop prose poetry.
March 2, 2009
Really awesome, like a postmodern "On The Road" you'd think was written last year deliberately to subvert the mythic image, when in fact the reverse is true: this book was the first one to use the phrase "beat generation" and was actually published before "On The Road", though it's not as well known. John Clellon Holmes was one of the Beats' inner circle before Jack Kerouac's fame started the beatnik craze. "Go" gives a more balanced portrayal of how that scene felt from the inside than Kerouac's book--for instance, in "Go", Hart Kennedy (Neal Cassady) gets slammed on his whole sexism trip by his ex-wife, and Pasternak (Kerouac) gets tagged for his private conservatism and worshipfuly imitating the posturing of Kennedy (Cassady)--who comes across in this book as a Fonz-like figure, bedazzling all the Columbia intellectual crowd with hipster jargon, dig, man, blow, and smoking tea. "Go" has almost all the same characters as "On The Road"--even one based on Herbert Huncke. Much of the narrative centers around the first "visions" of a character (based on Allen Ginsberg) named Stofsky, and his effect on the social lives of all the others. One interesting angle is when the Huncke character and two other underworlders, a slumped junkie named "Little Rock" who the character Hobbes (based on Holmes) casts as the epitome of "coolness" and a tall redhead named Winnie, move into Stofsky's apartment, using it to stash stolen goods, with increasing obviousness--the Stofsky character sees himself as a prophet subverting social values by hanging around with "the world's doomed and outcast" or some other such Blakean Ginsbergism. And that's not all!
August 8, 2013
chock full of beautiful language about love, drugs, sex, drugs, ennui that exists on the cusp of the Beat Generation's explosive, literary reaction. But this is a sad book, too - about young men and women looking to "Go and love without the help of any thing on earth." (p.246). The Beats weren't just Madmen, On the Road, and free - they were drug addicts, petty thieves, and the drifters of the unforgiving underbelly of 1950s NYC. They were young people looking for Home - and this Roman a Clef sets the foundation that launches a generation: those off to find the world and themselves: sometimes successfully, sometimes not.
Holmes says so himself that at times his writing is young and raw. It is. It often meanders too long or falls in love with the sound of its own voice. The end does fall apart - as though the author is trying to cram all the poetry he can into the last few scenes. But that cinematic ending forgives all - and leaves the reader wondering where Home truly is.
Holmes says so himself that at times his writing is young and raw. It is. It often meanders too long or falls in love with the sound of its own voice. The end does fall apart - as though the author is trying to cram all the poetry he can into the last few scenes. But that cinematic ending forgives all - and leaves the reader wondering where Home truly is.
August 7, 2017
A pretty great window into the inner workings of the Beats right before they started to publish and become famous. Holmes is much more of a realist than Kerouac (and certainly Neal Cassady) and doesn't hesitate to show the dark side of the Beat lifestyle--as when several characters get bored and sick of the antics of Cassady (here Hart Kennedy) and Jack Kerouac (here Gene Pasternak) at a bop (jazz) show. There's also lots of tooth-gnashing over the group's use and abuse of alcohol and drugs, and the confusion caused by several characters' commitment to sexual freedom.
It's clear/very likely Kerouac read Go and said "I'm gonna take out all the stuff that's a drag, man, and just go, go, go!"
It's doubtful Go would be as interesting if you didn't know who the characters REALLY were, and that in a few months many of them would be very famous. It's also divided into chapters narrated by Holmes' character Hobbes and the Allen Ginsberg stand-in David Stofsky, making the whole seem disjointed at times.
That said, the chapters float by like wild nights on the gritty side of town, broken up only by the bitter mornings-after that Kerouac so assiduously avoided in his more popular books. You also get a better perspective on the lives of the women who hung out with the Beats, and all the horrors they put up with. Holmes, unlike Kerouac or Cassady, feels empathy for the spots they keep putting them in (though they keep doing it, of course).
A pretty enlightening look back at the Beat era from a man who lived it, and who watched the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked... (you know the rest).
It's clear/very likely Kerouac read Go and said "I'm gonna take out all the stuff that's a drag, man, and just go, go, go!"
