While vividly evoking Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady and William Burroughs, this celebrated Beat Generation biography focuses on Lew Welch, the poet who lived the American Dream as an advertising man (shades of Mad Men) before dropping out. “My pick for the best written literary bio of anybody, ever,” writes Richard Meltzer in The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats. Includes classic … photographs.
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IMO, for what it is, this is a four-star book. If you were to rate it on what it could have (perhaps, should have) been, it would rate lower.
This is a short book, barely over 120 pages even with all the pages of photos included. It is well written, if not redundant in style and with much of the information it contains. Saroyan writes like a Beat Generation fanboy, emulating the style of Kerouac, which is usually recipe for disaster. Only thing is, he does it so damn well that, after a while, you can’t fault him for it. He’s a natural. And though Genesis Angels doesn’t contain a lot of information that hasn’t been much more exhaustively researched by writers such as Ann Charters and David Meltzer, Saroyan does a good job of concisely tying together the history of the core Beat writers on both coasts, with the spotlight focused (mostly) on Welch.
So what you get is a quick, entertaining read that goes down easily and quickly. You get a lot of information you already knew, mixed in with some new factoids you may not have previously known: for example, while working at an ad agency in Chicago, Lew Welch wrote the famous slogan, “Raid Kills Bugs Dead!” Another example: during the last decade of his life, Welch was the common-law stepfather of a young boy named Hugh Cregg, who would later take the stage name “Huey Lewis” — the surname a tribute to his influential poet father-figure.
There are plenty of other insights and guesses on the author’s part as to what Welch was thinking and feeling during different phases of his life. For much of this book, you are simply reading a condensed retread of the history of the Beats along with Saroyan’s assumptions of what was going on in Welch’s head. And somehow, it’s not bad at all. Credit due to Saroyan’s fantastic ability as an author; his approach to writing this book should have resulted in disaster, but it’s far from it. It’s actually good.
But to go back to what I said earlier about what this book could have been… If you go into this, as I did, expecting a more conventional autobiography (and let’s face it, Welch deserves one), you can’t help but be disappointed. Much of the early part of the book regurgitates the excellent interview with Welch in David Meltzer’s The San Francisco Poets (which I just happened to read recently; it was the instigation for my picking up this book). The middle of the book often abandons Welch to focus on the happenings of Kerouac, Burroughs, and Ginsberg — and we don’t need it here, because it’s been done to death elsewhere. And for whatever reason, the last years of his life are skimmed over. In fact, most of Welch’s life is skimmed over. This books is about 120 pages; let’s say about 80 are dedicated to Welch. Maybe not that many.
Why didn’t Saroyan do more here? Why couldn’t he give his subject the full treatment he deserves?
Perhaps the answer is that Welch, even during his life, is an enigma. Perhaps there simply isn’t enough to go on. It just seems that when this book was written (40 years ago, less than a decade after Welch vanished from the Earth) there were enough people around who knew him who could shed more light on his character. Now, the window may be shutting too quickly to ever see that happen. So we’re left with this: a very well-written book that still leaves the reader with the feeling that it could have been so much more.