Ah poetic. I keep saying “ah poetic” because I didn’t intend this to be a poetic paean of a book, in 1967 as I’m writing this what possible feeling can be left in me for an “America” that has become such a potboiler of broken convictions, messes of rioting and fighting in streets, hoodlumism, cynical administration of cities and states, suits and neckties the only feasible subject, grandeur all gone into the mosaic mesh of Television (Mosaic indeed, with a capital M), where people screw their eyes at all those dots and pick out hallucinated images of their own contortion and are fed ACHTUNG! ATTENTION! ATENCIÓN! instead of Ah dreamy real wet lips beneath an old apple tree? Or that picture in Time Magazine a year ago showing a thousand cars parked in a redwood forest in California, all alongside similar tents with awnings and primus stoves, everybody dressed alike looking around everywhere at everybody with those curious new eyes of the second part of this century, only occasionally looking up at the trees and if so probably thinking “O how nice that redwood would look as my lawn furniture!” Well, enough . . . for now.
Main thing is, coming home, “Farewell Song Sweet from My Trees” of the previous August was washed away in November joys.48
Then Kerouac comes back home, having quit the team, having goofed up, and having run away to the South. This is interesting because I remember trips like this where all of a sudden he’d disappear, cut out and go on an adventure, and I’d say, “Oh god, he’s irresponsible, undisciplined.”
When I read his books I always realize that he was enormously broodingly vaster of mind and heart than myself and that my irritation was jejune, egoistic, self-defensive, and contributed to his death and disillusionment. I always feel guilty. Occasionally I’ll also realize he was full of shit and totally vain. It wasn’t wisdom at all, it was some kind of paranoiac vanity. That’s why he drank himself to death. I mean the whole book is saying it, the Vanity of Duluoz.
At midnight, in bright moonlight, I walked Moody Street over crunching snow and felt something awful that had not been in Lowell before. For one thing I was the “failure back in town,” for another I had lost the glamour of New York City and the Columbia campus and the tweeded outlook of sophomores, had lost glittering Manhattan, was back trudging among the brick walls of the mills.49
Since he cut out of Columbia, he’d broken that pattern of Fitzgeraldean novelistic nostalgia. Now he was into some kind of awful grid of having to face the solitude of being a writer, and not just sliding along on the fantasy of youthtime romance with money making it all right. “The glamour of the tweeded look of sophomores.” He has some suggestions for writers here, since he’s describing a time when his writing method begins getting codified, clarified.
That’s how writers begin, by imitating the masters (without suffering like said masters), till they larn their own style, and by the time they larn their own style there’s no more fun in it, because you cant imitate any other master’s suffering but your own.50
Kerouac is saying it’s all right to begin by imitating the masters, but when you get your own style, you’ll have your own suffering to write about and there’s no more fun in it. He begins to examine his own early writings, his own diaries of age eighteen or nineteen, when he went out on the military sea transport.
All eyes peeled for the periscope. Wonderful evening spent before with the (not Navy, excuse me) Army gun crew near the big gun, playing popular records on the phonograph, the Army fellas seem much more sincere than the hardened cynical dockrats. Here’s a few notes from my own personal log . . .
Here he is at the age of forty-six, saying here’s a few notes from my own personal log of my Salingeresque days of 1938.
“There are a few acceptable men here and there, like Don Gary, the new scullion, a sensible and friendly fellow. He has a wife in Scotland, joined the Merchant Marine to get back to Scotland, in fact. I met one of the passengers, or construction workers, an Arnold Gershon, an earnest youth from Brooklyn. And another fellow who works in the butcher shop. Outside of these, my acquaintances have so far been fruitless, almost foolish. I am trying hard to be sincere but the crew prefers, I suppose, embittered cursing and bawdry foolishness. Well, at least, being misunderstood is being like the hero in the movies.” (Can you imagine such crap written in a scullion’s diary?)
That was his 1967 comment on that. Then it gets interesting, because he’s mixing his old early diary writing with little phrases to hop it up a little bit to make it funnier, or parody, or just being playful, quoting himself at eighteen and playfully adding on some new cadenza.
