{"id":10295,"date":"2011-10-06T11:18:33","date_gmt":"2011-10-06T11:18:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2011\/10\/06\/flannery-oconnor-on-the-beats-and-their-lack-of-discipline\/"},"modified":"2011-10-06T11:18:33","modified_gmt":"2011-10-06T11:18:33","slug":"flannery-oconnor-on-the-beats-and-their-lack-of-discipline","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2011\/10\/06\/flannery-oconnor-on-the-beats-and-their-lack-of-discipline\/","title":{"rendered":"Flannery O’Connor on the Beats and Their Lack of Discipline"},"content":{"rendered":"

Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being<\/em> (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1979), pp. 336-337, in a letter to Dr. T. R. Spivey dated 21 June 1959:<\/span><\/p>\n

\"O_connor_flannery2\"<\/a> I haven't read the article in PR [Paris Review<\/em>?] or the beat writers themselves.  That seems about the most appalling thing you could set yourself to do — read them.  But reading about them and reading what they have to say about themselves makes me think that there is a lot of ill-directed good in them.  Certainly some revolt against our exaggerated materialism is long overdue.  They seem to know a good many of the right things to run away from, but to lack any necessary discipline.  They call themselves holy but holiness costs and so far as I can see they pay nothing.  It's true that grace is the free gift of God  but to put yourself in the way of being receptive to it you have to practice self-denial.  I observe that Baron von H\u00fcgel<\/a>'s most used words are derivatives of the word cost<\/em>.  As long as the beat people abandon themselves to all sensual satisfactions, on principle, you can't take them for anything  but false mystics.  A good look at St. John of the Cross makes them all look sick.<\/span><\/p>\n

You can't trust them as poets either because they are too busy acting like poets.  The true poet is anonymous, as to his habits, but these boys have to look, act, and apparently smell like poets.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is the only reference to the Beats that I found in The Habit of Being<\/em> apart from the sentence, "That boy is on the road more than Kerouac, though in a more elegant manner." (p. 373)<\/span><\/p>\n

Although O'Connor did not read the Beat authors  she correctly sensed their appalling side (William Burroughs, for one example) and zeroed in accurately on their lack of discipline and adolescent posturing as 'holy' when they refused to satisfy the elementary requirements of becoming such.  But in fairness to Kerouac one should point out that he really did at one time make a very serious effort at reforming his life.  See Resolutions Made and Broken<\/a>, No More Booze, Publishing, or Seminal Emission<\/a>, Divine Light, Sex, Alcohol, and Kerouac<\/a>.  <\/span><\/p>\n

And I wonder what Miss O'Connor would say had she lived long enough  to read that book by the Holy Goof, Neal Cassady, entitled Grace Beats Karma: Letters from Prison 1958-1960<\/em>? (Blast Books, 1993)  Grace Beats Karma<\/em>: what a wonderful  title, apt, witty, and pithy!  I shall have to pull some quotations before October's end.<\/span><\/p>\n

Arguably, the central figure of the Beat movement was not Kerouac (OTR's Sal Paradise) but Neal Cassady (OTR's Dean Moriarty).<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1979), pp. 336-337, in a letter to Dr. T. R. Spivey dated 21 June 1959: I haven't read the article in PR [Paris Review?] or the beat writers themselves.  That seems about the most appalling thing you could set yourself to do — read them.  … Continue reading “Flannery O’Connor on the Beats and Their Lack of Discipline”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[202,40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kerouac-and-friends","category-literary-matters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10295"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10295\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}