The incredible joy of rereading a great book

Lew Welch

I'm here to pitch a book. I didn't write it. Aram Saroyan wrote it in 1979, and I've recently blogged more about it below.  It's called Genesis Angels: the Saga of Lew Welch and the Beat Generation. I think it's the best book ever written about the Beats.

Here I am pitching it more earnestly than earlier, hoping to convince you to read it. It won't cost much of your time or your bank account. The hard cover is only 128 pages long. You can read it in an afternoon. An incredible afternoon.

Many used copies are available here for as low as $2.20

An ebook version for Kindle is available here for $2.99

Either will be the best book buy you've made in a long time.

Many things distinguish this book and make it so different from other books about the Beats, including the new The Typewriter Is Holy that I just finished, a fine book in its own traditional way. But Genesis Angels is something different entirely. It's more prose poem than history or biography, a short book whose brief chapters read like stanzas, written in a style reminiscent of the Beats themselves. Take a listen.

And one night—in the history of you and me—at the West End Bar, with alive tables and chairs and beers, and incredible conversations about everything under the sun, under the electric light—with West Side traffic outside, and goofed-up drunks, and young couples, husband with his tie loosened, wife with a new permanent—one night John Kerouac is introduced across the table to young, deep-fabled, not long out of New Jersey, Allen Ginsberg. This is the primal meeting, the plug-in that reverses historical currents and lights up new rooms in the mind of generations. One poet and another poet, in America, getting to know the drift of their own, single mind: Hello, I see you. Hello, I see you, 

And here ...

 In America, each of us is a stranger. The communities are mostly too large. Our neighbors are sphinxes, as we are to them. Passionate men and women are confused and rendered inefficient, and suspicious of their own enthusiasm and energy. We hide the poem written in our own soul, or offer it obliquely to the light: daisies in the city window, roses on the dining car table: the landscape speeds by, and our dream is unloosed in meaningless efforts: buying and selling pieces of a lost vocabulary of feeling, the dollars and cents can never replace. These Beat people were gardening in each other's real earth, starting to water and plant a new estate of the mind in the midst of American urban commerce. All the rehearsals of their identities are now like sacred texts of the genesis of an original, native American culture. We hunger for more of the truth of ourselves which they allowed themselves to be.

But the focus here is someone treated as a minor figure in other accounts of the literary brotherhood, Lew Welch.

 Lew was a poet, and he was still, too, an apprentice poet, which is a complicated thing in its own way. The poet's apprenticeship ends when his life and his art become one, much as any writer's apprenticeship ends. And yet, this is a more difficult passage at times for the poet: words are a kind of spell for the poet to break through; and they can hold a poet longer in their thrall. Finally, when he becomes himself fully, the poet knows the language with an intimacy that is rare among writers because he has endured through so deep an awareness of the autonomous powers of the language itself.

,.. When the Beat Generation broke over the national media, Lew Welch was surprised and awakened and struck with the pang of yearning to be there, finding his old friends Philip Whalen and Gary Snyder right there in the news. What is this? Where am I? Why didn't I continue to bicycle into the stars? What left me out in this silly charade of being a normal American copywriter when I know I'm as crazy as the others, and sincere.

...Good-bye advertising. Hello poverty and joy, pain and language. This was April. By July he had written a dozen poems that cut through all the rhetorical, Yeatsian superfluity and apprentice questions of the past, and started an original, Leo talk with the entire planet from his neat desk. "Chicago Poem," for instance, beginning: "I lived here nearly 5 years before I could/meet the middle western day with anything approaching/Dignity."

...He was talking now, and his language was suddenly inhabited by his life, rather than a squeezed version of himself between rules of grammar and precision choices. He was on.

---

Reed College poets: Snyder, Whalen, Welch

I won't mention the end of the book or of Welch; if you know about the Beats, you probably know how Lew Welch "ended" in a physical sense and if you don't, you'll be so blown away I don't want to ruin the response for you. But it's incredible -- and it gave me the title to what I consider to be my best screenplay, The Brazen Wing.

If you have a few hours, if you have a few bucks, if you respond to literature, get Genesis Angels. You won't be alone in your appreciation of this book, even though it seems to have fallen out of sight. I hope the new ebook version can give it a renewed readership. It well deserves one.

What others have said:

It is immensely moving. Joan Didion.

...approaches Lew from the inside--a comradely, intuitive, bold book that is a creative work in its own right. Also accurate, I vouch for that. Gary Snyder.

A fine memoir. Lawrence Ferlinghetti. 

This book is so poetic it should be read aloud -- and to this end, it deserves an audible book version read by an accomplished actor. I'd love to hear it read this way. I've been listening to David Drummond read -- perform is more accurate -- the U.S.A. trilogy by Dos Passos, and it's an extraordinary experience. A good reading of this book would be just as moving.