Category: Literary Matters

Is a Fascist a Fascist When Pulling Up His Pants?

George Orwell's humanity is on display in the following passage from "Looking Back on the Spanish War" (1943), reprinted in A Collection of Essays (Harvest, 1981), pp. 193-194:

     Early one morning another man and I had gone out to snipe at the
     Fascists in the trenches outside Huesca. Their line and ours here
     lay three hundred yards apart, at which range our aged rifles would
     not shoot accurately, but by sneaking out to a spot about a hundred
     yards from the Fascist trench you might, if you were lucky, get a
     shot at someone through a gap in the parapet. Unfortunately the
     ground between was a flat beet field with no cover except a few
     ditches, and it was necessary to go out while it was still-dark and
     return soon after dawn, before the light became too good. This time
     no Fascists appeared, and we stayed too long and were caught by the
     dawn. We were in a ditch, but behind us were two hundred yards of
     flat ground with hardly enough cover for a rabbit. We were still
     trying to nerve ourselves to make a dash for it when there was an
     uproar and a blowing of whistles in the Fascist trench. Some of our
     aeroplanes were coming over. At this moment, a man presumably
     carrying a message to an officer, jumped out of the trench and ran
     along the top of the parapet in full view. He was half-dressed and
     was holding up his trousers with both hands as he ran. I refrained
     from shooting at him. It is true that I am a poor shot and unlikely
     to hit a running man at a hundred yards, and also that I was
     thinking chiefly about getting back to our trench while the
     Fascists had their attention fixed on the aeroplanes. Still, I did
     not shoot partly because of that detail about the trousers. I had
     come here to shoot at âFascistsâ; but a man who is holding up his
     trousers isn't a Fascist, he is visibly a fellow-creature,
     similar to yourself, and you don't feel like shooting at him.

Isn't there a scene in Homage to Catalonia in which the same or a similar fascist is caught with his pants down at the latrine when all hell breaks loose? In death and as in defecation, all distinctions dissolve to reveal us as indigent mortals made of dust and about to return to dust.

Charles Bukowski

Bukowski018 October's scrounging around in used book dens for Beat arcana uncovered Barry Miles' biography of this laureate of low life.  It has been holding my interest.   Bukowski, though not an associate of the Beat writers, is beat in the sense of beaten down and disaffected but not in Kerouac's sense of beatific. A worthless fellow, a drunkard, a lecher, a misogynist, a shameless user and betrayer of his benefactors, Bukowski (1920-1994)  is nonetheless a pretty good scribbler of poetry and prose.  (I call him a worthless fellow, but child is father to the man, and Bukowski had a terrible childhood.)  If I need an excuse to poke into the particulars of his paltry life, there is my masthead motto, "Study everything, join nothing," and the Terentian homo sum, nihil humani, etc.  The other night I read about him in bed, a mistake, since the night mind should be primed for its nocturnal preconscious ruminations with ennobling rather than debasing images.  In compensation I read Simone Weil in the predawn hours of the next day.   A comparison of the two would be an interesting exercise. 

The Dean of Dissipation versus the Red Virgin.  A celebration of the base, sordid, cheap, tawdry, depraved, degraded, of the complete abdication of the spirit  to the flesh and its lusts, versus an anorexic asceticism bordering on nihilism.

How wild the diversity of human types!  How impossible to be bored in a world so populated.  How should we live?  There is no substitute for finding your own path.

Kerouac October Quotation #30

The despairing section X of Book Thirteen of Vanity of Duluoz which I quoted yesterday is followed immediately by this:

Yet I saw the cross just then when I closed my eyes after writing all this.  I cant escape its mysterious penetration into all this brutality.  I just simply SEE it all the time, even the Greek cross sometimes.  I hope it will all turn out true.

It is fitting to conclude Kerouac month with the last section of Jack's last book, a section in which, while alluding to the Catholic mass, he raises his glass to his own piecemeal suicide:

Forget it wifey. Go to sleep. Tomorrow's another day. Hic calix! Look that up in Latin, it means "Here's the chalice," and be sure there's wine in it.