It's doubtful Go would be as interesting if you didn't know who the characters REALLY were, and that in a few months many of them would be very famous. It's also divided into chapters narrated by Holmes' character Hobbes and the Allen Ginsberg stand-in David Stofsky, making the whole seem disjointed at times.
That said, the chapters float by like wild nights on the gritty side of town, broken up only by the bitter mornings-after that Kerouac so assiduously avoided in his more popular books. You also get a better perspective on the lives of the women who hung out with the Beats, and all the horrors they put up with. Holmes, unlike Kerouac or Cassady, feels empathy for the spots they keep putting them in (though they keep doing it, of course).
A pretty enlightening look back at the Beat era from a man who lived it, and who watched the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked... (you know the rest).
November 20, 2014
If you think that the whole notion of the Beat Generation sprang from the head of Jack Kerouac when he wrote On the Road, you're wrong. Before Kerouac, there was John Clellon Holmes with Go, which -- partly fiction and partly autobiography -- tells of the frenetic search for liberation through drugs, alcohol, and even friendship that marked that strange group of young men who formed the core of the movement.
Holmes does, however, change their names: Holmes becomes Paul Hobbes; Kerouac, Gene Pasternak; Allen Ginsberg, David Sklofsky; and Neal Cassady, Hart Kennedy. (There are others, too, but these are the best known.)
Go is set entirely in New York City, and so leaves out the whole California efflorescence of the movement that was to follow.
While the novel is awkward in spots -- it was Holmes's first -- it is truthful and strangely analytical, as if Holmes were, to some extent, judging his own participation. When interviewed years later why he was so fascinated with this circle of friends, he replied:
In the end, I think the Holmes understood the Beat Generation more than Kerouac did. Kerouac, in the end, was one of its victims.
Holmes does, however, change their names: Holmes becomes Paul Hobbes; Kerouac, Gene Pasternak; Allen Ginsberg, David Sklofsky; and Neal Cassady, Hart Kennedy. (There are others, too, but these are the best known.)
Go is set entirely in New York City, and so leaves out the whole California efflorescence of the movement that was to follow.
While the novel is awkward in spots -- it was Holmes's first -- it is truthful and strangely analytical, as if Holmes were, to some extent, judging his own participation. When interviewed years later why he was so fascinated with this circle of friends, he replied:
Why did "Hobbes" yearn to know every aspect of the Times Square world? Undifferentiated reality. That is, life lived moment to moment as it unfolds. Spontaneous young men (and women, too, I'm sure) are attracted to the spontaneous, the improvised, the random, thus the wondrous.Of all of Holmes's characterizations, the one that stays with me the most is David Sklofsky as Ginsberg with his innocence, mysticism, and unending curiosity.
In the end, I think the Holmes understood the Beat Generation more than Kerouac did. Kerouac, in the end, was one of its victims.
September 8, 2010
Having read most of Jack Kerouac's books about this period in time, it was interesting to read about it from a different perspective. Holmes definitely takes a more sober view of everything than Kerouac did. Kerouac was all about the kicks, and Holmes is all about the consequences.
If you are reading the same edition as me, don't read the forward first. It reprints the entire last two paragraphs of the book.
If you are reading the same edition as me, don't read the forward first. It reprints the entire last two paragraphs of the book.
