Kerouac – He’s b-a-a-a-c-k
This past summer we were at a small dinner party in Decatur when I was reintroduced to Jack Kerouac. It had been a while. Minus Jack, there were six of us. Three couples. Diane and Jim Dexter. Connie and Doug. Rachel and Robert Beck. Not sure what we were talking about when Diane left the table for a moment—must have been something to do with the 50’s (Connie/Doug) or jazz (music is Robert’s expertise) or maybe trivia (Jim’s metier)—it may have even been the 2012 movie “On the Road.”
But in any event Diane returned, holding up Jack himself.
She presented him like a fine wine. “I bet you never had time with this fella!” she exclaimed with a wine-tipped glow.
Jack looked old and dour, dogeared and a bit pained. Rachel and Robert were suddenly quiet. Connie chimed in with a forkful of salad. The rejoinder was obviously left to me, as Jim had simply arched his brow and nodded—his way of saying, all yours, Diane!
But hey, I know when to jump in. I smiled my show-smile. “I know that guy!”
“Oh it’s wonderful!” Diane cooed. “You guys really should read this.”
The quiet erupted again. I chimed in: “That’s his first, isn’t it?” As well you know, I’m not exactly shy—but I have learned over time that asking an easy question is a good way to avoid coming off as overly knowledgeable.
“Uh huh. And I just read it last year,” she continued, “and I can’t say enough about it. A great old-fashioned story. Family saga. Stories upon stories.”
Jim-and-Diane is a duo of many talents. Together they are smart, clever conversationalists, great listeners. Jim was a CNN writer, and she is a long-time producer at CNN, an avid reader, food connoisseur, and, of late, a playwright. To be in the same room as Diane and Jim is to be caught up in a parrying, never-ending discussion that goes merrily along many winding and delightful rabbit holes. Hell, we could, if we were a good bit younger, go on to the wee hours of the morning.
So being with Diane and Jim always reminds me a little of the old days. A topic to which I shall return one day but now suffice it to say that I am usually the outsider sitting in on these in-crowd broadcasting stories and fascinating personal and political discussions (Diane and Rachel work at CNN International; Robert used to be a producer for the Jane Velez-Mitchell show until he was laid off at that show’s cancellation; Jim was a writer for Headline News; Connie worked at CNN Radio for several years).
Well, of course Diane being Diane, she would inevitably and suddenly and fearlessly pose the question: “Would anyone like to read it?”
This she predictably did, and just as predictably there arose among us a sliver of uncomfortable silence. Kerouac shrunk into his heavy paperback slouch. He looked so big and bloated. Poor guy, he was now painfully exposed. His used-book cover was blown. He had nowhere else to hide.
How could I stand for that? No, I would not ignore my friend Diane—and definitely not my old buddy Jack.
“I must have it!” I exclaimed.
And have it I did. Like old pals, we embraced. Later, on the way out to the car, I held the faltering, drunken Jack under my arm and told him this: “I will do right by you, sir. I will perform this honor that has been bestowed upon me without delay.”
Jack Kerouac “The Town and the City” (1950)
Now this is something you won’t hear from Kerouac lovers, current or former—that they “love” his first book? Really? “The Town and the City”?
The race was at a mile and a sixteenth. Just as the horses were being led in the stalls, the sun suddenly reappeared through a gap in the clouds and everything was hushed and ruddy with fading light, a coolness and freshness spread in the air, the rainwater dripped from the grandstand roof and twinkled in the puddles. To Mickey it was like the last day of the world, the late afternoon of time and destiny, the sad glowing reddish light that he always remembered from his childhood as the companion of hushed and muted wonder. And now he was afraid.
Well, okay, I loved the book. The names are changed, as was the style then (Peter = Jack, Galloway = Lowell, MA), but the story is American gothic and stands on it’s own. Family of five boys, two girls, a fallen-angel giant of a father, the mother saintly but barely holding up. The children’s youthful days are given to us in story-upon-story of … well, words bathed in a waterfall of joy. But gradually pain begins to arrive in doses, small at first, then large, then heaping.
Such as when George Martin loses his business to a flood. He drowns his sorrow at a local bar, and in the morning goes driving:
. . . kept looking at the farmhouses, among their fields and trees and homely stonewalls in the beautiful summer sun and shade of late afternoon, he kept wondering what the farmers were thinking there, if their lives were in any remote way similar to his own, if they had troubles and fears and crazy lonesomeness such as he had, and if they also know men whom they like and respected who had suddenly turned against them and turned the world into a place fearsomely lonesome. The winey glory of the sun was making deep green shade at the well, by the far stonewall, at the dusty old door of the red barn, a world of sun making grainy gold in the grass and shimmering across the fields, making speckles of shade in the woods of the afternoon earth. It was strange, strange.
As we watch the family falter, the kids’ lives blow apart—and the girls leave or marry and the boys grow up and take jobs all over.
