maggie cassidy

"Maggie Cassidy", Jack Kerouac, 1959.



Look at that cover. You'd think Jack was writing about encounters with escorts in France, not an adolescent heart-breaking love affair that the author looks back upon with sadness of days/pages turned. How awful.

So first I must say what "Maggie Cassidy" is not:

1) A book about horny.

Now I will move on to say my piece/peace.

Like The National Matt Berninger, Kerouac is having a secret meeting in the basement of his brain. Suppressed emotion of anguish in young love lost. It is seriously never like that I again, I do believe it.

From meeting Maggie Cassidy at a New Year's dance in high school, to having her over to big NYC for a prom at his new prep school, then the bitter and self-eating ending that shows you can overwhelm with emotion sans extreme sexual commentary. Yessir, this one hurts. Maybe myself moreso, moreso right now, because I feel stung by so many women whom I could've married. But I didn't want to. Or maybe I did, but I didn't really know. He didn't either. We're so lost in late teens, early twenties.

Every stupid review I write of Jack Kerouac talks some of automatic writing. It shouldn't, it is his known style for many a books, but this one is so completely successful in the vain of "Tristessa" in that of so many fragments of thought it creates this dancing poetry in novel form. On page 184, near the end, he concocts a speech from Maggie that is half a page, tons of "-", and from it emerges a sentiment that'd haunt Kerouac throughout his search for that ultimate big feeling, "You'll burn yourself out like a moth jumping in a locomotive boiler looking for light". She continues after a minor pause, deriding Jacky for his new big city being.

I see her like so many girls of my own life. With family I met in passing. With cities I met in passing. With a culture I know too well, couldn't be. It's so confusing to say what could have been, especially when what would ensue develops the intellect and awares us of what is.

In the end, the horny prevails, but not the horny, the dastardly and the sinister. Here's the last paragraph, but since nobody reads this, I can't ruin it:

"She laughed in his face, he slammed the door shut, put out lights, drove her home, drove the car back skitteringly crazily in the slush, sick, cursing." Post-revenge-fuck tortures, n that's it.

This from the book that took so many nostalgic and sentimental looks at old home town in a lost era. Kerouac's frequently bitter endings reveal such disappointment he had of his life -- starting in a good hometown Lowell, Mass then to Columbia, before life a military man and wanderer. The roamer, the writer, the antsy part-time recluse. Who started "Maggie Cassidy" with these wickedly sublime visions of winter back East, with the gang, with an easy life of the high school athlete and his little women, and fun.

Like so many of his books with the tinge of bitter ending accompanying this relentless for people and life, the evocative quality runs into your belly only when the pages begin to run out. Then you really can see the images of the indoor track and the little Lowell boy beating the great track star in the 30; the big father entertaining the guests in the back of the house during son's bday party with a dirty joke; the beautiful young lady of us falling into our pseudonym's arms and begging begging begging scared to be loved. Upon reflection, you realize how perfect awesome his writing was.

Now for the only "Maggie Cassidy" cover I know...

visions, blabs, tapes, all sorts of neal cassady

"Visions of Cody", Jack Kerouac, 1960

"Visions of Cody" has been a major reading project, unexpected, somewhere just shy of taking on "Ulysses", which I found 500 pages in I was not equal to without literary help. Thankfully, having read many Kerouac novels before embarking on this journey, I was able to understand the references to fictionalized history of Neal Cassady (now known as Cody Pomeray), and also the free-flying techniques of "automaticity", or pure mind noise in memories Kerouac strived to employ in his more non-linear bits, so I was OK. So it took me the better part of six weeks to mull over "Visions of Cody", a lot of three-page-and-quit sessions taking in little bits of scenery (San Fran, Denver), a lot of departures (reading also "Fear and Trembling", "St. Lucy's Home...", parts of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", Kerouac's own "Scattered Poems", got a great start on my own "Beautiful People Collection), admitted frustration over the mind-chatter employed and sometimes vain and irritating tape bits, engulfing in beauty in its bits of love for the protagonist, the friend, and I'm out the other end today. A long road, but not as long as some -- and ultimately, as goes with Kerouac, rewarding.

