The Beats held in Seymour Krim disappearance

Seymour Krim has been erased from the Beat record.

It’s worthy of an Onion style headline.

Krim edited the The Beats in 1960 and was given close to top billing on the cover of The Beat Scene that same year (his name is fourth from the top in the list of contributors, bested only by Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and Kerouac). So his MIA status is striking.

It’s a fascinating case for anyone interested in how a literary canon takes shape. In the heat of the creative moment the boundaries are porous. All sorts of cranky souls are allowed into the literary tent. Then when the passion seeps out and people get their bearings they look around and wonder, who the hell let him in here?

When did the moment of Beat sobriety arrive and canon-building begin? A border-setting Penguin Classic is a good place to start looking.

The Portable Beat Reader appeared in 1992. Krim is nowhere to be found. That seems to have set the boundaries. Krim is left out of The Birth of the Beat Generation (1995), The Beat Book (1996), The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats (1999), Beat Down to Your Soul: What Was the Beat Generation? (2001) (Krim titles only mentioned in back matter Chronology), The Beats: A Literary Reference, Syncopations: Beats, New Yorkers, and Writers in the Dark, The Beats: A Graphic History (2009).

He’s also absent from UC Berkeley’s Beat Generation resource page.

Likewise for the go-to site for things Beat, Literary Kicks, where founder Levi Asher wrote one of the world’s most incisive, Krim-like lines as the opening to the last chapter of his memoir: Do we search out the bottom, those of us who eventually find ourselves hitting it? I think we must.

A special plea

Oh, man. Oh, man, Levi, please, please get a hold of Krim’s You & Me and read “For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business.” (Don’t read the essay as it appears in What’s This Cat’s Story? the best of Seymour Krim because the essay’s poignant last paragraphs were inexplicably chopped off. My new Missing a Beat collection prints the whole piece but it won’t be out till April.) The terrifically astute Vivian Gornick wrote about the essay in The Situation and the Story and I see now that it is on her list the of the Ten Greatest Essays, Ever.

Back to our program

Now, the drawing of the Beat boundaries did not take place in a vacuum. It happened alongside the rise of women’s studies, multiculturalism, African American studies, gay studies and Queer Theory, and Jewish studies. Writers and other culturally important actors were conscripted into these new factions to overcome the neglect of the The Canon, the derided dead white males.

[Finally figured out what I wanted to add so here it is, two days later:] These conditions changed reading. We read differently now. Themes that were overlooked when a book was introduced as 19th century American lit are grasped when assigned as women’s literature or part of imperialism in the west, etc.

This trend was castigated by my hero, Saul Bellow. For him, any new understanding of Moby Dick gained by a Marxist view of the Pequod as factory and the sailors as proletariat, for example, was trivial compared to and even damaging of the emotional experience delivered by artistry.

(I can’t argue with that because I’ve been Bellowized. Years of reading Bellow has done to me what Boswell gloated that his Samuel Johnson biography did to England. “I have Johnsonised the land; and I trust they will not only talk, but think, Johnson.”)

But whether the new reading was positive or not, it happened, and I’ll bet that any editor of a Beat collection who considered Krim was shocked to find after reading a few pages that he was up to his neck in Jews.

Which demands another post with an Onion headline: Jewish Studies held in Seymour Krim disappearance.