Customer Reviews

Go: A Novel (Classic Reprint)

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Holmes is generally considered to be a Beat novelist, but that label creates unfair expectations for those who have not read his work. In truth, Holmes' writing is a narrow bridge between writer's of the 30's and early 40's and the Beats. His style is reminiscent of Thomas Wolfe to an extreme--something Kerouac was guilty of in 'The Town and the City.' The problem with this novel is that Holmes wants so badly to chronicle the activities and attitudes of the Beats, but he can't pull it off stylistically. Kerouac's spontaneous prose was better suited for the subject matter and themes. This is why Kerouac, not Holmes, is generally considered the King of the Beats. Holmes' prose is dense with word illustrations and bland dialogue. Compare this with Kerouac's economy of words and beat-laiden dialogue, and you'll see why Kerouac's chronicles of the Beat Generation more fully capture the essence and spirit of the movement. If you truly enjoy Thomas Wolfe, you'll like Holmes. But if you're thinking 'Go' is anything like 'On the Road,' think again.

Whenever the immortal giants are discussed and associated with The Beat Generation the trinity of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Cassady top the list. After reading "Go" by John Clellon Holmes I feel he deserves some recognition. His story follows 4 major characters that howl through early 50's New York along with a cast of minor junkies, addicts and Hobbes' wife who can't decide what she wants. From smoky jazz clubs like The Go Hole and all night "tea" parties Hobbes(holmes), Pasternak(kerouac), Stofsky(ginsberg) and Kennedy(cassady) face life's situations and decisions with actions and reactions that portrayed most everyone who would become what is known as "The Beat Generation." And, as we all know, that was really the beginning of all that is hip, cool, far-out and trendy.

An Extremely Important Book In The Beat Canon

We all know that Jack Kerouac was a more important writer than J C Holmes. More poetic, more rhythmic, more original, more driven by his passion, but was he more aware of the situation, and the relationships, and insightful? That's what I'm left wondering after returning to Holmes' book Go after I put it down 30 years ago, (I'm reading the 1959 British version The Beat Boys). I didn't finish it the first time, probably got less than a quarter of the way through it because it didn't seem to contain Kerouac's dream I found it too conventional, literate, dense with detail, dry?

Now having read all of the Kerouac canon and having searched volumes' of letters of such for further knowledge of The Beat Generation I happen back on Go and having a heavy bout of flu have the time to settle back by the fire with cat on lap and re-discover it - and by God it's all here, everything I ever wanted to know about the early days. You know how you wish you could have a time machine and travel back to be at a beat party in, say, 1949 and see Jack, and Neal, Luanne and Allen as they really were through the eyes of (yourself or) someone else - well now you can, it's incredible!

And not written in retrospect by someone putting the record straight or playing to an audience, satisfying a fandom, but Holmes is writing about them before he even knew that they would ever become famous (why?). Why would you do that? They must have been an extraordinary group of people or just I suppose living life in a wild way that didn't go on in the war years. Do you write books about your groups of friends? Documenting their every move? Yet Holmes does, and it's lucky for us he did. And the insight he shows on what those guys were like! Wow! and not just a couple of paragraphs or a soundbite that you might get from a friend talking on a video documentary but page after page of observing their lives. Point made.

This book is such a gift to Beat fans. As I say I attempted reading it about 30 years ago after reading Kerouac's euphoric hypnotic first person accounts of the Beatosphere and found 'Go' formal/dry/dense/ and not knowing the characters, gave up a quarter way through.

If I say that this book is as good a book as On the Road you know I'm not spoofing, because I'm one of Jack's biggest, long standing, fans and I wouldn't say such a thing lightly. The difference being, probably, that whereas OTR appeals to everybody with no background knowledge of the beat scene of the late fourties with Go a little prior knowledge of that scene and it's characters helps.

If Kerouac is the poet. Holmes is the realist. He lives with them, travels with them, enters into their 'experiences', but never judges, lets you draw your own conclusions. In fact it's questionable, was John a Beat? I think he'd say he was, he certainly loved them and was one of Jack's best friends.

With the film (American: movie) of On the Road finally being released to cinemas (American: theatres) near you the biographies of the Beats will abound, but Go which came out before any of the beat books will probably in the end prove to be the best biography to get. The others will almost certainly be judgemental, the biographers will be running their moral slide rules across the Beats, like an investigator entering a monastery and saying "this is all very well but these men are shirking their responsibility to support a woman and procreate". The said investigator not questioning his morals that society these days helps him support the woman to procreate with tax breaks and such and the children he procreates will be put through a school system which he himself hated, a work system which he himself hated and maybe made to inflict suffering on others by joining the armed forces.

This is a very long book.

I started out reading it to gain insight into Kerouac and Cassady and ended getting insight into Holmes and even myself. Outside of the Beats there are some marvellous passages and character observations. Take this page for instance -
Google: "Amazon"
Then: "Go by John Clellon Holmes"
Then: "Click to Look Inside" the book and search for the words:
"cool, laughing couples"
- how's that for wandering through a lonely city?
or
Take for, instance, this short passage:
After a nights heavy party, the host Hobbes (Clellon Holmes) having seen Kerouac, Cassady and attendant girlfriends and others out, goes to the bathroom:
"Hobbes was dizzy and nauseated from the beer and the marijuana and, leaving Dinah to arrange the spare blankets, he went into the bathroom to make himself vomit as was his habit whenever he was too drunk or sick to sleep.
"While leaning over the toilet getting up his nerve, he thought that the moment before making yourself throw up must be very like the instant before suicide. You are almost content to bear the sickening headache and the torment in your stomach rather than go through that moment. But the prospect of relief made you fool-hardy and you jammed your finger down your throat."
Do you get many passages in Kerouac as self-realising and insightful as that?