It took off like a rocket. Beat-up movie theatres, skid row descriptions, Ginsberg was indeed proud of the unsentimental, gritty, urban, Joyce in the gutter type prose. The background, Cody's ascension to the main scatterbrained man of the Denver underground, the emergences of King Beat, is amazing, Herculean, as he foot races, tackles, shows-off his machismo and mile-per-minute mind.

We are then put right in the living room of the Pomerays as Jack comes to visit, listening to the mad banter of Cody and Jack as they got high, listened to bop, played their instruments, and philosophized in the immediacy of every moment. The cliche of the day is "Live every moment as if it's your last", and you can't help but to feel, in the vibrations of these crazy, sometimes nonsensical, sometimes profound, bits of uncensored talk, that these two were even micromanaging their moments!

The follow-up is Imitation of the Tape, and I can't pretend I totally get it besides, in Allen Ginsberg's notes, "By now the author K.'d obviously gave up entirely on American Lit., on Town & City, on On the Road, on Himself & his history, and let his mind loose. The resulting book is full of charming sounds & jokes, he didn't think he was Finnegan's wake; but some American Mouther Fucker." I love that, Mouther Fucker. To me it's also him imitating through his own isolated literary experiment-trip the mad immediacy of his and Cody's minds in some sort of strange fusion, playing off each other, two chemicals in a deadly bomb. When Evelyn (Cody's wife) pops in with sane questions, she only triggers further insanity. These parts, along with the ensuring re-entry to San Francisco, "Joan Rawshanks in the Fog", can be quite cumbersome due to their intensely personal, inside-story ways, but in retrospect, they are able to represent exactly what Kerouac meant when he spoke tirelessly of automaticity. Something says his friendship with Neal Cassady inspired that more than he'd ever let on.

The true gems of the story, however, belong to the last 60-some pages, almost an alternative version of "On the Road" in many ways, as Kerouac takes the trips from that story, speeds them up into a hypomanic fit, and delivers them with less punctuation and more raucous-ness. It's hard to get sick of him telling the story of his trip to Mexico, and the visions-- such as sitting in the Tropic of Cancer park, and Cody coming to his last will to remember, when prodded about his whorehouse experience on the way down to Mexico City says, surprisingly, "Makes no difference" -- these visions round it out, bring depth to what we've already heard, bulk to this legendary trip. All the insanity further developed, and it's refreshing for Kerouac to step out of his typically linear style to focus on images, vignettes of life, mad moments. In the end, it drove home his admiration of a man he'd follow to the ends of the Earth just to see what IT was really out there.

Though Jack ends on a tender, somber note, believing Cassady was to be lost to traditional marriage, settled times, Ginsberg is quick to note that it is Cassady -- who later reinvented his persona with Ken Kesey and the Pranksters -- who'd see Kerouac's decline from his alcoholism in the early 60s. They'd have their kicks again, but the heart of who they were together lives in the 40s and 50s, in "On the Road", though the fullness of the real Neal Cassady seems most likely immortalized in the pages of "Visions of Cody".

"I stood on sandpiles with an open soul, I not only accept loss forever, I am made of loss -- I am made of Cody, too --"

Below: Cassady is on the left, Kerouac the right

in the world of nothingness

"The Dharma Bums", Jack Kerouac, 1958

You truly need to quiet your mind for this one, to piece together the wonders of Japhy Ryder (poet Gary Snyder) through the eyes of Raymond Smith (Jack Kerouac himself), to understand in a bit of a Buddhist nothingness not silence not noise not anything. At times, with all swirling in my brain these days--moving, staying in Phoenix, balancing finances, the hard-hit realization of being a full-fledged adult with credit and economy--I had times I felt shamefully noisy. But that's why it's good I hit a more romantic Kerouac with his "Dharma Bums" at this time, to remember the quiet and the joy and the OKness of many things. (Even if he was drunk and trying to get laid a lot of the time--).

