Back to Beatland Again: A Study in Moral Decay

Anybody who has ever collected star fish well knows how an interesting object can in a few days turn into a wad of putrid decay; this latest addition to the literature of the down-and-out is a sign that we have a literary star fish on our hands that must be buried, and quickly.

Zane's novel is not particularly outstanding; but its deficiencies are less his than those of the movement and the life which he writes about. The paucity of thought and craftsmanship which mark the novels of Beatland (On The Road is the bible of this pagan country) betray the trivial superstructure which American beats have errected upon a set of basic and simple propositions about the society they reject and the values they seek to transcend. In short, the beat generation is a barren subject-matter, and the more one has to say about it, the more one becomes repetitious, boring, and obnoxious.

Clinical candor about sex and the uncommuncative discourse of the hipster are poor substitutes for sound thought and mature craftsmanship, whch explains why so few of the works of the Beat literati have been interesting, let alone readable. Easy Living, at least, is comprehensible, but the hippies who hop in and out of the beds Zane has made for them are, on the whole, lifeless forms. Rarely to they seem human; often they seem to be nothing more than sex machines. One more pot of hashish or an additional romp in the love bed could not save the book. Zane's monsters no doubt have read their Henry Miller carefully and know their cues perfectly. Only their performances are shoddy, awkward, and deserving of the stage manager's book.

Easy Living concerns the escapades of two American expatriates who sleep in or about Paris and London. One, a bastard named only Wyeth, moves from bed to bed, uncaring and undiscriminating, seeking only to assuage a deep-down itch. His friend, Harry Steiner, is escaping from his middle-class Bronx past, from the squares back home, from his own terrible insecurity. They dig the easy life, the life of least resistance, the life of escape via jazz, junk, drink, and sex.

And everything is interesting for a while, just as the first dirty joke of the evening is engaging. But after a few hours, the range of vulgarity has been covered, and anything following becomes somewhat sickening, somewhat boorish.

Easy Living unfortunately never gets beyond the dirty joke stage. Steiner departs for America just as smut-ridden as when he left. The woman he almost came to love is, when the story ends, back in Paris where we first found her, still unloved. Only the location of the beds and the position of the players thereon have changed.

"Here is a story of a strange world and some troubled people," the dust jacket proclaims, "written by a young man who knows them at first hand." But how does Zane know them? Does he care? Does he approve? Does he condemn? Indeed, for the reader, does it matter? Wyeth and Steiner ultimately appear trivial and absurd. A child, at least, grows up; but the down-and-outs in Easy Living are adults gone to seed. They are grown men and women romping in diapers, shouting to attract our attention, aware of our criticism, scornful of our values, yet forever concerned with what we think of them. Children we can tolerate; child-men and child-women we generally lock up. Unfortunately, Wyeth and Steiner broke loose; but Zane seems unable to know what to do with the fools he has freed.

"Life's a gas, man," Wyeth remarks late in the novel. "You just gotta learn to compromise where it counts. Right?" But as Steiner points out, "The trouble is, where does it count?" This, alas, is a problem both for Steiner and Zane. Where does one draw a distinction between the moral and immoral? Neither Wyeth, Steiner, nor Zane seems to be particularly concerned with this question except to the extent that they raise it, then let it drop.

Yet Steiner's contempt for respectable America, the land of the free and the bourgeoisie, certainly implies a moral judgment that leads us to ask why Steiner is justified in rejecting those social regulations which transform the chaotic into the orderly, or in condemning those who seem to be more principled and responsible than himself. No matter how often we ask, however, Zane leaves us in a moral haziness, which leads us in turn to suspect that he doesn't know how to solve the moral dilemma he has generated. Perhaps this is because he has known too well these strange people, because he has been too long in their strange world to distinguish now between ponography and love, dirt and scum, mistakes and downright sinfulness.

It is precisely this failure to take a stand, however, that turns Easy Living into a trite account of the nocturnal habits of a seedy set of people. In the absence of any moral clarity, either in defense of or opposition to this new life, we are left with a gutless congregation of men and women--shallow, mechanical, colorless--who do absurd things and utter ridculous statements but who never seem to be aware of their own humanity.