Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of "Blues For Jack Kerouac"
Book Review
Lonesome Traveler, Jack Kerouac, Viking Press, New York, 1995
Some of the general points made below have been used in other reviews of books and materials by and about Jack Kerouac.
“As I have explained in another entry in this space in a DVD review of the film documentary “The Life And Times Of Allen Ginsberg”, recently I have been in a “beat” generation literary frame of mind. I think it helps to set the mood for commenting on this one of Jack Kerouac’s lesser works, “Lonesome Traveler”, essentially a series of ‘real world’ job-related exercises in his well known spontaneous writing method at a time when he was trying to keep body and soul together, that it all started last summer when I happened to be in Lowell, Massachusetts on some personal business. Although I have more than a few old time connections with that now worn out mill town I had not been there for some time. While walking in the downtown area I found myself crossing a small park adjacent to the site of a well-known mill museum and restored textile factory space. Needless to say, at least for any reader with a sense of literary history, at that park I found some very interesting memorial stones inscribed with excerpts from a number of his better known works dedicated to Lowell’s ‘bad boy’, the “king of the 1950s beat writers”.
And, just as naturally, when one thinks of Kerouac then, “On The Road”, his classic modern physical and literary ‘search’ for the meaning of America for his generation which came of age in post-World War II , readily comes to mind. No so well known, however, is the fact that that famous youthful novel was merely part of a much grander project, an essentially autobiographical exposition by Kerouac in many volumes starting from his birth in 1922, to chart and vividly describe his relationship to the events, great and small, of his times. Those volumes bear the general title “The Legend Of Duluoz”. That is why we today, in the year of the forty anniversary of Kerouac’s death, are under the sign of his book of essays “Lonesome Traveler”.
In some senses the stories in “Lonesome Traveler” are, more than “On The Road” and other major works, exemplars of that Kerouac writing method mentioned above. None of the thinly fictionalized (as almost always is the case in a Kerouac work where the material at hand formed the basis of his writing) characters and events in the essays on their faces seem to be more than a catalogue of job, travel, or entertainment happenings. Except Kerouac's descriptive powers turn these every day happenings into a running commentary that the reader, including this reader, stays glued to so as not to miss a detail, even hanging on to see if an egg will turn out to be too “runny” or not. I think that the most powerful expression of that descriptive knack is in the essay “Railroad Earth” (also found in “The Portable Jack Kerouac”) which tracks his "day job" as a young brakeman working the San Francisco-based freights. Just an average, maybe above average, working class job. But his descriptive powers/existential sense of the job -Wow. I would give much gold to be able to write a few sentences like that.
No comments:
Post a Comment