Japhy Ryder is to "The Dharma Bums" what Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady) is to "On the Road": the Chosen One Kerouac follows pseudonymed-up for another segment of his life--journey--adventure--learning. This time we go fewer places than "On the Road" before, but the visions of life are more wide-eyed. You can literally taste the coldness of the stream Kerouac sips from as they make their way up Matterhorn Mt., feel the exhilaration as Kerouac realizes you can't fall off of a mountain(!), and then, later, see the clouds swirling below you as the lookout on great Desolation Peak (a place not quite as romanticized in the more devastating "Desolation Angels"). Japhy takes Kerouac through all of this, showing him the purity in the quiet outdoors, steering clear of tourists and haggles, noise and human-inflicted pain. Even in the city they live in shacks and sit on haysacks meditating, doing nothing and everything. We even run into Allen Ginsberg who Kerouac portrays more crabby then ever due to his conflict with Kerouac's insane passion toward his BhuddiChristian beliefs (not hard to see why this was the Kerouac book he was the harshest towards, though honestly, I take him for a more objective intellectual then that). In turn for Japhy's guidance, Kerouac immortalizes him in his familiar rollicking prose, edited I'm sure with more tight punctuation, let loose enough to let the rhythm and spontaneity breathe through and sound authentically Kerouac. He is far warmer and more idolizing of him than the, at time caricature-like, Neal Cassady.

In the end, you see Kerouac as the mountain lookout, following in the shoes of this young man, Japhy, trying to understand his world, see how it fits him. In later books, we'd find out it didn't quite go as dreamily as he had wished or even chronicled in the last 30 or so pages of this book, but here, for the sake of this work of fiction, it was a blessing and a soothing peace gathering around this Raymond Smith, this man searching for something beyond the booze and women that plagued his life so, past the insane drama his so often inflicted upon himself and immediately returned to after his trip down the mountain. In many ways, perhaps, this was the silent climax in the hectic life of the fictional Sal Paradise, Raymond Smith, Jack Duluoz, as the one lurking in the shadows of the Duluoz Legend wanted us to see. Maybe. Or maybe that's my romantic interpretation of it all. Either way, I leave with a quote to fall with the popular interpretation of Kerouac as a brilliant chronicler of post-World War Americans searching for a place to be, with

"I recalled with a twinge of sadness how Japhy was always so dead serious about food, and I wished the whole world was dead serious about food instead of silly rockets and machines and explosives using everybody's food money to blow their heads off anyway."




PS: I've now read three of the 17 (as I count'um right now) "Graphic Classics" from penguin. This, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Candide, and Fairy Tales. I love the feel and the covers and all of the contextual intros and notes!

inimitable he

"Visions of Gerard", Jack Kerouac, 1958

Of all the misadventured wild looking for IT of Mr. Kerouac's life, "Visions of Gerard" is that Duluoz Legend book that takes us on a trip in the memory, created visions n little tidbits of actual emotion drawn from the little kid remembrance of Gerard, Jack Kerouac's older brother who died at the age of nine. Kerouac admits his idealism and old-soul wisdom came from this oldest soul of a little boy who hated mousetraps and digging out the eyes of killers in the newspaper (among other things), who went to confession to purge every little bad detail admitting his sins puresouled, who yelled from his deathbed for his sister Ti Nin and little Ti Jean to go out and play and enjoy the day as his nine year old body expired.

The 130 pages are divided up into small vignettes expressing the soul of Gerard as Kerouac pieced together from distant feelings and memories, and I'm guessing from old stories his mother would tell him. The first half contains many recollections of Gerard, summed in, "My own brother, a spot of sainthood in the endless globular Universes and Chillicosm." Right down to when he first became sick and told the nuns at school of his visions of Heaven, you'd be surprised he wasn't isolated by his earnest wisdom but he drove awe into the hearts of the adults he touched, and no one more so than Jack Kerouac. The second half contains some of the more stark and stumbling images as we see Ti Jean's father, Emil, milling about town hit hard woebegone as his son lays on his death bed begging to see the birds which come to his window, HIS birds he wishes so badly to come to him and sit around him (not understanding their fear, having no fear even in certain death). When the death comes we are hit with the immense sorrow of child death despite Gerard's intense wishes to be gone to Heaven (even when he was well he cried of why people can not have what they want--he wanting Heaven).

