Category: Kerouac and Friends

The Journals of John Cheever

Arrived yesterday. I open to any page and find good writing. How can such a decadent booze hound write so well? And why is the sauce ink to so many literary pens? One of the mysteries of life, like why so many Jews are leftists. Whole books have been written about this. Prager wrote one. Podhoretz wrote one.

Cheever lets it all hang out with brutal honesty. Auto-paralysis through self-analysis  on the rocks of self-loathing. I open at random to p. 96:

I am a solitary drunkard. I take a little painkiller before lunch but I really don't get to work until late afternoon. At four or half past four or sometimes five  I stir up a Martini, thinking that a great many men who can't write as well as I can will already have set themselves down at bar stools.  [. . .]

He's thinking about Kerouac, I'll guess. The entry is dated  1957, the year On the Road was published. Two pages later, Cheever lays into Jack in a long entry which begins, "My first feelings about Kerouac's book were: that it was not good . . . ."

Who is the better writer? Cheever. Who cuts closer to the bone of life and left more of a cultural mark (for good or ill)? Kerouac.  

Too much of the preciosity of the Eastern Establishment attaches to such  superb literary craftsmen as Cheever, Updike, and Yates, phenomenologists of suburban hanky-panky, auto dealerships, and such.  Social climbers like Cheever look down on regional writers such as Edward Abbey, whose journal is entitled Confessions of a Barbarian.

I read 'em all, even boozer Bukowski whose novels I consider trash. Some of his poetry, though, I think is good; Bluebird for example.

Three American Sophomores

The Restlessness of Thomas Merton, J. D. Salinger, and Jack Kerouac.

On balance, a very good essay, but just wrong in places. For example:

Due to our separation from God that occurred in the Garden, all men intuitively sense that they are missing something, that they are radically incomplete.3 Aristotle had this incompleteness in mind when he opened Metaphysics with the statement, “All men by nature desire to know.” 

Vito Caiati, cradle Catholic, native New Yorker, former resident of Greenwich Village, ex-pat in France for a time, historian, NYU Ph.D., with a finely-honed literary sensibility, is well qualified to offer some astute commentary on this essay.  I invite him to do so. 

Caiati introduced me to the novels of Richard Yates.

Yates Richard

Why did Kerouac's writing give rise to an outpouring of biographies, commentaries, dissertations, articles, not to mention new editions and the publication of the shoddiest of his literary efforts, when Yates' novels and short stories had no similar effect?  One thought is this. Kerouac was a sort of unwitting pied piper. His 1957 On the Road gave rise to the 'rucksack revolution' of the 'sixties.  Yates' 1961 Revolutionary Road, his best novel, was backward-looking, in large part social criticism of the  Zeitgeist of the fading 'fifties.  

But my one thought is one-sided and wants augmentation and qualification. Later perhaps.

While I admire Yates' superb craftsmanship, his writing does not move me. Kerouac moves me, literary slop, hyper-romantic gush, and all.  No one would accuse Kerouac of being a craftsman. 

Literary sensibility is an ineluctably subjective thing,  but not so subjective as to disallow higher and lower grades of sensibility. But how describe and order them? 

Two weblogs I regularly consult are Patrick Kurp's Anecdotal Evidence, and the late D. G. Myers' A Commonplace Blog. Myers died ten years ago. Kurp here recounts a meeting with him.

Enlisting William S. Burroughs in the War Against Leftist Language-Abusers

I've been fulminating for over 20 years online against the language-abuse of  the language-abusing Left, having found it necessary on only a few occasions to take conservatives to task. Although my Beat credentials are impeccable,  I never took William Seward Burroughs seriously enough to suppose he could be enlisted on our side.  And then I stumbled upon this  article:

The modern left is unabashed about wielding language as a virus—or, really, as a form of control. “Supercut” videos by critics of corporate leftist media, like Tom Eliot, reveal the media figures and politicians repeating the same words and slogans over and over again: President Joe Biden, despite drooling on himself, is “sharp.” Kamala Harris has brought the “Joy, joy, joy” back into politics. Conservatives are “weird.” Abortion is “healthcare.” These word storms rip through the country via television, radio, and social media, infecting hosts from D.C. to California. Millions of people mindlessly repeat them as if they have been infected with some kind of mentally impairing disease. It’s a virus worse than COVID.

I agree with that completely. I am rather less enthusiastic about the following:

So how to fight the language virus? According to Burroughs, language can also be used to liberate. He believed that if words were cut into pieces and rearranged, you could break free from what he called the Control. Burroughs used rearranged texts, “found sound,” and tape-splicing—techniques still used by artists today—to defy the establishment. Burroughs used the method of cutting up sentences and rearranging them in famous countercultural books like Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine. 

My generation took a more direct approach to using language to dismantle Control: punk rock. Not for nothing was Burroughs known as “the Godfather of Punk.” The writer was lionized by people like Lou Reed, David Bowie, and bands like U2, Nirvana, Joy Division, Led Zeppelin, and Steely Dan. In his book American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Beat Generation, Jonah Raskin describes meeting Burroughs in San Francisco in the 1970s.

I will leave it for you to decide whether the way to combat the leftist language virus is via Old Bull Lee and punk rock.

Of the Beat triumvirate, "sweet gone Jack," alone moves me, supreme screw-up that he was, and surely no role model.  

One month to go, and then then it is October, Kerouac month in my literary liturgy. 