January 2, 2013
I really really loved this book. I wasn't sure what to expect, being about the Beats but not by Kerouac, but it was phenomenally good. Holmes doesn't have Kerouac's beautiful prose but he has an intensity that I found really appealing. He gave so much insight into his characters and their inner battles. The dialogue was great, their were so many memorable scenes even though so much of it was a whirlwind of parties and bar hoping. Despite being published in the 50s it was full of sex and drugs and jazz. I'm not sure how much I liked Holmes, I thought it was a bit telling that the only scene he made up was his wife sleeping with Kerouac, which seemed rather mean. But it was told so beautifully, and her explanation and feelings about it the next day when talking to him, and him not getting it was perfect. I feel like I had that exact conversation with one of my exs. I think that was part of the appeal to me was that it reminded me so much of my life in my 20s and it was lovely to read about the lives of people 50 years earlier and having them do the same crazy things, and go to exactly the same parties and have some similar dramas. In fact the only thing I wasn't expecting was the car chase, but then I suppose no book is perfect. His portrayal of the beats was different to Kerouac's they seemed rawer and not as nice. Particularly Neal, though I loved his portrayal of LuAnne, and their last fight. I think Kerouac came off most like himself. Ginsberg was interesting in that the homosexuality didn't really get mentioned till about 3/4 of the way through and then it was only hinted at as to why he was so depressed. I think one of my favourite scenes was when the fag and the junkie sat around and talked about their different opinions on society's rejections of them. I don't know if it was a reflection of the author, or society, that made it ok to talk about all the drinking, drug taking and sex but yet homosexuality was still so taboo. The book was such an amazingly intense ride, even when it was at it's most aimless wandering around in search of tea the characters seemed so vivid. While it was obviously based on real people and real events it felt like a novel rather than an autobiography and I think this really worked in it's favor and added tension. It was full of psychology and social commentary, without being blatant about it, just in the way the characters were trying to cope with life and get by the best they could. I totally loved this book, I can't recommend it highly enough. I am definitely going to read anything else I can find published by him.
October 7, 2015
Go by John Clellon Holmes is a book I’ve had sitting on my bookshelf since picking up a copy of the 1977 hardcover reprint edition at the Strand Bookstore in ’78 or ’79. I didn’t read it right away because I guess I thought is was just “lesser” Kerouac rather than a novel that provided a totally new viewpoint of the Beat Generation immortals. Kerouac (Gene Pasternak) and Neal Cassady (Hart Kennedy) disappear for sections on their road trips; we don’t see them on the road and on the west coast, but they are always in the conversation and they become major characters when they return to Manhattan where Holmes (Paul Hobbes) and Allen Ginsberg (David Stofsky) and others are waiting for them.
Go, which was published in 1952 before On the Road and is famously the first book to use the term “Beat Generation,” is a glossary of other slang from the period as well. “Go!” itself is Hart Kennedy’s catchphrase and in another place Hobbes mansplains at length the meaning of the new term “Cool” to a young romantic interest; Hobbes has a pedantic side that would mansplain “mansplaining” to a young romantic interest if he were writing a roman à clef about 2015 New York rather than late forties New York — a city where young men and women are smoking marijuana and listening to bebop in wild parties and older New Yorkers are still seen on the street in bowlers and spats.
Kathryn Hobbes, Paul’s wife, is a strong character throughout the book (as are more of the women than in a typical Kerouac novel), and she puts the Beat Generation in its place when she says to her husband about the legendary free-spirit Hart Kennedy, who is smoking pot, sleeping late, and chasing other women in New York while his travelling companion Dinah (LuAnne Henderson) is supporting him: “Sure,” Kathryn says, “He doesn’t want to lose her salary. Oh, he cares about those things, no matter what he says! But does he get a job? It’s been two weeks and I’ll bet he hasn’t even been looking. That’s the beat generation for you.”
I’d wholeheartedly recommend Holmes’ novel to anyone who has ever fallen under the spell of the Beats. It’s as if Jack and Neal had a sane friend who was staying home, taking notes, and willing to face a few of the hard truths they (and many of us, their readers) were trying hard and running fast to avoid.
Go, which was published in 1952 before On the Road and is famously the first book to use the term “Beat Generation,” is a glossary of other slang from the period as well. “Go!” itself is Hart Kennedy’s catchphrase and in another place Hobbes mansplains at length the meaning of the new term “Cool” to a young romantic interest; Hobbes has a pedantic side that would mansplain “mansplaining” to a young romantic interest if he were writing a roman à clef about 2015 New York rather than late forties New York — a city where young men and women are smoking marijuana and listening to bebop in wild parties and older New Yorkers are still seen on the street in bowlers and spats.
Kathryn Hobbes, Paul’s wife, is a strong character throughout the book (as are more of the women than in a typical Kerouac novel), and she puts the Beat Generation in its place when she says to her husband about the legendary free-spirit Hart Kennedy, who is smoking pot, sleeping late, and chasing other women in New York while his travelling companion Dinah (LuAnne Henderson) is supporting him: “Sure,” Kathryn says, “He doesn’t want to lose her salary. Oh, he cares about those things, no matter what he says! But does he get a job? It’s been two weeks and I’ll bet he hasn’t even been looking. That’s the beat generation for you.”