Naturally, all this naturally, but the revelations of imminent death, the world being death, the somber realizations are what "Visions of Gerard" are about past the shots of heart-breaking idealism. For Ti Jean, Jack Kerouac, this was his first experience in death and we see him confused over the moping, crying, knowing Ti Gerard was in Heaven, as the adults cry and moan, as mom screams, "They took him off to Heaven!--They didnt leave him with me!--Gerard, my little Gerard!" It's a sobering view from a child of 3 now grown into a soon-to-be legendary poet and novelist. Death has always been a played-with subject of the Duluoz Legend, but in this book it takes center stage with all its promise and dire promise brought out, danced around. Yet we still have the words of what can be DONE before the death takes over, the impenetrable heart of perhaps Kerouac's own personal savior, Gerard Duluoz, someone who taught Ti Jean to be kind as he stabbed out the newspaper eyes of the murderer woman--"We smooth the ruffled paper, stroke the paper lady's eyes, brood over our sin, rectify hells, fruition good Karma for ourselves, repent, go to confession--" This sort of innocent heart, not sentimental or nostalgic, just understand of the sanctity surrounding him, he died for certain with no hopes like adult hopes but with some sort of alien heart for the good of all men.

This all not to say how Kerouac's words dance dance dance the page amazingly and elegantly the story of his brother. His progressive style of punctuation and short episodes lead to a clear, penetrating look at Gerard and his family structure. As Gerard returns form confession, Kerouac remembers his exact place and time, you have to be jealous over his ability to describe unabated, "I'm sitting stupidly at a bed-end in a dark room realizing my Gerard is home, my mouth's been open in awe an hour you might think the way it's sorta slobbered and run down my cheeks, I look down to discover my hands upturned and loose on my knees, the utter disjointed inexistence of my bliss." All over the return of the boy who'd bring him intense love for the world, word, and the heart to tell it. Then this leads to the internal understanding, "None of the elements of this dream can be separated from any other part, it is all one pure suchness." Simple, elegant. The book is--not crammed 'tis still airy--but laden with such description and wisdom, vivid, illuminating, gut-wrenching in a butterfly sort of way.

"Visions of Gerard" will raise many questions in the mind, the BIG QUESTIONS, as we see a saintly boy expire n go to where he always begged to go, as he posed the simple boy questions of why are men so mean(?) and so on. This is key in the Duluoz Legend as Kerouac runs all over creation searching for IT (which I always say was ENCRUSTED in his trips to begin with), though it appears IT was something Gerard had internally, and Kerouac, in this book, looked to dig it out of him before telling the story of his inevitable end to his rheumatic heart. It's heartfelt, in a way tender, never bitter, pure Kerouac in simply another way, pictures painted bright golden then stark never-seeing nights (behold the scene Gerard runs out to get his mother aspirin in the blistering windy cold winter night and revelates that God did not make the world for men in its pure darkness with a light only showing the darkness but not illuminating). The making of a literary icon in the visions of his brother who perhaps was greater than He.


"In bed that night he lies awake, Gerard, listening to the moan of wind, the flap of shutters--From where he lies he can just see one cold sparkle star--The fences have no hope."

all of us on mountains

"Desolation Angels", Jack Kerouac, 1965

On top of a peak in solitude, this is a new voice of Jack Kerouac, yet the same old one, working things out constantly. Thing is, Jack Kerouac spent a whole lot of time not on the road but we never hear about it because when he wasn't on the road, rather, in more or less solitude at his mother's he was writing about the wild times, the pursuits. Now we catch him in Book One (Desolation Angels) in 70 pages of solitude like a reborn Buddhist mulling over his philosophies before emerging back into adult life to be, again, Jack Duluoz, Beat poet rising into star status, these adventures taking place just before the publishing of "On the Road" before all things would change.