Kerouac mountain

Young Man’s Bible, Old Man’s Bible

HitchhikerWhen he was a young man he travelled around the country with On the Road, the 'Bible of the Beat Generation,' in his rucksack, just as Kerouac had with Dwight Goddard's A Buddhist Bible in his. Now the young man is old. Now when he travels he carries a different light paperback, the plain old Bible.

 

And he says a prayer for the soul of a lonesome traveller who quit the via dolorosa on this date 54 years ago thereby securing his release from the samsaric meat wheel and the granting of his wish:

The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . . . . . I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel and safe in heaven dead. (Mexico City Blues, 1959, 211th Chorus).

Saturday Night at the Oldies: October Jazz

The 15th already! October's a bird that flies too fast. Time herself's such a bird. I would freeze her flight, but not that of

Charley 'Bird' Parker, Ornithology

Jack Kerouac and Steve Allen, Charlie Parker

Kerouac and Allen, October in the Railroad Earth

Jack Kerouac, San Francisco

Mose Allison, Parchman Farm.

This one goes out to Tom Gastineau, keyboard man in our band Dudley Nightshade, who introduced me to Mose Allison in the late '60s. Tom went on to make it, more or less, in the music business. I caught Allison at The Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach, California, a couple or three times before I headed East in August of '73.  Heard him on the East Coast as well at a joint in Marblehead, Mass. with a girlfriend  I dubbed 'Springtime Mary'  which was Kerouac's name for his girlfriend Mary Carney.

Mose Allison, Young Man's Blues

Mose Allison, I Ain't Got Nothing but the Blues

Dave Brubeck, Blue Rondo al a Turk

Herbie Hancock, Watermelon Man

From Hagiography to Pathography: Yates and Kerouac

YatesI'll admit to being more fascinated by Richard Yates' life as reported in the 671 pages of Blake Bailey's biography than in Yates' writing. So this struck a nerve:

I’m no fan of hagiographers, obviously, but I’m only a bit less distrustful of literary biographers.  Too often their books slide toward what Joyce Carol Oates has dubbed “pathography,” which she defined as “hagiography’s diminished and often prurient twin.”  Its motifs are “dysfunction and disaster, illnesses and pratfalls, failed marriages and failed careers, alcoholism and breakdowns and outrageous conduct.”

Since we live in an age that’s obsessed with personalities and celebrities, it’s not surprising that so few readers are satisfied with loving a book and so many insist on knowing as much as possible about the person who wrote it.  While this appetite has inspired literary biographers to produce a long shelf of pathographies and other monstrosities – does the world really need Norman Sherry’s three-volume biography of Graham Greene? – it has also resulted in some well researched and finely written literary biographies that did what such exercises do at their best: they led readers back to the subject’s books.  Among these I would include Blake Bailey’s recent biographies of Richard Yates and John Cheever and, strangely enough, Ann Charters’s thorough and balanced 1973 bio of Kerouac.  In her introduction, Charters wrote insightfully, if a bit clunkily: “The value of Kerouac’s life is what he did, how he acted.  And what he did, was that he wrote.  I tried to arrange the incidents of his life to show that he was a writer first, and a mythologized figure afterward.  Kerouac’s writing counts as much as his life.”

I would argue that his writing counts more than his life, much more.  Eventually Charters seemed to come around to my way of thinking.  In 1995, after she’d edited two fat volumes, Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1940-1956 and The Portable Jack Kerouac, I interviewed her for a newspaper article.  “I wanted (the book of letters) to be a biography in Jack’s own words,” she told me.  “His life is in his books, but on the other hand the most essential thing is missing from those novels.  What he tells you in the letters is that the most important thing in his life is writing.”

Why did Kerouac's writing give rise to an outpouring of biographies, commentaries, dissertations, articles, not to mention new editions and the publication of the shoddiest of his literary efforts, when Yates' novels and short stories had no similar effect?  One thought is this. Kerouac was a sort of unwitting pied piper. His 1957 On the Road gave rise to the 'rucksack revolution' of the 'sixties.  Yates' 1961 Revolutionary Road, his best novel, was backward-looking, in large part social criticism of the  Zeitgeist of the fading 'fifties.  

But my one thought is one-sided and wants augmentation and qualification. Later perhaps.

While I admire Yates' superb craftsmanship, his writing does not move me. Kerouac moves me.  Literary slop, hyper-romantic gush, and all. So far I have found nothing in three of Yates' novels and a couple of his short stories  like this:

Kerouac and motherHere is Jack Kerouac on the road, not in a '49 Hudson with Neal Cassady, but in a bus  with his mother:

Who are men that they can insult men? Who are these people who wear pants and dresses and sneer? What am I talking about? I'm talking about human helplessness and unbelievable loneliness in the darkness of birth and death and asking "What is there to laugh about in that?" "How can you be clever in a meatgrinder?" "Who makes fun of misery?" There's my mother a hunk of flesh that didnt ask to be born, sleeping restlessly, dreaming hopefully, beside her son who didnt ask to be born, thinking desperately, praying hopelessly, in a bouncing earthly vehicle going from nowhere to nowhere, all in the night, worst of all for that matter all in noonday glare of bestial Gulf Coast roads — Where is the rock that will sustain us? Why are we here? What kind of crazy college would feature a seminar where people talk about hopelessness forever?

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), Desolation Angels, 1960, p. 339.

Compare Mexico City Blues, 1959, 211th Chorus:

The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . .
. . . I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel
and safe in heaven dead.