I’d wholeheartedly recommend Holmes’ novel to anyone who has ever fallen under the spell of the Beats. It’s as if Jack and Neal had a sane friend who was staying home, taking notes, and willing to face a few of the hard truths they (and many of us, their readers) were trying hard and running fast to avoid.
May 23, 2009
With many of the same "characters" (different names, but based off of the same real life people) in John Clellon Holmes, Go as in On the Road by Jack Kerouac, it's hard not to comapre the two. The general feels are different enough, Holme's contribution to the beat generation being entirely situated in New York and following the events of a battered marriage and the wild party lives of a core group as opposed to the cross country jumble of Kerouac's experiences with one Neal Cassidy; while the latter's work seems to be one town to the next with little relation outside of the linear trip itself, Holmes puts a more story like effort with a third person narration, not only following his alter ego, Hobbes, but relating events unexperienced by him through a second character, David Stofsky. His writing might not be on par with Jack Kerouac, but he makes up for it in general interest. If Kerouac is the technical chronicler of the beat generation, Holmes is the imaginitive realist; at once inside and outside of the group with a level of insight not held by others and delivering a genuine human interst story.
October 24, 2023
mér fannst svo leiðinlegt að lesa þessa bók. respecta samt bítkynslóðina og hvað þau voru að ganga í gegnum og svo framvegis. en ég bara get ekki svona aumingjaskap, sorry memmig. kathryn geggjaður karakter og þau áttu að hlusta á hana oftar.
August 14, 2013
Notable as being the first "beat" novel, Holmes' debut novel presents a surprising perspective on the bohemian lifestyle of that famous core group of the beats. Where Kerouac would immortalize the all-night drinking / drug parties and non-monogamous sexual relationships in a positive light, Holmes describes these situations as someone that is maybe a bit "square", and although fascinated by these people and how casually they would get involved in crime (grand theft auto, burglary, etc.), he was clearly torn between observing this self-destruction and attempting to maintain his shaky relationship with his wife.
Highly approachable yet beautifully written (if a bit awkward at times), Go seems like it should have been a confessional written by a friend of Kerouac, Ginsberg, etc. years later about the negative inter- and intra-personal effect bohemia had on some rather than the preamble to the explosion in popularity of cool. These impacts are particularly apparent and poignant in the case of many of the female characters in Go, who are among the most endearing and fascinating characters in this story. Where women come and go inconsequentially in Kerouac novels with little fanfare, Holmes gives nearly equal consideration to females and their role in the scene.
I am reading through Kerouac's Duluoz Legend chronologically by time period covered, and I inserted this book right before Town and the City. Although the events in this book actually take place after Kerouac's first novel, the publishing of the book is chronicled here, so it feels like a good place in that chronology to read it.
Highly approachable yet beautifully written (if a bit awkward at times), Go seems like it should have been a confessional written by a friend of Kerouac, Ginsberg, etc. years later about the negative inter- and intra-personal effect bohemia had on some rather than the preamble to the explosion in popularity of cool. These impacts are particularly apparent and poignant in the case of many of the female characters in Go, who are among the most endearing and fascinating characters in this story. Where women come and go inconsequentially in Kerouac novels with little fanfare, Holmes gives nearly equal consideration to females and their role in the scene.
I am reading through Kerouac's Duluoz Legend chronologically by time period covered, and I inserted this book right before Town and the City. Although the events in this book actually take place after Kerouac's first novel, the publishing of the book is chronicled here, so it feels like a good place in that chronology to read it.
November 7, 2008
A- The first novel of the Beat Generation. (Take that, On the Road!) Fantastic, really engaging…while his style isn't as spontaneous as Kerouac, some really interesting characters, and the style is engaging. Really enjoyed this. I can't believe I haven't read this until now! Highly recommended for all Beat afficionados.
