Another Reason to Like Kerouac

The ultimate dharma bum talks to God ...

Found in Jack Kerouac's journals from 1947, the year I was born, no further comment required (fom Harper's magazine):

And what do I owe You, God, for my gifts:
I owe you perspiration and suffering and
all the dark nights of my life:
God I owe you godliness and diligence,
God I owe you this blackest loneliness,
and terrified dreams--
but humbleness, God, I have none and
I owe it You: for I would have You
reach down a hand to me, to help me
up to You--Oh I am not humble.
Give me this last gift, God, and I will
be humble, I will owe You humbleness,
but only give me the gift.
Spit in my soul, God, for asking and
always asking, and for not giving and
owing what I have given, and give,
and shall give: God make me give.
Old Job there of the three thousand five
hundred years a-mouldering in his grave,
Old Job there is your servant, God:
forgive me for my youth, then, forgive
me for it, God, oh make me a giver.

On the Road (Again)

No, it's not about Willie Nelson ...

Sure, you read On the Road once, but have you read it lately? I decided it was time for me to look at it again after a pause for reflection that lasted about forty years.

The first time I read it I was in high school. Overlooking the fact that Jack Kerouac was the same age as my parents, I regarded him rather as an exciting big brother who was exploring the world ahead of me and sending back reports.

In this way I was like my buddy Jerry whose older brother was in college, had served in the Coast Guard, played folk guitar, and who introduced us to the Beats by passing along his cherished recording of Allen Ginsberg reading Howl with Kerouac reading from Visions of Cody on the flip side.

It's impossible to overstate the impact this had on us--though I think it had a greater effect on me, as an aspiring writer. This stimulus was all it took to send me out to the book stores in search of more material. Eventually I found On the Road as well as The Dharma Bums, The Subterrraneans, and an incredible collection simply called The Beats, which I still own, and which contained book extracts, articles, and poetry from a long list of authors including Diane DiPrima, Phillip Whalen, and many others. I also discovered a novel by Jean Genet and the hair raising Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby, and Naked Lunch and Nova Express by William Burroughs. It was a whole new world.

Just a few years after I discovered him, and only twelve years after the publication of On the Road, Kerouac died at the age of 47 in St. Petersburg, a couple of hundred miles from my home in Miami. Over the years he and the rest became a fond memory, though periodically I revived my interest in their work.

Once, a recollection of Diane DiPrima's "13 Nightmares" sent me back to look at The Beats again. Then an article in The Herald about a visit to Kerouac in his last days by journalist Jack McClintock (who I met once) became the inspiration for a story of my own, called "Stalking Jack." In my version the first person narrator is a hippie whose encounter with his idol is both a disillusionment and a foreshadowing of his own dissolute future, a generational passing of the torch.

Researching the story led me to consume several Kerouac biographies. Perhaps the best is the one by Ann Charters, who knew him well, but Memory Babe by Gerald Nicosia is also great reading. This took me to some of Kerouac's other work that I had not read before: Tristessa, for example--a memoir of a sojourn in Mexico City in which the first 60 pages take place in the same hovel of a living room with Kerouac seated in the same chair, yet which is compelling to read. And his shorter pieces like "In the Railroad Earth," about his time with the Southern Pacific Railway, are some of his finest writing. Recently I re-read The Subterraneans, supposedly written in two weeks, which may be the best example of his stream-of-consciousness style.

At last I found my way back to On the Road where it all began--not his first novel, but the one that made his fame and the one that ignited the concept of the "beatnik" in American culture.

[Historical note: the -nik suffix was added to "beat" after the launch of Sputnik, the first space satellite, in 1959. The media meant it in a derogatory way, much the way "hip" and "hipster" became transformed later into "hippie." The origin of "beat" is attributed to Herbert Huncke, one of the less savory members of Kerouac's circle of intimates. Kerouac always claimed it meant beaten down in a saintly way, "beat as in beatific," which is how he described it in On the Road.]

All I remembered from my first encounter with the book was racing back and forth across the continent with Dean Moriarty (AKA Neal Cassady) in an orgy of wine, women, song, and life. So my first surprise was that Part One, the first 90 pages, is about Jack's own solo journey across America and back. By bus and hitching rides he makes his way to Denver to link up briefly with Dean and company, then on to San Francisco, which is revealed to be amazingly hip seeing as it is only 1947 (the year I was born). Bebop is in full swing at the jazz clubs, as is the drug culture that has not yet gone mainstream everywhere else.

Still restless, he decides to join Old Bull Lee (William Burroughs) and Carlo Marx (Allen Ginsberg) down in Louisiana. However he is quickly waylaid by meeting a cute Mexican girl on the bus, and instead ends up living with her in Southern California, hanging with her family and doing backbreaking work as a cotton picker for a buck fifty a day--that's one dollar and fifty cents, kids.

This interlude contains some wonderful lines, such as, "I made love to her under the tarantula." Naturally, because in the barn where he was staying a giant spider lived in the rafters overhead. This foreshadows the later memoir of his daughter, Jan [see Baby Driver], who lived for a time in Mexico in a thatched hut the roof of which was infested with scorpions.

Or how about this, as they are breaking up: "We turned at a dozen paces, because love is a duel, and looked at each other for the last time." But Kerouac sneaks another peek at a hundred feet and sees her walking back to her life as he goes back to his.

Money wired from his "aunt" (actually his mother) back in Patterson NJ buys him a bus ticket most of the way home. He says he has a book with him that he stole back in Hollywood, "but I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along." And transcribing it pretty well, I might add.

Incidentally, the Hollywood connection is that back in SF a friend had encouraged him to write a screenplay that he would help him sell to the movie studios. Kerouac went along with the idea but thought his attempt was "too sad" and did not expect success. Weeks and months later, after working in the cotton fields with the Mexicans, he drops by Columbia Pictures "just in time" to pick up his rejected manuscript, then it's off across the country again. The image of mad Jack scurrying unnoticed around the feet of the movie moguls is priceless.

[There's a movie we'll never see -- On the Road, starring Marlon Brando as Sal Paradise and James Dean as Dean Moriarty, that might have been directed by John Huston or Orson Welles. Just think.]

I'm leaving out so much -- like the connections and allusions to Steinbeck and the Grapes of Wrath dust bowl, Okies going west, grafting Jack firmly onto the American literary tree while rooting him with the working class he felt most at home with. Living with the hobos he is never a college boy slumming it. His affection for, and comprehension of, these people is always genuine and heartfelt.

"They thought I was a Mexican," he says of the townspeople when he was picking cotton. "And in a way I am."

Then along comes Part Two and the slim book gathers itself, winding up like a spring, for the Dean Moriarty voyages that will propel us to the end, six thousand miles and a hundred sixty pages further on. There is an orgiastic explosion up ahead in Mexico, and a crash of mutual abandonment in the end. But I'm going to leave you right there as they are poised to take off:

"He and I suddenly saw the country like an oyster for us to open; and the pearl was there, the pearl was there."

A repetition that would only occur to the poet that Jack was.


*Footnote: Just learned that in August Viking will be publishing the original version from the famous scroll -- one of the most unique artifacts in recent literary history -- so we'll get to read it yet again as if for the first time. Stay tuned.

In Praise of the Book

"But what's going to happen to all the books?" asked my friend ...

Having praised the new breed of digital book readers, I'd like to take a step back and argue the opposite case. First off, isn't it a bit of a misnomer to call these devices "readers?" To paraphrase the slogan of pro-gun lobbyists, "Computers don't read books, people read books." All these devices do is show them to us; we still have to read them. They should be called "viewers" or "displayers," but that is way too dull to ever catch on, so we are probably doomed to call them readers from now on. Soon the noun "reader" will come to mean the thing, not the person who reads, and instead of "reading" we will end up "readering" our books.

Of course it's a good thing that we still have to read, and that we have so much material available both from the present and the past. It's also an advantage that the size of our personal libraries will no longer be limited by the amount of windowless wall space we are willing to devote to bookshelves in our homes. But two incidents have forced me to look again at what we are losing in the transition.

The first one was a visit with my high school English teacher and personal mentor, Harry. For years I've been telling him that digital books are on the way, and how great that will be. Some time ago I showed him a laptop computer with text on the screen just to give him an idea, but he was unimpressed. Even though this machine was probably outweighed by the Oxford English Dictionary, it seemed way too heavy and clunky to him--not the sort of thing you would curl up in bed with before going to sleep.

Even though I know people who would do that, I had to concede his point. I also knew that his attention span would far outlast any available battery (we're talking Marcel Proust), and the idea of having to be plugged in while you read was a non-starter. But just wait, I told him, they're getting smaller and lighter all the time ...

So naturally I had to show off my cute little Sony when I got one. Small enough to fit in a jacket pocket, able to go weeks without a charge, lighter than a hardbound book, holding enough reading matter for an entire summer vacation ... it's Superbook!

"But," he said, his faced lined with concern, "what's going to happen to all the books?"

It's easy to dismiss this attitude as clinging to the past. Who would want to go back to the days of cassette tapes or vinyl LP's or player-piano rolls now that we have digital recording technology? Or, perhaps a better analogy, why would we copy a book by hand once the printing press has been invented? Or use a typewriter instead of a word processor?

But his feelings were not just nostalgia for the past. They came from a form of fetishism familiar to anyone who has ever loved a good book. Through the act of reading them these objects become parts of ourselves, as well as talismans representing their authors and the worlds of imagination contained within them. It's no accident that a staple of children's fiction is the magic book, one whose cover is a door into an enchanted other realm.

I remember a friend saying of a cherished volume of short stories, "I'm carrying it around like it's my velveteen rabbit." Is it possible we will ever feel the same way about our ebook readers, whose covers are always the same regardless of what text they contain, and whose pages never get dogeared and fly-spotted from use? Even the yellowing paper of an old book speaks to us of its age and lends import to its counsel.

The second incident involved Jack Kerouac. I've rediscovered him more than once since the first time, when I was in high school. This time it was due to a reading at our favorite bookstore, Books & Books, by John Leland, who has written Why Kerouac Matters. I won't tell you why if you don't know already, but I can say that the best thing about the reading was that it sent me back to read Kerouac again. Consulting my bookshelves (they occupy two of my windowless walls) I selected a battered copy of The Subterraneans, the same one I had bought and read while still in school so many years ago when it was newly published in paperback by Grove Press with a cover price of $1.45. (Let's not forget the fetishism of publishers, too.)

This book, containing some of Jack's most powerful and lively stream-of-consciousness prose, details--dissects might be a better word--his brief affair with a black woman who was going off her rocker in the hipster subculture of 1950's San Francisco. It was actually made into one of Hollywood's most atrocious movies (mercifully NOT available from Netflix) in which the part of Leo/Jack was played by George Peppard and his lover, Mardou, by the not only white but blond Leslie Caron, which kind of shows how they missed the whole point. In spite of a terrific jazz soundtrack by Andre Previn, featuring Gerry Mulligan and Carmen MacRae, I can only recommend that you read it, not watch it.

So one day this week that's what I was doing. I carried it into Chick'n Grill at lunchtime and had it on my tray while I paid. The cover caught the eye of the young woman at the register--The Subterraneans in big bold letters with the rough shape of the Golden Gate Bridge giving a sense of location.

"What's your book about?" she asked. In the moment that it took me to think how to answer, I noted the flash of intelligence in her eyes, and felt a sense of pride in the democratic lifestyle that spreads our culture widely, however thin it may be.

"The Beat Generation," I replied.

"The what?"

"You know, the beatniks? Back before the hippies?"

"Oh. Was that you?" A mischievous smile, letting me know my age.

"No, that was before me."

"What were they like?"

"Well, they were pretty far out."

She laughed, and took my money, and I took my book to eat with me. There it was, my own name on the inside of the cover, written in my teenage hand. My pencil underlines were still to be found, and occasional notes of appreciation in the margins -- the record of myself cheering the author on like a jazz aficionado shouting "Go!" and "Yeah!" during the sax solo, exactly what Kerouac's fondest wish had been.

This book and I were old friends. The experience of renewing our acquaintance was more than just taking in the words again, it was touching a part of my past. And it was an experience I could never have in digital form. Nor would that young woman have thought to ask what the book was about if all she had seen was the blank leatherette cover of my reader. When people see that they are more likely to ask, "What is it?" rather than "What are you reading?"

So here's to the lowly book. Though it may come to be regarded as a Dead Sea Scroll, or a cuneiform clay tablet, and though it may be on its way into oblivion, let's honor it and think fondly of it as we set it gently on the shelf of history.