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Nothing More to Declare

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Originally published in 1963 Nothing More To Declare collects essays that appeared in locations as varied as the New York Times and Nugget. Nothing More To Declare's 16 essays on topics like sexuality, living in the Forties and Fifties and profiles of Holmes' friends like Kerouac in "The Great Rememberer" and Ginsberg, in "The Consciousness Widener".

Holmes is the Beat who grownups can read and understand, finding identification rather than the nostalgic kicks of Kerouac or the paranoid view (whose ultimate end is impotent helplessness) of Burroughs and, to an extent, Ginsberg. In his most famous essay, collected here, "This is the Beat Generation", he attempts to catalog the philosophy of his literary minded friends and present them to a wider audience. He did, and by 1958's "The Philosophy of the Beat Generation", a bit more had changed. The public was deep in love with the caricature of the Beats that they had begun to see in the media.

The collection also contains some of Holmes' finest stylistic turns; highlighting the sort of prose a poet who has turned his back on poetry can create. "I read All Quiet on the Western Front, and dreamed of star-shells over splintered skulls through which trench poppies grew. . . " Unlike so many of his contemporaries though, pretty prose like that doesn't stop him from taking a cold hard look at himself, he relates his wife telling him "Whatever made you so guilty, so despairing? I'm sick of your whipped tail.") or the results of excess wreaked by and upon his friends, the Beats.

For those readers who have previously focused only on Holmes' fiction and not his non-fiction, it's actually advisable to read Nothing More To Declare before novels like Go. Holmes' essay "The Forties" reflects back on the same time period in his first novel, but with a wisdom and a carefully restrained, style that bridges the gap between rollicking fiction and apologia por sui vida.

Today, Holmes is near forgotten. But as an unique Beat Generation voice, the fact that so little attention should be paid to Holmes is shocking and may soon be coming to an end -- I've heard a rumor that Kerouac biographer Ann Charters is preparing a biography of Holmes and by the sheer weight of her own reputation, Holmes' is sure to rise.