November 22, 2015
I felt moved at the end. As terrible and beautiful as The Great Gatsby. Holmes had a tender insight into 'what matters' in life, even at age 23 or 26 or whenever he wrote this. I came to Go assuming it would be a timepiece, dated but interesting. I closed the book feeling very alive to the moment that I myself live in. Not a timepiece. Go is timeless.
January 8, 2008
Credited as the first book by/about the "Beats" it's a great little snapshot to that wild and 'innocent' time right before most of the major players would break out and become successful. Holmes has so many passages that are just as good, if not better, than his more established Beat brethren.
March 19, 2021
I see how this text influenced the Beats but I should've read it when I originally bought it and was super into the Beats.
January 27, 2014
This novel exists primarily as a roman-à-clef, depicting the early years of the Beat writers that have now become household names.
The book focuses on the usual cast of "characters", masked behind thinly veiled literary doubles, Jack Kerouac becomes Gene Pasternak, Neal Cassady - Hart Kennedy and Allen Ginsberg - David Stofsky.
While Kerouac documented every aspect of the movement - the jazz, drinking, drugs, crime, infidelity - as a living part of it, Holmes, although heavily involved, seems to have written as more of an outsider. Someone fascinated with the antics of the Beats, but lacking the freedom in his lifestyle and outlook to ever immerse himself fully in them.
As a result this book might not evoke the chaos and hysteria of the scene, but Holmes has produced a requisite chronicle of Beat life.
Written more as a confessional commentary, Holmes has captured the personal identities of his counterparts, and the honest depictions of their thoughts and dialogue gives perspective to the life events of these iconic writers.
Ginsberg in particular is portrayed with an intimacy that perfectly captures his eclectic personality. Arguably the hero of this piece, he's portrayed as a visionary with some of the best writing reserved to depict the content of his character.
The book serves as a good insight into the beginnings of the Beat movement and provides an interesting look at their interpersonal relationships but it does lack the almost lyrical style of other Beat memoirs.
Kerouac's On the Road is famed for his Continuous Prose and Burrough's Naked Lunch for its experimental structure, Go in comparison reads as somewhat formulated and prosaic.
Although possibly too conventional for some fans, Holmes' portraits of the inner circle of beat writers make this a must-read for anyone interested in the movement.
The book focuses on the usual cast of "characters", masked behind thinly veiled literary doubles, Jack Kerouac becomes Gene Pasternak, Neal Cassady - Hart Kennedy and Allen Ginsberg - David Stofsky.
While Kerouac documented every aspect of the movement - the jazz, drinking, drugs, crime, infidelity - as a living part of it, Holmes, although heavily involved, seems to have written as more of an outsider. Someone fascinated with the antics of the Beats, but lacking the freedom in his lifestyle and outlook to ever immerse himself fully in them.
As a result this book might not evoke the chaos and hysteria of the scene, but Holmes has produced a requisite chronicle of Beat life.
Written more as a confessional commentary, Holmes has captured the personal identities of his counterparts, and the honest depictions of their thoughts and dialogue gives perspective to the life events of these iconic writers.
Ginsberg in particular is portrayed with an intimacy that perfectly captures his eclectic personality. Arguably the hero of this piece, he's portrayed as a visionary with some of the best writing reserved to depict the content of his character.
The book serves as a good insight into the beginnings of the Beat movement and provides an interesting look at their interpersonal relationships but it does lack the almost lyrical style of other Beat memoirs.
Kerouac's On the Road is famed for his Continuous Prose and Burrough's Naked Lunch for its experimental structure, Go in comparison reads as somewhat formulated and prosaic.
Although possibly too conventional for some fans, Holmes' portraits of the inner circle of beat writers make this a must-read for anyone interested in the movement.
October 19, 2017
You kind of know this book already. Kerouac and Ginsberg have covered much of the same ground, only better.It's just that "Go" by John Clellon Holmes was first. The whole gang is in this book as well -Kerouac, Ginsberg & Cassady- but here they're more coolly observed, held at arm's length and viewed with a sense of detachment, and perhaps more truly.
For example, Neal Cassady is hardly the holy angel that Ginsberg rhapsodizes, nor is he the mad-to-live dynamo that Kerouac describes. He's more of self-centered, violent, sexist lout who drinks too much, indulges too much. Holmes makes it clear that his version of Cassady is heading for a flame out.
