You thought you heard of them all. But Seymour Krim is the Missing Beat.
Oh, he was a Beat, alright. He edited The Beats (1960). He was included in The Beat Scene the same year. He lived in the Village, wrote for the Voice, had no dough, no wife, no regular work, drank at the White Horse Tavern, and proclaimed his debt to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road for the green light that signaled not WALK but TALK — and he did.
Krim let loose with a barrage of words that his work as a literary critic had no use for. And like a Hollywood movie hero discovered that what the world really loved was his wretched poor self and not that respectable front he wore for disguise.
At least, at first.
Norman Mailer wrote the foreword to Krim’s 1961 collection, Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer. James Baldwin praised it in his review for the Voice and Saul Bellow published an article from it in his own journal, The Noble Savage. Krim published two more books, taught writing at Columbia University and at Iowa, won a Guggenheim and a Fulbright, and managed to piss-off both Mailer and Jimmy Breslin and alienate so many in New York’s literary and publishing worlds that when he died in 1989 at age 67 he was already largely forgotten.
Since then he has been left out of every Beat anthology you can name.
Except that in 1992, Dan Wakefield’s New York in the Fifties recalled Krim’s “jazzy, electric prose.”
And Bellow reprinted that early Krim essay in a 2002 Best from Five Decades collection.
And that same year critic Vivian Gornick called him “the Jewish Joan Didion.”
And in 1993 I read Krim’s “Making It!” essay and learned that James Wolcott was right. “The happy kick that comes from reading Seymour Krim is irresistible.”
But I wondered, was Krim really a Beat?
The Beats were mainly poets and novelists and Krim was neither. His writing was first-person, journalistic, jumpy excited canny. Sometimes wounded but never mystical, forbearing, forgiving, Buddhist or trembling.
(Any trembling came from number 9 train. It runs under the Village.)
What did he write about? He wrote about success and failure, whites and blacks, intellectuals and writers. And he wrote about Jews.
That’s what Missing a Beat: The Rants and Regrets of Seymour Krim is about.
But that’s another post.
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