Still, what kind of rebirth is it? He comes back down off that mountain (from doing fire watches and keeping entertained with card baseball games) where he curses the sky and Mt Hozomeen for his solitude yet has the chance to meditate on his Buddhist leanings and seemingly feels refreshed, apparently knowing much more about life, and intermittently will curse his rebirth all together, wishing for nothing but pencils, paper, and nobody. Still, has he learned a thing, going back into New York, finding a few lovers randomly women taking care of him in absence of his mother, searching for that ultimate truth in the road trying to live and damnit doing it on his own whatever pursuits. Has he learned a thing?

Appearing yet again are the likes of Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso (all pseudonymed-up) with all their quirks, but Cassady much more lovingly human than the caricature hero of "On the Road"'s Dean Moriarty, while Corso is as mad and poetic ever painting murals for the mafia, speaking truth and cursing destitution, with Ginsberg and his lover sitting around naked at parties doing whatever taboo can be to shake people out of their comfort zone (whaddya expect from the man who, at this time, just published the titanic poem, "Howl"?). We get glimpses of their mangled fraternity, emerging flame, careless lumping into sameness catagories while Kerouac's prose sorts them out quite clearly as a diversity of souls all digging each other out of curiousity and sheer madness, but what else should friendship be based on? Cassady teaches Corso how to bet on horses, Ginsberg pisses Corso off by stripping down at a quiet gathering in San Fran, William S Burroughs appears in Tangiers typing away madly at "Naked Lunch" whilst dreaming of his Ginsberg and ever getting shot-up on M, Kerouac rides around to Mexico City, Africa, Europe, and so on with a growing stash of manuscripts artistically flourishing (for he never considered "On the Road" a magnum opus and had "Tristessa" under his arm nearly losing it on the train), Great Jack's last adventure was even to move his mother out to Berkley for their perfect home in the effeminate progressive art communities but the old matriarch couldn't take the madness, scared her boy would be destroyed by it all, begging for him to find a home, another theme constantly creeping through all the Duluoz Legend and especially "Desolation Angels" (there is no home in desolation?), the concept of home through all the searching home is not lost but yearned for more, especially as he takes that boat back to America from England, yet nothing is ever settled even as he finds his Joyce Johnson, or Alyce, the one who takes care of him so well...he even concedes that sex is not the furthest he can love a woman or somesuch (I think I'll find it and quote it here -- second thought maybe not I got a better Hozomeen quote). Yes, so much goes on here, the wild shit, the soul searching (and yes, the cover is right, religion comes up so often with so many Buddhist and Christian and spiritual references you must read it all in context to even grasp the meaning), and the longest Kerouac book in 409 pages and over 150 small vignettes/episodes, two books (Desolation Angels and Passing Through, which was really an overview of happenings after "Desolation in Isolation" and "Desolation in the World") you must do as you always would first time in a Kerouac maze, read read read don't stop read read and synthesize what's great let other words drift off, catch more the second time around.

Yes, you'll learn.

"Hozomeen, rock, never eats, never stores up debris, never sighs, never dreams of distant cities, never waits for Fall, never lies, maybe though he dies-"

mardou and others

"The Subterraneans", Jack Kerouac, 1958

With "Tristessa", it was fleeting junkylove, more of a meditation of what it means to be enslaved and reliant upon others and upon drugs than truelove, like "The Subterraneans". Kerouac's follow-up to "On the Road" is even more off-the-cuff, but now a panoramic snapshot of a single love, not several back-and-forth trips, and in a mere 111 pages he spills that love onto the paper in all its details and glory, true to the soul and all that good stuff.