Many people do self-destruct in this novel. If you've read about the beats you already know about them: drunks, junkies, petty crooks, all careening down a mad path. Holmes puts WWII as the tipping point where these young men and women lost their way and began a such for what...excitement? variety? kicks?
In "Go," Holmes is not writing about kicks. He's writing about consequences. His gang is pursuing pleasure to escape a dark place, but in his depiction it is clear, escape is not possible.
For example, Neal Cassady is hardly the holy angel that Ginsberg rhapsodizes, nor is he the mad-to-live dynamo that Kerouac describes. He's more of self-centered, violent, sexist lout who drinks too much, indulges too much. Holmes makes it clear that his version of Cassady is heading for a flame out.
Many people do self-destruct in this novel. If you've read about the beats you already know about them: drunks, junkies, petty crooks, all careening down a mad path. Holmes puts WWII as the tipping point where these young men and women lost their way and began a such for what...excitement? variety? kicks?
In "Go," Holmes is not writing about kicks. He's writing about consequences. His gang is pursuing pleasure to escape a dark place, but in his depiction it is clear, escape is not possible.
June 19, 2014
I really enjoyed this novel, for me it was fascinating to have such a different outlook into the beats. Holmes can get a bit too verbose at times, but for me this was part of the young writer trying to capture everything as honestly as he can with whatever tools of the trade he knew at the time.
There's a lot of dialogue in this book, mostly converse-driven plot-wise. Which is fine, it's a social scene that is being documented here, not a tale. It took me a short while to figure out who was who, but most of the time just reading the dialogue one with the slightest familiarity with the beats can figure out who is who. One thing that truly fascinated me about this book, before I read it even, was learning that Holmes had written notes and conversations written verbatim from those days.
Considering the recent trend of Beat-inspired films recently, I think an adaptation of this novel is definitely in order. And anyone who enjoys the Beat Generation has only a partial view into the beats without this early, infantile look to those that formed it.
There's a lot of dialogue in this book, mostly converse-driven plot-wise. Which is fine, it's a social scene that is being documented here, not a tale. It took me a short while to figure out who was who, but most of the time just reading the dialogue one with the slightest familiarity with the beats can figure out who is who. One thing that truly fascinated me about this book, before I read it even, was learning that Holmes had written notes and conversations written verbatim from those days.
Considering the recent trend of Beat-inspired films recently, I think an adaptation of this novel is definitely in order. And anyone who enjoys the Beat Generation has only a partial view into the beats without this early, infantile look to those that formed it.
January 7, 2008
If you're going through a "quarter life crisis," this is the book for you. If you're turning into an aging hipster, please do read "Go" If you want to read a better version of "On the Road," pick "Go" up at your local book shop. It involves the same group of bohemians Kerouac hung with in their early stages. Being from the Philly area (can't speak for other urban entities), I could imagine these people living in West Philly in 2007 having the same set of aspirations and problems. It's basically Paul (our hero) and his group of character friends doing crazy and sometimes stupid things. Paul is growing away from them and wants to be more of an "adult."
April 16, 2010
i just can't understand how this isn't a more recognized work of the beat catalogue. it's a surprisingly intimate look at the life of a few of the key beaters (capturing ginsberg much more intimately than kerouac, cassady and huncke). it brings to dramatic life (perhaps too dramatic at times) these iconic persons and some of the essential life events i've only caught vague wind of in my beat inquiry. from ginsberg's arrest and his blakean visions to kerouac's initial publishing windfall and references to one of his & cassady's crosscountry journeys,
holmes swept me along. while his character on the page is rather frustratingly passive, his writerly honesty & attention comes across in powerfully moving ways...
holmes swept me along. while his character on the page is rather frustratingly passive, his writerly honesty & attention comes across in powerfully moving ways...
May 6, 2012
DRAFT
I liked this book a lot. Partly because it concerns the lives of beat generation writers in New York in the late 1940's who, like many readersd hold a fascination for me, with their full frontal assault on straight society but also because its well written and accessible. There are many anecdotes taken from actual events such as Stofsky's (aka Allen Ginsberg) revelations whilst reading Blake's poetry. Go is intelligent and observant without a trace of the heavy handed stylistic treatments of Kerouac with his "Bop Prosody" methods and optimism and wonder in at 1940's America. It is good to get a more grounded and critical assessment of the beat movement from such a close insider who.