Was a time when I though that I'd discovered/read the whole Beat oeuvre: three quarters of Jack's books, Junky and Naked Lunch, Howl. That was about the lot I thought. Now I include Holmes' Go which I think can stand head and shoulders high with that group. Go, buy it!

It's time to take Go from the back of the bookcase, dust the cobwebs off of it, and put it up front between On the Road and Junky where it belongs. When's the film of Go being made?

But nothing I've told you so far prepares you for Part 2 Chapter 8 when Luanne and Neal fight this is some kind of crescendo but we're nowhere near the end of the book yet. It's so man/woman as they really are. So much deeper into male/female relationships than anything Kerouac attempted (or could accomplish) in his books. (From what I've read of him anyway.) This is probably because Holmes being a long-time married man could empathise with male/female entwinement better than Jack who was always on the retreat from it.

I've got to Page 147 (three quarters of the way through) and I'm feeling emotionally drained. I've been to a beatnik party (O.K. a Beat party) with Jack Kerouac, John Clellon Holmes, Allen Ginsberg, Holmes' wife, Neal Cassady, Luanne Henderson, (all under their stage names, or pseudonyms to be precise), find out what their pseudonyms in the book are by Googling:
>GO by John Clellon Holmes (Scribner's, 1952) Character name:<
This cast list thanks to the Beat scholar Dave Moore, of Bristol, U.K. on his website >beatbookcovers<

But as I was saying courtesy of this book I've been to a Beat party, I've scoured New York city with Neal Cassady for marijuana, I've frequented several cold water walk ups (which I take to be the American way of saying bed-sits in tenement blocks where you have to boil your own water (no heating), this is the late `forties after all). Listened to hot bop jazz on the radio with those self-same Beats as I recovered from a hangover ("Turn it down!") in one of the walk-ups. But most importantly, lived through (or observed at close quarters) the emotionally wrenching warm blooded relationships of the people concerned. Only a married man or a man who had a great rapport with women could write about personal relationships with the opposite sex so un-flinchingly, and in this book John Clellon Holmes delivers the goods.

This might seem like an over-long rave review but this book is a revelation. Holmes pokes into every corner of the Beat experience leaving no roach unexamined whether he's bathing Herbert Huncke's ulcerated feet while the exhausted engenderer undergoes cold turkey or attending a post war jazz fuelled jump-joint rave he's there, recording it for posterity.

as the above says, I have not encountered a novel that offered a better look into the daily lives of the beats from a "sort of" outsiders point of view.

A hard to find novel, and one I thought would be as entertaining as it is legendary. However, I found myself for much of the book wanting to put it down. It had at times, the trite voice of another young author putting too many words to too many pages. While it is a good chronicle of Beat life, illuminating more truth than perhaps On The Road might even. And perhaps thats it failure... it failed to gloss over too many blasie days and focus on the story... Id say... if you love the Beats, read it. But if yr looking to find out more about the Beats, read the more popular works and leave Go for later. Finally, if you do read it, and you find yr self dosing as often as I, skip to page 270. Assuming you know the Beats, Holmes story starts here.

At the moment of writing I have not finished John Clellon Holmes' novel yet. My reason for writing a review now is not to discuss the book (which seems to be quite eloquent and insightful thus far), but to warn potential buyers about the e-book. The Kindle version is horribly peppered with mistakes. It would seem that whoever scanned and uploaded the novel only wanted to make a quick buck. It has obviously not been checked for word/letter-recognition errors.

The price for the digital version is more expensive than the paperback, and yet this mess would never have been scraped off on the boot of a second hand bookshop. I have only reached chapter six and have already encountered many obvious "typing" mistakes. The most ridiculous is an unintelligible fragment of a sentence shoved between two paragraphs. I sure hope it's not the remnant of a chapter the "editor" missed.

Perhaps I should include my resume with this review. I'll be glad to clean up this mess if you can't do it, Amazon/Penguin.

The author has been generally ignored as to his place
in the formative years of Beat-O-Roma, and this book
becomes a good background check on his impressive
"credentials". He certainly can't write with that
jazz laced pen which Keroauc used to set the tone
of beat writings, but his story really sheds a lot
of light upon the struggles which this anarcistic
movement bestowed upon its followers.
All in all, if you like beat culture you
will probabley find this to be an enjoyable read.

I think that when it comes to the beat generation there is no other book to cronicle it. GO really gives you the base charactarization that can allow you to understand even further the other beat generation works. Especially allen ginsberg, and jack kerouac.

First novel, based on actual events, to actually open the window shades on the Beats. Ginsburg, Kerouac, they're all in here. Feel what it was like living in New York in the early 50's with all the hip-cats. Go, man, go

If you love the Beat writers, this early novel (published in '52) will please you. It portrays Beat development in late '40s Manhattan. The main characters are Ginsberg, Kerouac and Holmes before they were famous