For a short little novel "The Subterraneans" is incredibly dense, wordy, and still flowing. It took me several sessions to come through, probably as many as the 2-3 times as long "Big Sur". You could tell that Kerouac wrote this in a BLAST, three days and three nights in reality, and that it struck like lightning you take a picture of and never fades. The words would lose me, find me, and like great Kerouac, there are moments you have no clue what's going on, then moments of utter clarity. He's able to divulge common things such as the basic plot (meeting, courtship, first sex, the good times, the bad times, the cause of the end, the end, the outcome) with glory of humanity and tenderness with his sketching prose, his stream-of-consciousness paralleled by no one.

The girl's name is Mardou, half-black half-Indian who strikes Kerouac's fancy as being somewhat the mother of us all. Hie Oedipal Complex is fleshed-out toward the end, and continuously through the whole Duluoz Legend as he struggles to find a replacement for his mother and always ends up back on her doorstep. Mardou seems like the closest thing the many-times-a-married man would find, as they make plans in darkness and love for real, but it isn't to last. The classic Kerouac paranoia rears its head as he begins to see signs of their downfall and plans accordingly. Through the man's positivity as The Legend goes on, his worship of life and the wonderment it brings, he's surely got the weakness of looking over his shoulder constantly. In this way he sabotages the relationship and this is a reflection of its destruction, beautiful and brittle, and totally relatable as it is a cliche in a new way. So not a cliche. Just a really good book on love.

Also covered in subplots that will converge with Mardou's affair with another "subterranean", Kerouac must've cemented his status as leader of the beats with this book which goes into further detail of the structure of the underground folk he was a part of. Some had made it in art, some were simply self-made scholars, others street poets and beatniks with the brains to join; they all had brains. Mardou was like Kerouac, impoverished, mad, intelligent as hell, and ready for whatever. In many ways she was the counterpart he was made for as you could see his contrast with the better-off beats and their witticisms that he did not all together fit with (he was too honest, even in his wit it was not as clever as it was genuine). Kerouac was instead crazier, just as brainy, impressive in conversation and art, but always retreated, and so did Mardou, to her home and the aptly named Heavenly Lane she lived on, where, Kerouac prophesized, one day her light would not be on for him any longer. And he was right.

Through the packed prose and intellectual and cultural references Kerouac and his Legend are known for, this strikes compelling as what is a meditation on love and its costs and rewards. He seems to regret in retrospect what he did to destroy, only seeming to understand it away from the situation and behind a typewriter, but still he moves. That's the point, right? He moves, and we move, and his travels and loves and heart-breaks and search for it continue perpetually. And I can't help but feeling he finds IT so often, but also finds that nothing so IT lasts, too precious and breakable. Just move!


"...and now you threw away a little woman's love because you wanted another drink with a rowdy fiend from the other side of your insanity."

deterioration

"Big Sur", Jack Kerouac, 1962

My previous Duluoz experience goes to the first typed "On the Road" and then the smashing little druggy Mexico City love meditation "Tristessa", but now Kerouac has found fame through what he refers to as "Road", and post-fame blues with alcohol tremens are what will be taken on in "Big Sur".

Kids expect him to be younger, and wiser, and more and more Jack Ti thinks he's a complete idiot and full of shit. He's caught up with Cody Pomeray (Neal Cassady as you'd figure), sleeping with Cody's favorite mistress and sitting on her chair and binging as she works while her child drives him wild, and on this saga goes.

The first fifth of the book is simply our protagonist, Mr. Kerouac, searching for an escape from big crowds and people who need to talk to him now that he is so-called "King of Beatniks". He's famous, he's got money, and he's getting the hell out of New York, so he finds himself on a cabin on Big Sur on the Pacific, and he's isolating himself trying to find greener grass. Though such is not possible; when he's at Big Sur he misses the crowds when he's with the crowds he misses the isolation Big Sur provided him. His torture turns to him rationalizing all with supposed signs he's going mad (such as Tyke, his kitten, dying and he mourns this consistently through the book so fabled loss of innocence) until he winds back at Big Sur with friends and his affair screwing with her kid hanging off of her and all woebegone things. This is Kerouac at his maddest and most self-deprecating.