May 5, 2014
An early Beat Generation novel, but one that I only came across recently, it features characters based on Kerouac, Ginsberg etc. and takes place about 5 years or so before On The Road was published. As such it has a mostly straightforward style to the narrative, but covers a lot of familiar ground that fans of this genre will be familiar with. It is really well written, but maybe doesn't have that wild, almost frenetic feel that the more well known writers from this group achieved later on. It would even be a good novel to start off on when thinking about exploring the Beat writers, as it certainly has a cool 50s feeling, as well as showing the kind of lives that some disaffected, bohemian young Americans lived post-WW2.
July 12, 2015
After trawling through many a Kerouac novel as a youth I finally found "Go". This is a great book.
However positive progression and the avant-garde within literature are, the advancement or stunting of the species...freedom and autonomy versus circumspect action. In "Go" Clellon Holmes approached classic literature as opposed to the forging, freshness and gimmicks of bebop prose.
The rancid filth of a post war bohemian struggle as the 60s approach. The perpetual imbalance and lack of security of walking on the wild side. Kerouac exposed as a lost boy, a creepy stalker, Ginsberg a gutter punk Angel, Cassady still burns on another plane. Truth be told the beautiful melancholy and poetic blues of existence bleed out of the streets of this book.
However positive progression and the avant-garde within literature are, the advancement or stunting of the species...freedom and autonomy versus circumspect action. In "Go" Clellon Holmes approached classic literature as opposed to the forging, freshness and gimmicks of bebop prose.
The rancid filth of a post war bohemian struggle as the 60s approach. The perpetual imbalance and lack of security of walking on the wild side. Kerouac exposed as a lost boy, a creepy stalker, Ginsberg a gutter punk Angel, Cassady still burns on another plane. Truth be told the beautiful melancholy and poetic blues of existence bleed out of the streets of this book.
August 18, 2011
Though not as lyrical or experimental as many of the other beat writers I've read, this book finds its own impressive voice in its commentary on the times. I've seen few other beats be able to express what I feel to be the central core of the beats in such a clear fashion, seeming to capture the identity of the participants so well. Admittedly, there is a great deal of awkwardness here, particularly when getting into analyzing what is going on or trying to talk about high ideas. Still, the narrative is strong, the description is vivid, and the characterization is amazing. A really good piece from this era. Strange that I haven't heard more people talk about it.
April 17, 2014
I enjoyed it, and it's a must-read for any beat aficionado. But it's a bit verbose and tedious, overloaded with contrived analysis and description. It's as if Holmes as a young writer thought the added adornment was necessary to get published, which may have been true at the time.
It's also contains none of the passion and verve of Kerouac and other beat works, but this was Holmes' admitted role with the beats, a somewhat detached observer on the fringe, rather than an ardent principal of the beat "movement."
Nevertheless, well worthwhile if you're looking for more insight into the beat characters, not so much if you're just looking for an entertaining book to breeze through.
It's also contains none of the passion and verve of Kerouac and other beat works, but this was Holmes' admitted role with the beats, a somewhat detached observer on the fringe, rather than an ardent principal of the beat "movement."
Nevertheless, well worthwhile if you're looking for more insight into the beat characters, not so much if you're just looking for an entertaining book to breeze through.
June 6, 2008
This is the book Kerouac would have written, had he stayed sober, stayed put in NYC and stayed in his "Town and City" Thomas Wolfe mode. Happily, he got drunk, hit the road and discovered spontaneous prose, which is really what made the beats "beat."
If you want reportage and a sober account of the late 40s/early 50s in NYC, then this is your book. It tells what happened, a bit about the why, but fails to capture the feel of that whole scene. Not bad, though, for a different perspective.
If you want reportage and a sober account of the late 40s/early 50s in NYC, then this is your book. It tells what happened, a bit about the why, but fails to capture the feel of that whole scene. Not bad, though, for a different perspective.
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