Kerouac October Quotation #30: The Holes in Jesus’ and Buddha’s Bags

Vanity of Duluoz, Book Thirteen, X, pp. 274-276, ellipses and bold emphases added:

Kerouac again.  .  .  .Mad Dog creation has a side of compassionate mercy in it . . . we have seen the brutal creation send us the Son of Man who, to prove that we should follow His example of mercy, brotherly love, charity, patience, gave Himself up without murmur to be sacrificed.  Otherwise we would have taken his example lightly.  Seeing that He really meant it right down to the cross, we are impressed.  [. . .] But we cant be redeemed "unless we believe," it says, or follow His example.  And who can do that?  Not even Count Leo Tolstoy who still had to live in a "humble hut" but on his own lands even tho he had signed over his "own lands" of course to his own family, and had the gall then, from that earthly vantage point of vaunt, to write The Kingdom of God is Within You.  If I, myself, for instance, were to try to follow Jesus' example I'd first have to give up my kind of drinking, which prevents me from thinking too much(like I'm doing in awful pain this morning), and so I'd go insane and go on public debt and be a pain to everybody in the blessed "community" or "society."  And I'd be furthermore bored to death by the knowledge that there is a hole even in Jesus' bag: and that hole is, where He says to the rich young man "Sell everything you have and give it tothe poor, and follow me," okay, where do we go now, wander and beg our food off poor hardworking householders?  and not even rich at that like that rich young man's mother? but poor and harried like Martha?  Martha had not "chosen the better part" when she cooked and slaved and cleaned house all day while her younger sister Mary  sat in the doorway like a modern beatnik with "square" parents talking to Jesus about "religion" and "redemption" and "salvation" and all that guck.  Were Jesus and young Mary McGee waiting for supper to be ready? While talking about redemption?  How can you be redeemed when you have to pass food in and out of your body's bag day in and day out, how can you be "saved" in a situation so sottish and flesh-hagged as that? (This was also the hole in Buddha's bag: he more or less said "It's well for Bodhisattva sages and Buddhas to beg for their food so as to teach the ordinary people of the world the humility of charity," ugh I say. No, the springtime bud I talked about with rain dew on its new green, it's the laugh of a maniac.  Birth is the direct cause of all pain and death, and a Buddha dying of dysentery at the age of eighty-three had only to say, finally, "Be ye lamps unto thyselves" — last words –"work out thy salvation with diligence," heck of a thing to say as he lay there in an awful pool of dysentery.  Spring is the laugh of a maniac, I say.

You Don’t Know Jack About Kerouac. A Trivia Test

I'll prove it. Take this test. No search engines.
Kerouac merchant marine 1. Name the one and only Kerouac novel that contains a chess  diagram. Extra credit: Does it represent a legal position?
2. On which nationally known talk show did Kerouac make a reference to Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite?
3. Kerouac gave a pretentious literary subtitle to one of his novels.  Name the novel and name the subtitle.
4. Kerouac applied the derogatory moniker 'Reinhold Cacoethes' to whom of his acquaintances?
5. Which of Jack's friends compiled a list of popes from A.D. 64 to 1958?
6. Which branch of the service was Kerouac in when the above picture was taken?
7. Name the neocon who took Kerouac & Co. to task in "The Know-Nothing Bohemians."
8. The phrase 'ball the jack' has fallen into desuetude. To the best of my knowledge, the phrase is employed in only one of Kerouac's novels. Name the novel and explain the phrase's meaning and origin.
9. "But it was that beautiful cut of clouds I could always see above the little S. P. alley, puffs floating by from Oakland or the gate of Marin to the north or San Jose south, the clarity of Cal to break your   heart." From which short piece is this passage excerpted? And what does 'S. P.' stand for?
10. "Since beginningless time and into the never-ending future, men have loved women without telling them, and the Lord has loved them without telling, and the void is not the void because there's nothing to be empty of." From which novel?

 

Kerouac October Quotation #27: Jack on Robert Lax

During his years of unsuccess, when he was actually at his purest and best, an "unpublished freak," as he describes himself in a late summer 1954 letter to Robert Giroux, living for his art alone, Kerouac contemplated entering a monastery: "I've become extremely religious and may go to a monastery before even before you do." [. . .] "I've recently made friends in a way with Bob Lax and I find him sweet — tho I think his metaphysics are pure faith. Okay, that's what it's supposed to be." (Selected Letters 1940-1956, ed. Charters, Penguin 1995, p. 444.)

And then on pp. 446-448 we find an amazing 26 October [sic!] 1954 letter to Robert Lax packed with etymology and scholarly detail which ends:

I'm no saint, I'm sensual, I cant resist wine, am liable to sneers & secret wraths & attachment to imaginary lures before my eyes — but I intend to ascend by stages & self-control to the Vow to help all sentient beings find enlightenment and holy escape from sin and stain of life-body itself [. . .] but thank God I'm a lazy bum because of that repose will come, in repose the secret, and in the secret: Ceaseless Ecstasy.

"Nirvana, as when the rain puts out a little fire."

See you in the world,

Jack K.

For information on the enigmatic hermit Robert Lax (1915-2000) , see here and here.

Finally, Visions of Tom for the Merton-Kerouac connection.

Kerouac October Quotation #26: Kerouac as Homo Religiosus

When On the Road finally saw the light of  day in 1957, fame proved to be Kerouac's undoing.  William Plummer writes insightfully:

For nearly a decade he hungered for recognition, but when the public at last chose to take notice it would choose to measure the least part of him. In forums and on talk shows, he would be queried about drugs, kicks, promiscuity. No one would understand or care to credit the spiritual underpinnings of On the Road; interviewers would regard him quizzically when he suggested that his life and work constituted a single effort to force God to pull back the veil and show Himself in the althogether. (The Holy Goof: A Biography of Neal Cassady, Paragon, 1981, p. 104)

Vanity of Duluoz, pp. 176-7:

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 [Jack's dead cat] 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."  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.

Kerouac October Quotation #25: The Noise in the Void

From a February 1950 journal entry (Windblown World, p. 262):

There's a noise in the void I hear: there's a vision of the void; there's a complaint in the abyss — there's a cry in the bleak air; the realm is haunted.  Man haunts the earth.  Man is on a ledge noising his life. The pit of night receiveth.  God hovers over in his shrouds.  Look out!

Here  is a review of Windblown World by Gerald Nicosia.

Kerouac October Quotation #24 : W. C. Fields

How I admire W. C. Fields! — What a great oldtimer he was.  None like him. I'll write something about him soon, my personal ideas. "Ain't you got no Red Eye?" "Ain't you an old Follies girl?" "I snookered that one." "Those Grampion hills." "Mocha-java." "The enterprise I am about to embark upon is fraught with eminent peril, and not fit for a young lady of your tender years." "Don't you want to wear diaphanous gowns? And get enough to eat?" With his straw hat, his short steps, his belly, his wonderful face hid beneath a bulbous puff of beaten flesh, his twisted mouth, his knowledge of American life, of women, of children, of fellow-barflies, and of death ("the fellow in the bright night-gown.") His utter lovelessness in the world. Bumping into everything blindly. Making everybody laugh. The line he himself wrote, addressed to him" "You're as funny as a cry for help." How he blows foam off a beer, an Old Mad Murphy of time; how he is alone among foolish people who don't see his soul.

Shakespeare never was sadder.

A hounded old reprobate, a clown, a drunkard of eternity, and "Man."

(Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954, ed. Douglas Brinkley, Viking 2004, p. 236, entry of 14-16 October 1949.)

Kerouac No Role Model

Lest I lead  astray any young and impressionable readers, I am duty bound to point out that this month's focus on Kerouac is by no means to be taken as an endorsement of him as someone to be imitated.  Far from it! He failed utterly to live up to the Christian precepts that he learned as a child and the Buddhist precepts he assiduously studied in the mid-1950s.  Not that he was a hypocrite; he was just a deeply flawed human being.  I just now recall a critique of Kerouac by Douglas Groothuis from some years ago.  (Old Memory Babe ain't got nothing on me.)  Ah yes, here it is.   I am in basic agreement with it.