Yet again, it's about adventure. He drinks too much, he's getting old, he misses his time with his old road pale when it's just the two of them, but he's still picking his ass up and doing things. Big Sur itself seems the maddest place as Duluoz stands over the thousand foot bridge and the wild waters as if its some giant monster meant to deter him from the peacefulness of the cabin, the peacefulness of the pure life. His alcoholism are those mad waters which never calm. Eventually even the pure things begin to look crazy and convicting, as Duluoz gets more and more paranoid and into worse situations with Billie, the woman who so wishes to settle with him but ends up driving him mad with useless philosophy and beatings of her child (and she swears, in the most despondent parts of "Big Sur" that she'll kill herself and the kid and all will be over). This adventure is not the same as the others, however, where Kerouac finds joy and sadness but always the will, as it seems he loses some of his faith and eventually, in the last fifth of the book he's gone so mad it's hard to make anything concrete of the text at all -- a wonderful mish mash of words set to the tune of a scabbed and tattered brain. A maddening adventure of the alcohol-induced and destroyed psyche.

The strangest part is that in the last two pages he suddenly snaps out of it. Everything is OK. It leaves with a sort of "What the fuck" thought, though this is Kerouac and he is, as I previously suspected, so damn scared of falling into cynicism, and it's funny I'm drawn to people like that because my own writing I forget, and, while I will venture much farther to the darkside of my own mind than I've seen Kerouac do, I need to hold on to those rays. In "Big Sur", yes, it is totally forced, but I think Kerouac wanted us to see that, see that you need to draw your mindstate away simply, make a change, get rid of Billie and her damned kid, drop them off and your obligations if need be, and get back to the purity of things. Or go mad. It's hard to say where Duluoz leaves us this time. We just know he comes back at some point.

This is a much more picturesque, naturesque Kerouac this time around, and not only is there isolation through Big Sur, but he seems isolated by those around him, isolated by fame, isolated by the mindset that he is not who he may really be. It is not instantly quotable, philosophies much more scattered, but still a different side of Kerouac and his Legend, and all is strange and mad in the world of Duluoz.

the stuff and the stuff

"Tristessa", Jack Kerouac, 1960

Now that I had read "On the Road", traditionally regarded as Jack Kerouac's magnum opus, I knew that it would be time for me to further get into what Kerouac himself called The Duluoz Legend, the books Kerouac wrote about his journeys. I went way off the beaten path to a slight and mind-fucking short novel, "Tristessa". Finally, finally I could see Kerouac's true prose unleashed in all their stream-of-consciousness glory. For the first 20 pages I thought I was high. For the final 74 I was just enjoying the magic carpet ride through the slums of Mexico City, visiting the sick people and seeing dead ends go dead.

This one is a two parter, the first being "Trembling and Chaste", and our narrator, presumably Kerouac himself but I never know, is going back to Tristessa's hole of all homes, and for the next 60 or so pages, we are immersed in the dank and solemn and uncut images of junkie life. He follows with his eyes the pigeon and cat and hen and people sitting around talking and doing morphine shots, while he drinks his drink. Tristessa, the apple of is high, is vividly described as he longs for her, but ultimately refuses her, and in this, reveres her, a common but beautiful junkie. Secondary characters are described, but if this is anything, it is rantings from the lovesick to the drugsick, trying to build bridges that cannot be forged.

The second part, "A Year Later...", tells of the return of Kerouac or whoever to Mexico City to reclaim Tristessa as his third wife. But she is too far gone. Old Bull, the man he used to live next to, who is now renting him a room, a true long-time junkie and the one who funds Tristessa's habit, he is the one, and as he so bluntly says, Give him a beautiful woman in one chair and morphine in the other, he takes the morphine every single time, it's all he needs. And it's all Tristessa needs. And it's not this fact, or this semblance of plot that matters, but the prose, the gut-wrenching pull at your belly and teeth prose, the straight-from-the-brain words Kerouac uses that brings it all home. It's total and utter despondency, and it's incredibly and sadly awe-inspiring.