“Sunday July 26: A beautiful day! Clear and windy, with a choppy sea that looks like a marine painting . . . long flecked billows of blue water, with the wake of our ship like a bright green road . . . Nova Scotia to larboard. We have now passed through the Cabot Straits.” (Who’s Cabot? A Breton?) (Pronounced Ca-boh.) “Up we go, to northern seas. Ah there you’ll find that shrouded Arctic.” (That wash of pronounced sea-talk, that parturient snowmad ice mountain plain, that bloody Genghis Khan plain of seaweed talk broken only by uprisings of foam.)
That’s a little parenthesis he threw in on top of his old journal. His pure appreciation of vowels and the babble of the mind, the playfulness of it, and the easiness of the writing of this. With the implication that it all comes to nothing in the end. The uprisings of foam.
Yessir, boy, the earth is an Indian thing but the waves are Chinese. Know what that means? Ask the guys who drew those old scrolls, or ask the old Fishermen of Cathay, and what Indian ever dared to sail to Europe or Hawaii from the salmon-tumbling streams of North America? When I say Indian, I mean Ogallag.51
There’s that alcoholic mouthing playfulness. “The earth is an Indian thing” is a favorite line originally from On the Road somewhere. Fellaheen comes out of Spengler, from the volumes that Burroughs handed him when we went to visit Burroughs in 1944. Kerouac was identifying himself more and more with fellaheen and the earth as an Indian thing.
I didn’t know what he meant at first, I got mad when I heard him say that. I was always getting mad at his works of genius. I thought he meant, “white people are not supposed to be here, only the Indians have the earth, that the earth is owned by the Indians.” Later, I learned that it meant that the Indians know their own geography, they know all the plants and the medicines, like saying that the earth is a gardener’s thing. I took it as political at first, some anti-Semitic comment.
The next chapter is just pure messing around, he must have got drunk then. His method of writing is useful to know. This book is divided into something like thirteen books altogether, then each book within it is divided into anywhere between five and thirteen little chapters, chapterettes. Each chapterette is one session of writing, wherever the writing leads. That’s how the book is composed. One day he’ll write maybe a paragraph, and that’s a chapter. The next day he’ll get interested and idly write three pages, so that’s a whole other chapterette. Then when he’s piled up enough of these little chapterettes to account for a season or an idea that he meant to cover in his mind’s eye chronologically, he’ll move on.
But my hands werent sea-netted and chapped by rope and wire, as later the next year as deckhand, at present time I was a scullion. I’d vaguely heard of Shakespeare yelling about that, he who washes pots and scours out giant pans, with greasy aprons, hair hanging in face like idiot, face splashed by dishwater, scouring not with a “scourer” as you understand it but with a goddamned Slave chain, grouped in fist as chain, scratch, scroutch, and the whole galley heaving slowly.
Oh the pots and pans the racket of their fear, the kitchen of the sea, the Neptunes down here, the herds of sea cows wanta milk us, the sea poem I aint finished with, the fear of the Scottish laird rowing out with a nape of another fox’ neck in the leeward shirsh of S H A O W yon Irish Sea! The sea of her lip! The brattle of her Boney! The crack of Noah’s Ark timbers built by Mosaic Schwarts in the unconditional night of Universal death.
Short chapter.52
It was just a little piece of writing which didn’t lead anywhere or it led to a little lyric, but nowhere in terms of the narrative, but he didn’t eliminate it or make it into anything. Just a short chapter. In this book there’s a lot of little comments on the writing, like “proceed to book V.” The writing is so easy, almost negligent. Remember that phrase he used when he tossed off a play, “my newest idle work.” This writing is very idle, he’s just talking to his wife so he doesn’t have to be a great litterateur, he can just idly make whatever little nonsensical ditties he wants to.
It must have been psychologically difficult until he finally sat down, [and then] it was like falling off a log. All he had to do was remember a few details, occasionally pulling out his old journals, writing it down, and then making funny little comments, like “O gee.” Loose and relaxed, honest. He didn’t care, he no longer was maintaining his mythology. In fact he even mentions in his book that among mythologizers he’s an expert.
If you’re interesting in writing writing, pure writing, there’s that delightful playfulness, negligence, the word “idle” that he used comes through very clearly. I mean not everybody can be that idle and careless. He’s like an accomplished master painting with a few strokes. He’d done it so much that he knows how to turn a phrase just to turn a phrase, just when there’s nothing to talk about. Where did he get that? You may notice it in “the sea of her lip, the brattle of her boney, the shallow of the un-Irish sea,” there’s a little element of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Ulysses, which were also great archetypes for him.
CHAPTER 10
Lucien Carr’s Influence on Kerouac
Lucien Carr was so central to everybody’s mythology that it’s hard to give a course on [the] literary history of the Beat Generation without adducing his tongue as part of the literary background. The great documentation of that is a text by Kerouac called “Old Lucien Midnight” later retitled “Old Angel Midnight.” It was Kerouac’s Lucienesque gibberish, a Joycean Finnegans Wake style, an unconscious language based mainly on Lucien’s language. Jack seemed to hear Shakespeare through Lucien Carr’s speech. Lucien also had a pure tongue, a beautiful tongue, and we all considered him the great Shakespearean tongue among us. In the end Lucien decided that he didn’t want to cast any shadow, unlike us egotists.53
There’s a real interesting chorus in Mexico City Blues, which maybe is a summary of all that. It’s a mixture of Shakespeare, Lucien Carr, and W. C. Fields.
217th Chorus
Sooladat smarty pines came prappin down
My line of least regard last Prapopooty
And whattaya think Old Father Time
made him? a western sponeet
Without no false on bonnet,
Trap in the cock adus time of the Nigh,
Slight the leak of recompense being
hermasodized
By finey wild traphoods in all
their estapular
glories
Gleaming their shinging-rising spears
against the High Thap All Thup —
So I aim my gazoota always
to the God, remembering the origin
Of all beasts and cod, Bostonian
By nature, with no minda my own,
Could write about railroads, quietus
These blues, hurt my hand more,
Rack my hand with labor of nada
—Run 100 yard dash
in Ole Ensanada—
S what’ll have to do,
this gin & tonics
Perss o monnix
twab
twab
twabble
all day
I don’t know if that makes sense to you? I’ve heard it so often that it’s clear as a bell. Old soldier smartypants, “Sooladat smarty pines,” came parading, farting down. “My line of least regard last Prapopooty,” last Friday. Soldier smartypants, egotistical smartypants came parading himself down my line of least regard, my line of fire, my line of indifference last Friday. And what do you think time made out of him? He’s just imitating a Shakespeare sonnet and writing anything that comes in his mind. It’s attitudinal partly, but also there are hints in puns.
This is specifically Lucien Carr’s speech that he’s parodying. I chose this because it is a sample of the prose of Old Angel Midnight. It’s good, it’s funny, it’s just drunken talk, with all the sounds of talk, so you don’t have to worry about what it means. It has all sorts of suggestions in the syllables and in the associations and the puns. It is Sunday afternoon with all the sounds of the universe coming in the window of the ear. That’s from the beginning page of “Old Angel Midnight” and as I said it was Lucien’s sound that Jack was interested in.
It’s just funny playfulness. It’s Kerouac doing anything he wants. You don’t have to fit into anybody’s rules, you don’t even have to make sense, you don’t have to make a story, as long as you are grounded. It’s a demonstration of the emptiness of mind, the emptiness of art.
CHAPTER 11
Kerouac and Vanity of Duluoz, Part 2
Kerouac had gone crazy in the navy. The war is on and he’s in a navy psycho ward. He’s decided that the world is crazy and he doesn’t want to have anything to do with it. He just wants to be a novelist, but he doesn’t want to have any truck with the world or responsibility. His father visits him and then Sebastian Sampas, his old youthtime, Shelleyan, poetic, idealistic fellow friend.
Then in comes Sabby in a U.S. Army uniform, sad, idealistic, crewcutted now, but dream-minded, try to talk to me, “I have remembered, Jack, I have kept faith,” but the nutty manic depressive from West Virginny shoves him in a corner and grabs him by the private’s sleeves and yells “Wabash Cannonball” and poor Sabby’s eyes are misting and looking at me saying, “I came here to talk to you, I only have twenty minutes, what a house of suffering, what now?”
I say “Come in the toilet.” West Virginia follows us yelling, it was one of his good days. I said “Sabby dont worry, the kid’s okay, everybody’s okay . . . Besides,” I added, “there’s nothing for me or you to say . . . Except, I s’pose, that time when Bartlett Junior High School was burning down and my train was taking me back to New York prep school and you ran alongside, remember? in the snowstorm singing “I’ll See You Again’ . . . huh?”
And that was the last time I saw Sabby. He was fatally wounded on Anzio beachhead after that.54
That’s his belated farewell to the person he felt closest to as a poet, who died young. That’s Kerouac’s legend of the lost, pure, innocent poet. I think there was a great love that they shared.
Jack mentions that the book comes to a pivotal point and changes while he’s writing it. He’s aware of it while writing [and treats it like] a quality of empty playfulness in this particular novel. It’s odd that he knows what he’s doing, or maybe he decided that once he had written something that was it. In this passage he has a little conversation about football with his teammates.
I said “After I make my break, and may not sink anything and you miss some dumb choice, I’ll slice that first ball into the corner with a little scythe, as soft as your Devil.”
“And therefore you’re the Devil.”
“No, I’m his wind. And I’m gone as much from his influence, as this ungraspable handshake.”
This is where the book, the story, pivots.
This is known by Massachusetts Yankees as “deep form.”
Funny halfbacks dont have to sell Pepsi-Cola.55
He’s seeing himself as a funny halfback, but he can go and be a novelist instead of being like the rest of the halfbacks, getting fat and old, selling Pepsi-Cola. Book X pivots in the sense that the first half was his Horace Mann High School days and then he goes on into New York with Burroughs and Carr, Huncke, myself. He just decided then and there, “Wel
l I better get on with it, get into the story” and so he informs the reader. There’s a little bit about his Catholicism here and his notions of God, which I thought were pretty good because he was summarizing thoughts, philosophical thoughts. Emptily making a few conclusions, negligently,
Because when I saw the face of my beloved dead cat Timmy in the Heavens, and heard him mew like he used to do in a little voice, it surprised me to realize he wasnt even born when World War II was on, and therefore at this moment, how can he even be dead? If he wasnt born, how can he be dead? So just an apparition in molecular form for awhile, to haunt our souls with similarities to God’s perfection, in Timmy’s case the perfection was when he’d sit like a lion on the kitchen table, paws straight out, head erect and full-jowled, and God’s imperfection when he was dying and his back was a skeletal run of ribs and spinal joints and his fur falling off and his eyes looking at me: “I may have loved you, I may love you now, but it’s too late . . .” Pascal says it better than I do when he says: “WHAT SHALL WE GATHER FROM ALL OUR DARKNESS, IF NOT A CONVICTION OF OUR UNWORTHINESS?” And he adds, to show you right path:
“There are perfections in Nature which demonstrate that She is the image of God”—Timmy sittin like a lion, Big Slim in his prime, Pop in his prime, me in my careless 1943 youth, you, all—“and imperfections”—our decay and going-down, all of us—“to assure us that She is no more than His image.” {That nature is no more than the image of God. Then Kerouac’s comment:} I believe that.
“God is Dead” made everybody sick to their stomachs because they all know what I just said, and Pascal said, and Paschal means Resurrection.56
And Pascal, the philosopher, said, and “paschal,” paschal lamb, means resurrection. He makes a little Catholic statement there, just from an aesthetic point of view. “‘God is Dead’ made everybody sick to their stomachs” was his final comment on that as an intellectual thesis.
The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats Page 9