And thus, in this manner, without a second's forethought, Joe and his melancholy wild friend began a mad voyage that was to take them a thousand miles up and down the seaboard and into the middle west, in a truck which was now technically a stolen truck. All of it was done without a moment's reflection and when they would remember it later on they would only recall the wild rushing speed of the truck, the moon meadows along the highway, the shouting and laughter in the high cab, the lunch diners along the road, the music and the madness of the spring night and the American spaces. They never did find Jeanie in Pittsburgh.
Peter Martin (Jack) goes to college for a time on a football scholarship, then leaves in the midst of the war to join the merchant marine.
Everywhere throughout the great ship there were men—in the barber shop topsides where the supply of shaving lotion would be drunk in a month's time, down in the bowels of the ship in the engine-room, and in the foc'sle, and men gambling in the mess hall, men eating in the galley pantry, men talking in the staterooms, officers conferring on the bridge, kid seamen playing cards and reading in bunks, soldiers at the guns or in their quarters playing records, captains and mates convoking over maps, men brooding in their bunks alone, men on deck staring at the darkness. It was a whole world of men, eight hundred of them, talking and gambling and smoking and reading and drinking as the great dark ship pitched through the night, towards the furious North.
A LOT happens in this novel, and it has that whirlwind feel most of the time. In the latter third of the book, Peter’s travels take him to NYC in the mid-forties wherein he meets the likes of Allen Ginsburg and William Burroughs and all the other assorted beat poets. There is a consistently hard-driving force to the narrative, the story, and writing—much as we have come to expect of Kerouac.
The first edition cover read “by John Kerouac,” only later to be changed to “Jack”. It had been cut from 1,000 pages to 500 by the editors. Even so, how could someone write 1,000 pages in their first novel? It was written in the mid- to late-forties and finally published in 1950. As has often been repeated, it was “in the style of Thomas Wolfe”—who I too revere—but must admit, if for no other reason than I have read both, seems a bit of a whiff.
Jack Kerouac’s “beat” life is well known. He enthusiastically joined the San Francisco poetry scene. He delved into Eastern religion and music. His books were the embodiment of all the new ideas of the time, free association and stream of consciousness, filtered through the vision of the Everyman called Sal or Leo or whoever, but known to everyone else as Jack. Allen Ginsburg often said that Kerouac created “a mythology from his own life” that resonated with people the world over—not just the bohemians from which he drew. But for all his supposed “cool” Kerouac was fundamentally both meditative and restless, which to me are his most appealing qualities of all.
In 1957 he became famous overnight with the publication of “On the Road”. What followed was an amazing 8-year run of books written and pre-written in his not-so-newly-minted inimitable style, and then in 1969 a fearsome death at age 47 from a mountain of alcohol poisoning. But what a decade. To his credit he never paid much attention to fame, he kept writing and writing and writing—though it is said he always craved a recognition of sorts that had been afforded only to his literary forebears.
The word “brooding” appears a lot in the “The Town and the City.” And for all those truisms that he eventually collapsed under the weight of his reckless drinking, I’d have to say it was just as much his own self-doubt and the ruinous sense of sinner’s guilt born of the Catholicism of his rearing. Yes, he was part Lester Young, part Dylan Thomas—both artists who broke free of the chains of ordinary life—and both who succumbed to drink and drugs. And true, he created “Town” in the tradition of Wolfe, and here chanted as loudly and as charmingly as Whitman—but to me he was a man alone in the wilderness from the beginning, still smarting from his father’s rejection, always on the run . . . well, enough of this.
What’s so cool about “The Town and the City” is the Kerouac we did not know. Much younger and learning to speak in a new tongue. With one foot in the old world and another in the new, he pushes forth in a waterfall of words, breaking free from the bonds of established literary writing.
Without this first novel, this monster of a contribution, I think, he would not be the Kerouac that changed the world. And he might not have paved the way for so many other writers in his wake: the spontaneous Hunter S. Thompson, the drunken genius Charles Bukowski, the chronicler and new journalist Tom Wolfe.
And now this excerpt from the book’s last pages:
On a highway one rainy night in the summer of that year, by glistening waters of a river in a place not far from the lights of a town, among hills and river-bluffs that were like shadows, a big red truck stopped at the one-light junction. Peter Martin, in his black leather jacket, carrying the old canvas bag in which all his poor needments for a long journey were packed, got down from the truck. [ . . . ] And Peter was alone in the rainy night. He was on the road again, traveling the continent westward, going off to further and further years, alone by the waters of life, alone, looking towards the lights of the river's cape, towards tapers burning warmly in the towns, looking down along the shore in remembrance of the dearness of this father and of all life. The heat-lightning glowed softly in the dark, and crowded treetop shores and wandering waters showed through shrouds of rain. When the railroad trains moaned, and river-winds blew, bringing echoes through the vale, it was as if a wild hum of voices, the dear voices of everybody he had known, were crying: "Peter, Peter! Where are you going, Peter?" And a big soft gust of rain came down. He put up the collar of his jacket, and bowed his head, and hurried along.
Leave a Reply