If anything, the book is an experience. Every image is destruction. There is so much agony packed in, it will totally feed your angst as you read about the downtrodden characters of the underworld. Hope? Last line is, "This part is my part of the movie, let's hear yours", no ending punctuation or anything. It was just a story, one of many, it would seem, so that's as much hope as there is. But the experience is, again, in the prose and the images. "I play games with her fabulous eyes and she longs to be in a monastery" is just too good to come off the top of his head, the ending of a long conversation about faith and what is and what never was, previously saying, "I feel we are two empty phantoms of light or like ghosts in old haunted-house stories diaphanous and precious and white and not-there." Sometimes he rambles and rants and longs so bitterly and it's tough, but you get to the luminous parts, and the true loveliness is in there, even if it's painful.

Another side of Kerouac explored, another part of the legend put to rest. I'd never tell anyone new to Kerouac to pick up "Tristessa" first, but it is an experience I wouldn't trade. It's poetry moving in line with two terrible sicknesses that will never be resolved, the lovesickness and the drugsickness. They can't be resolved, so what's your story?

"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."

stuck between stations

"On the Road", Jack Kerouac, 1959

Oh man, what do I do? In just over 300 pages of "On the Road", I read Jack Kerouac intimately describe journeys, maniacal, tough, rugged, intense, depressing, and gratifying journeys back and forth across the continent, in what is vastly considered a legendary and untouchable piece of literature, and really, nothing for me to do except reflect. Yes, that's the point of this blog anyway, reflection, but my mind is so blown right now it's incredible.

Sal Paradise is the narrator, Dean Moriarty is his wild-eyed and slightly insane friend, and they are representative for what Kerouac himself would term the Beat Generation. They are the twenty-something souls displaced by World War II, and so they journey and journey and run into dead-ends and brick walls and, of course, oceans, searching for life. Hard to say, by the end, that they found anything resembling what they set out for, but the adventure, the "kicks" as Dean so often referred to them, that's what illuminated what Kerouac so often referred to as a sad life. He especially liked the word sad. He used it to describe just about everything in the world.

Still, something radiates out in this story that transcends all of the sadness, and these boys strike gold in such unorthodox fashion that you must thoroughly examine the pages and penetrate the density of Kerouac's prose and the magnitude he could strike with even the simplest of language, and you have to see. There is so much talk of souls here, so much so it's trippy and it shines on you. If nothing else, Sal and Dean are sharing time and space to believe in the ecstatic. As they bounce back and forth, Dean like a pinball between his women and relationships and responsibilities, Sal between his limiting reality in New York and fantasies of the West, they talk madness and sweat and shake and do whatever comes their way, avoiding worry and avoiding following society's expectations. It's anarchic. For those of us caught in the jaws of regular society, you have to fear for'um a bit, especially as Sal, who goes from exuberant to weary and back every 20 pages, is shown in such obvious light that Dean Moriarty is not capable, truly, of being down for him with all that's on his plate, as he abandons Sal in San Francisco starving and barely able to fend for himself. But in the end, his loyalty to Dean runs deep and he knows this guy and his incapability to right himself and the limitations of his empathy, and in the end, his true madness, and he loves Dean for so many reasons, in this strange way that never fades, so remarkable and unconditional and so counter-cultural in a quid pro quo society, and in that, so majestic.

This will stick with me a long time. "On the Road" isn't just, as it says on the back, "THE NOVEL THAT DEFINED A GENERATION", it is a novel that defines the dreamers still. With a decent awareness of the context in which Kerouac wrote this beacon of post-WWII lit, one can relate to it now, the band of people searching beyond the blandness of our Subdivision Nation, beyond the dulling of intellect and, as always in every generation, the marginalization of radical ideas, until all we have are our own souls, with such a yearning to share them, and a sparse few out there who even seem to give a damn. The world, like that, can be pretty scary, but what's the sense of worry, as Dean Moriarty once said and I'll paraphrase, it's all passing us by anyhow.

"Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk - real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious."