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Book reviews |
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Road gang still leads the pack
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Reviews |
ROAD GANG STILL LEADS THE PACKReviewed by Giles Hugo WHEN I first encountered Jack Kerouac's writing I was working in a Johannesburg bookshop. Every week we were issued a copy of Jakobsen's List, detailing all the decisions of the South African Publications Control Board (PCB). If a book was banned, you had to return it to the publisher, embargoed books were taken off the shelves pending a decision by the PCB, and a title released from embargo could be put back on sale. Very rarely a book was unbanned. That was back in 1968, and I didn't hang around in the job long enough to see the works of Jack Kerouac unbanned. But I did manage to acquire as much of the Duluouz saga as I could. As soon as one of his titles came in it was usually listed as embargoed, and I would put one aside for myself. 'On the Road' was already banned, so I had to wait until I got to London later that year to up on the classic that made his reputation. Instead I started with 'Desolation Angels', and I still think it is a fuller, more intriguing work than 'On the Road'. What immediately impressed me was Kerouac's love of, and ability with, language. At his lyrical best his writing is exhilarating, a flat-out torrent of impressions and sensations enlivened by his idiosyncratic 'cosmic fool' commentary. Kerouac was quite prolific, but after a couple of years I had collected and enjoyed all his published works. Happy happy, joy joy, when a few weeks ago my favourite Hobart bookseller thrust a copy of 'Good Blonde & Others' into my paws, knowing I couldn't have resisted it, even if it was just a collection of Ti Jean's old shopping lists. In fact, this is a collection of Kerouac's uncollected writing - pieces published between 1958 and 1971, mostly in magazines such as 'Evergreen Review', 'Esquire', 'Playboy', 'Pageant', 'Black Mountain Review', 'Writers Digest' and 'The Atlantic', and as introductions to books or contributions to anthologies. Hence it's a fairly mixed bunch of stuff, ranging from reflections on the Beats, Zen, Beatdom and his own writing, to appreciations of Shakespeare, football and baseball, and quirky thoughts on politics and American culture. Decades later, it's hard to see why Kerouac posed such a threat to the thought police of the '50s and '60s. It was easy for the Right - and the extreme Left - to label Kerouac as some sort of cultural enemy, but actually he was far more complex than the media or critics of the time realised. Take, for instance, his (in-)famous 'Bippie-in-the-Middle' piece, called 'What I am Thinking About', published in 1969 as 'Man, Am I the Grandaddy-O of the Hippies' in 'Miami Tropic' - you can see why Kerouac mistrusted and despised the media, which sought to (mis-)label and (mis-)understand him in the tabloidish terms of pop culture, such as it was back in the '50s and '60s. Written close to his death, 'What I am Thinking About' is another attempt by Kerouac to distance himself from the worst excesses of the '60s, for which he and his Beat mates were copping a lot of blame. He kicks off with: 'I'm trying to figure out where I am between the established politicians and the radicals, between cops and hoods, tax collectors and vandals. I'm not a Tax-Free, not a Hippie-Yippie - I must be a Bippie-in-the-Middle'. Then he defines himself out of association with either the American Society Establishment or the indulgent extremes of professional radicals like Tim Leary, Jerry Rubin or Abbie Hoffman - ending with a quote from British cartoonist Smythe's Andy Capp: 'What I need is less people tellin' me what I need.' Don't we all. Partly, it seems, Kerouac was reacting against the '60s version of political correctness. Unlike Burroughs and Ginsberg, who were both from basically middle-class backgrounds, Kerouac had strong peasant working-class roots, and his love of America was much more unconditional, less complicated. He did not have Ginsberg's pink tinge or Burroughs' anarchism. However, while in his last years some of his associates felt Kerouac had slid further Right, perhaps they didn't understand his Beat tolerance. In one of his 'The Last Word' columns for Escapade magazine, writing about media manipulation, he says: 'I even saw a blatant lie in 1954 when Joe McCarthy made one of his few brilliant points about increasing Communism in America and read the 'full transcript' in the paper the next day only to find it deleted - Now if I defend Kruschev, Joe McCarthy and me that doesn't make me a Shmommunist but what is the matter with America when the time comes when men are so hung up on their jobs that they'll lie in public, in great numbers, under the mistaken assumption that 'the news' has got to be bad, not good, or nobody will follow the news.' If alive today - post Cold War, and faced with the intellectual Stalinism of postmodernist political and artistic correctness - would Kerouac have been a fan of Noam Chomsky and John Pilger? Kerouac reacts to people and situations with his own unique Catholic/Zen/Beat compassion. In 'On the Road to Florida', an account of his travels with photographer Robert Frank, published in 'Evergreen Review', he describes a scene in Rocky Mount, North Carolina: 'Hundred of out-of-work Southerners of the present recession milled about in the Russia-looking mud staring at things like the merchant's clutter of wares in the back trunk of his fintail new-car... there he sits, before his tools, drills, toothpaste, pipe tobacco, rings, screwdrivers, fountain pens, gloomy and jut jawed and sad, in the gray Southern day, as livestock moo and moan within and everywhere the cold sense of drizzle and hopelessness. "I should imagine," said Robert Frank to me that morning over coffee, "though I've never been to Russia, that America is really more like Russia, in feeling and look, than any other country in the world... the big distances, the faces, the look of families travelling." We drove on, down near South Carolina got out of the car to catch a crazy picture of a torndown roadside eatery that still announced "Dinner is ready, this is It, welcome" and you could see through the building to the fields the other side and around it bulldozers wrecking and working.' He susses that ordinary people are ordinary people, irrespective of what ideology is imposed on them. Perhaps the most interesting items in this collection are Kerouac's reflections on writing, such as the highly instructive gem, 'Belief & Technique for Modern Prose' - a 30-point 'List of Essentials' including: 'Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy... Submissive to everything, open, listening... Be in love with yr life.. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind... The unspeakable visions of the individual... Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibitions... Write in recollection and amazement for yourself... Believe in the holy contour of life... Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind... No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge...' While the techniques and the credo would be still be anathema to most modern 'serious, literary writers', they sure worked for Jack. Truman Capote referred disparagingly to Kerouac's work: 'That's not writing,
that's typing.' There is a certain irony here, because while Kerouac missed
out on the literary acclaim that was heaped on Capote, and his work was
seen by academia and the cultural mandarins as an undisciplined indulgence,
the enduring appeal and influence of Jack's work on later writers is stylistic
and inspirational. Kerouac's descriptive and narrative peculiarities directly
reflect the man and his life, in love with words, language, ideas, people
and the living of life. It all happens - on the page, as in life - without
a well- This may have offended Capote the literary craftsman and sundry academics, but it inspired a gonzoid generation of stylistic writers - Ken Kesey, Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe (actually more New Journalism than Gonzo), Richard Brautigan, Kathy Acker, and, here in Australia, Frank Moorhouse and Michael Wilding. In fact, Kerouac was perhaps the first gonzo writer - although he didn't coin the term - using on-going, involved autobiographical prose as a legitimate literary genre, combining elements of traditional fiction (pure story telling), journalism and autobiography in a heady, highly personalised exhilarating mix. Ironically, both Kerouac and Capote were victims of their own fame - Capote more willingly - but on the basis of literary productivity, Kerouac left a fuller, and perhaps even more enduring legacy. Kerouac's whole oevre was cumulative - a life story in 15 novel, not counting many collections of poetry and dreams. Capote's finest achievement was his first novel, 'Other Voices, Other Rooms', owing much of its strength and beauty to the strong autobiographical elements. In his 'non-fiction novel' 'In Cold Blood' he made a similar connection between the techniques of journalism and fiction - picked up on by the gonzoids - but he tended to keep his narratorial presence at a discrete distance from his pathetic but grotesque murderous protagonists. In his last two flawed but fabulous creations, 'Music for Chameleons' and 'Answered Prayers', Capote returned to the much more illuminating - and enjoyable - role of involved narrator. Kerouac stuck with and developed the role of Beat writer as literary protagonist within the story through almost all his 'fiction' work (the main exception being 'Pic', though in an unpublished draft, Kerouac ended the story with the black brothers Pic and Slim hitchhiking and being picked up by Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise). Kerouac defends his method and work with intriguingly sobriety and formality in 'Written Address to the Italian Judge' in the case of Attorney General vs Kerouac, relating to alleged obscenity in 'The Subterraneans'. Kerouac asks His Honour to look beyond the legal arguments, 'all shadowed with social overtones, only of controversial value as evidence' to the artistic background - 'the form is strictly confessional in accordance with the confessional form of Fyodor Dostoyevskys' 'Notes from the Underground-... as to the style of 'The Subterraneans': this is the style I've discovered for narrative art, whereby the author stumbles over himself to tell his tale, just a breathlessly as some raconteur rushing in to tell a whole roomful of listeners what has just happened, and once he has told his tale he has no right to go back and delete what the hand hath written.' What he is saying, in effect, is: judge my work as you would judge my life, because they are the same. To the question 'Are Writers Made or Born?' Kerouac answers with dead seriousness, neatly twisted with illustrative Beatspeak: 'So in the case of a born writer, genius involves the original formation of a new style. Though the language of Kyd is Elizabethan as far as the period goes, the language of Shakespeare can truly be called only Shakespearean. Oftentimes an originator of a new language forms is called 'pretentious' by jealous talents. But it ain't whatcha write, it's the way atcha write it.' Quite so, and that is why Kerouac is instantly recognisable in passages such as this one, taken from his introduction to photographer Robert Frank's book 'The Americans': The humour, the sadness, the EVERYTHING-ness and American-ness of these pictures! Tall thin cowboy rolling butt outside Madison Square Garden New York for rodeo season, sad, spindly, unbelievable - Long shot of night road arrowing forlorn into immensities and flat of impossible-to-believe America in New Mexico under the prisoner's moon - under the whang whang guitar star - Haggard old frowsy dames of Los Angeles leaning peering out the right front window of Old Paw's car on a Sunday night gawking and criticising to explain Amerikay to little children in the spattered back seat - tattooed guy sleeping on grass in park in Cleveland snoring dead to the world on a Sunday afternoon with too many balloons and sailboats.' The ultra-literary critics and fashion-driven academics have never liked the Beats. Yet the popularity of writers like Ginsberg, Burroughs and Kerouac persists - proving that ' it ain't whatcha write, it's the way atcha write it.' Reviewed by Giles Hugo |