Frontmatter to: "Kerouac in (and mostly out of) California"
Just in
the last month, well after I set out to revaluate my own dwindling appreciation
of Jack Kerouac at least four prominent Kerouac-related articles appeared in
the national news. The first was a review of the Library of America edition of
Kerouac’s poetry by Bruce Bawer in The New Criterion. To give you the gist of that critique I will
cite a couple of the more entertaining passages. Bawer says, “the best way to get through
Kerouac’s poems is to approach them not as literary texts but as private ramblings
of the sort you might find in the files of a psych ward.” Further, speaking of the Beats in general,
Bawer observes “ . . . with their glib contempt for capitalism and mainstream
society, their romanticization of criminality, drug abuse, and the tragedy of
mental illness, and their narcissistic rebranding as virtues of their own
shiftlessness and dissolution—they would turn out to be, to an amazing extent,
the seed of pretty much everything that was rotten about the American 1960s and
their aftermath.” I was also amused by
his description of Neal Cassady as a “footloose priapic young psychopath.”
2. In the September 6 New Yorker Ian Scheffler
researches biographer Joyce Johnson’s question: “Did the effects of cumulative
damage to the brain over Jack’s lifetime contribute to his deepening alcoholism
and depression?” Johnson was Kerouac’s
girlfriend when he showed up at her door broken and beaten after a drunken
episode in a Greenwich Village tavern.
The beating included Kerouac’s head being smashed repeatedly against a
street curb. Scheffler tracks Kerouac’s traumatic brain injuries, mostly from
football, and concludes that most probably he did indeed suffer from Chronic
Traumatic Encephalitis as a result of so many violent concussions. The most prevalent of all CTE symptoms is
depression, but also impulse control (which leads to substance abuse) and
memory loss, which Kerouac began complaining of while in his late
twenties. This is the affliction that
plagues former National Football League players who just won a ¾ of a billion
dollar judgment from the league. But CTE
can only be proven by physical examination of the brain itself, so this foray
into forensic literary diagnosis must remain somewhat speculative.
I am reminded here of William F Nolan’s
essay on Hemingway titled “Last Days of the Lion” published in 1974. Its second very long paragraph listed the
traumatic physical accidents Hemingway endured including several before taking
the 237 pieces of shrapnel in World War I down to the two plane crashes, both
in 1954 that he miraculously survived. We think of the tragedy of his suicide,
but Nolan’s conclusion was that he was physically exhausted, there wasn’t much
left.
3. The death in August of Beatrice Kozera, or as
she was portrayed in the On the Road Terry, the Mexican girl. She was 92.
She had only known for three years that Kerouac had written of their
relationship. When the writer Tim Hernandez, discovered her, Bea’s daughter
said to him “ “She doesn’t know any famous writers. She’s not of that world.” By that time, 2010, she wasn’t quite sure of
his name “Jack, or John?” She said she
knew nothing of about a writer named Kerouac. After her death, her son searched
her library for signs of Kerouac’s books and found none. The passage describing Kerouac’s abandoning Terry
the Mexican Girl has always struck me as one of the saddest moments in the
book.
4. Finally Carolyn Cassady “ the grande dame of
the Beat generation,” died just a few weeks ago at the age of 90. She had been the second wife to Neal Cassady
and slept with Kerouac, writing about it all in her two books Heart Beat: My
Life with Jack and Neal, and Off the Road, My Years with Cassady,
Kerouac and Ginsberg. She her the
book as a “sobering corrective to what she considered the essentially unhappy
lives of these men.” This an assessment
with which I will essentially agree in the essay that follows.
Although
I do fully intend to make good on my promise to discuss Kerouac in California,
particularly in the California as portrayed in the many iterations of On the
Road, I will begin by disclosing that what I’m really concerned with is
Kerouac’s influence. That is, his
enduring influence on American culture and his waning influence on me.
These are
three notable moments in my on my road to disenchantment with Kerouac:
1) Teaching On the Road to my lower division
general education literature class was basically a disaster. I have always been slow to teach books I love
most. Why? I think that “love” of a book is deeply
personal and hard to articulate. Some books I don’t even wish to reread (much
less try to teach): I want the memory of my first reading experience to
last. I don’t wish to be woken up to the
fact that I was sentimental reader, naïve, beyond belief, filled with youthful
notions long outgrown. I don’t want
Crosby Stills Nash and Young’s prophetic line “Don’t let the past remind us of
what we are not now” to become an unheeded warning. Suffice to say that in teaching the book the
women students in the class were unimpressed by both the portrayal of women and
the male characters’ treatment of them.
This is of course further complicated by the book’s genre, which is best
described, I think by one of his earliest biographer’s, Anne Charters, phrase,”
confessional picaresque memoir.” I
couldn’t think up an adequate defense. Talking about this later with the writer
Rebecca Solnit, she generously let Kerouac off the hook: “He was writing in a
decade that wasn’t so favorable for my gender.”
2) The late photographs of Kerouac. How I wish I hade never seen them! Ginsberg sums up his last photograph of
Kerouac at their last meeting in 1964, three years before his death: "Jack Kerouac on visit to Manhattan,
last time he stopped at my apartment 704 East 5th Street, Lower East Side, he
then looked like his father, corpulent red-faced W.C. Fields yawning with
mortal horror, eyes closed a moment on D.M.T. visions.”
3) The new (2012) Walter Salles’ adaptation of On
the Road to film. On the Road
has always felt to me to be a particularly American novel, and I think the film
succeeds in its peculiar Americanness.
And yet, I can’t erase, from my mind, just like I can’t erase the image
of the bloated alcoholic dead-in-life long before his time, the facts of the
film’s making: the fact that its director is Brazilian, that two of the three
leading actors are British and that the American landscape filmed in Argentina,
the interior scenes shot in Canada. The
America that Kerouac wrote about surely doesn’t exist today; I wonder if it
ever did exist. As the credits of the
film role down the screen there are scenes of the Neal Cassady figure walking
down railroad tracks in the desert.
These, of course, are prefiguring his death just one year before
Kerouac’s own death at 47, in his mothers’ home of internal bleeding which was
complicated by cirrhosis of the liver, the result of a lifetime of heavy
drinking. He was drinking a glass of
whiskey and malt liquor and writing notes about his father’s print shop when
the bleeding began.
