In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60th
Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)-Jack Kerouac- On The Road To “On The Road”-“Maggie Cassidy”
By Book Critic Zack James
To be honest I know about On The Road Jack Kerouac’s epic tale of his generation’s search for
something, maybe the truth, maybe just kicks, stuff, important stuff has
happened on some such happening strictly second-hand. His generation’s search
looking for a name, found what he, or someone associated with him, maybe the
bandit poet Gregory Corso, king of the men New York streets, mean very mean
indeed in a junkie-hang-out world, called the “beat” generation. Beat, beat of the jazzed up drum line backing
some sax player searching for the high white note, dead beat, run out on money,
women life, leaving, and this is important no forwarding address, dread beat, nine
to five, 24/7/365 that you will get caught back up in the spire, beaten down, ground
down like dust puffed away just for being, hell, let’s just call it being, beatified
like saintly and all high holy Catholic like there were not ten thousand other
religions in the world to feast on- you can take your pick of the meanings. Hell
they all did, the guys, and it was mostly guys who hung out on the mean streets
of New York, Chi town, North Beach in Frisco town).
I was too young to have had anything but a vague passing
reference to the thing, to that “beat” thing since I was probably just pulling
out of diapers then, maybe a shade bit older but not much. I got my fill, my
brim fill through my oldest brother Alex. Alex, and his crowd, more about that in
a minute, but even he was only washed clean by the “beat” experiment at a very
low level, mostly through reading the book and having his mandatory two years
of living on the road around the time of the Summer of Love, 1967 an event
whose 50th anniversary is being commemorated this year as well. So
even Alex and his crowd were really too young to have been washed by the beat
wave that crashed the continent toward the end of the 1950s on the wings of
Allan Ginsburg’s Howl and Jack’s travel book of a different kind. These were
the creation documents the latter which would drive Alex west before he finally
settled down to his career life.
Of course anytime you talk about books and poetry and then add
my brother Alex’s name in to the mix that automatically brings up memories of
another name, the name of the late Peter Paul Markin. Markin, for whom Alex and
the rest of the North Adamsville corner boys, Jack, Jimmy, Si, Josh, and a few
others still alive recently had me put together tribute book for in connection
with the Summer of Love, 1967. Markin
was the vanguard guy, the volunteer seeker who got several of them off their
asses and out to the West Coast to see what there was to see. To see some stuff
that Markin had been speaking of for a number of years before (and which nobody
in the crowd paid attention to, or dismissed out of hand in those cold, hungry bleak
1950s cultural days in America) and which can be indirectly attributed to the
activities of Jack, Allen Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, that aforementioned bandit
poet who ran wild on the mean streets, William Burroughs, the Harvard-trained
junkie and a bunch of other guys who
took a very different route for our parents who were of the same generation them
but of a very different world.
But above all Jack’s book, Jack’s book which had caused a
big splash in 1957 and had ripple effects into the early 1960s (and even now
certain “hip” kids acknowledge the power of attraction that book had for their
own developments, especially that living simple and hard part). Made the young,
some of them anyway have to spend some time thinking through the path of life ahead
by hitting the vagrant dusty sweaty road. Maybe not hitchhiking, maybe not
going high speed high through the ocean, plains, mountain desert night but
staying unsettled for a while anyway.
Like I said above Alex was out two years and other guys,
other corner boys for whatever else you wanted to call them that was their
niche back in those days and were recognized as such, from a few months to a
few years. Markin started first back in the spring of 1967 but was interrupted
by his fateful induction into the Army and service, if you can call it that, in
Vietnam and then several more years upon his return before his untimely end. With maybe this difference from today’s
young. Alex, Frankie Riley the acknowledged leader, Jack Callahan and the rest,
Markin included, were strictly from hunger working class kids who when they
hung around Tonio Pizza Parlor were as likely to be thinking up ways to grab
money fast any way they could or of getting into some hot chick’s pants as anything else. Down at
the base of society when you don’t have enough of life’s goods or have to
struggle too much to get even that little “from hunger” takes a big toll on
your life. I can testify to that part because Alex was not the only one in the
James family to go toe to toe with the law, it was a close thing for all us
boys as it had been with Jack when all is said and done. But back then dough
and sex after all was what was what for corner boys, maybe now too although you
don’t see many guys hanging on forlorn Friday night corners anymore.
What made this tribe different, the Tonio Pizza Parlor
corner boys, was mad monk Markin. Markin called by Frankie Riley the “Scribe” from
the time he came to North Adamsville from across town in junior high school and
that stuck all through high school. The name stuck because although Markin was
as larcenous and lovesick as the rest of them he was also crazy for books and
poetry. Christ according to Alex, Markin was the guy who planned most of the
“midnight creeps” they called then. Although nobody in their right minds would
have the inept Markin actually execute the plan that was for smooth as silk Frankie
to lead. That operational sense was why Frankie was the leader then (and maybe
why he was a locally famous lawyer later who you definitely did not want to be
on the other side against). Markin was also the guy who all the girls for some
strange reason would confide in and thus was the source of intelligence about
who was who in the social pecking order, in other words, who was available,
sexually or otherwise. That sexually much more important than otherwise. See
Markin always had about ten billion facts running around his head in case
anybody, boy or girl, asked him about anything so he was ready to do battle,
for or against take your pick.
The books and the poetry is where Jack Kerouac and On The Road come into the corner boy
life of the Tonio’s Pizza Parlor life. Markin was something like an antennae
for anything that seemed like it might help create a jailbreak, help them get
out from under. Later he would be the guy who introduced some of the guys to
folk music when that was a big thing. (Alex never bought into, still doesn’t,
that genre despite Markin’s desperate pleas for him to check it out. Hated whinny
Dylan above all else) Others too like Kerouac’s friend Allen Ginsburg and his
wooly homo poem Howl from 1956 which
Markin would read sections out loud on lowdown dough-less, girl-less Friday
nights. And drive the strictly hetero guys crazy when he insisted that they
read the poem, read what he called new breeze was coming down the road. They
could, using a term from the times, have given a rat’s ass about some fucking
homo faggot poem from some whacko Jewish guy who belonged in a mental
hospital.
Markin flipped out when he found out that Kerouac had grown
up in Lowell a working class town very much like North Adamsville and that he
had broken out of the mold that had been set for him and gave the world some
grand literature and something to spark the imagination of guys down at the
base of society like his crowd with little chance of grabbing the brass ring.
So Markin force-marched the crowd to read the book, especially putting pressure
on my brother who was his closest friend then. Alex read it, read it several
times and left the dog- eared copy around which I picked up one day when I was
having one of my high school summertime blues. So it was through Markin via Alex
that I got the Kerouac bug. And now on the 60th anniversary I am
passing on the bug to you.
Markin comment:
Every year, in October, in Jack Kerouac's hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts a Jack Kerouac Festival is presented to keep his be-bop working class fellaheen memory alive. The link is http://www.lowellcelebrateskerouac.org/lck-2010
Book Review
Maggie Cassidy, Jack Kerouac, Penguin Books, New York , 1993
As I have explained in another entry in this space in reviewing the DVD of “The Life And Times Of Allen Ginsberg”, recently I have been in a “beat” generation literary frame of mind. I mentioned there, as well, and I think it helps to set the mood for commenting on Jack Kerouac’s lesser work under review here, “Maggie Cassidy”, where the action takes place in his hometown, 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 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. The series, of which the book under review, “Maggie Cassidy”, about the trials and tribulations, the inevitable schoolboy quests for love and the “meaning of the universe” of his high school days in Lowell and a little about his prep school days is part, bears the general title “The Legend Of Duluoz”. So that is why we today, in the year of the forty anniversary of Kerouac’s death, are under the sign of “Maggie Cassidy”.
I have mentioned in a note to a review of “On The Road” after a recent re-reading of that master work that Kerouac ‘s, not unexpectedly for a novelist of the immediate post- World War II generation, worldview was dominated by what today would be regarded as deeply, if not consciously, sexist impulses. Moreover, the whole “beat” experience of which he was “king” was, with a few exceptions, a man’s trip. All of the books that I have read of his have that flavor. They may be, some of them, great literature but they are certainly men’s books.
Also, not unexpectedly, for a shy, sly, French-Canadian (with a little Native American thrown in) working class athletic youth from Lowell, Kerouac’s escapades center in this book on his high school male bonding experiences with his “corner” boys. And being, from all reports and a quick glance at his youthful photographs a handsome man, his exploits with young women. And here enters the sultry Maggie Cassidy, the Irish colleen dream of every heterosexual youth. Although the dramatic tension of this book is not exactly gripping, after all despite some very grand, descriptive narration about Lowell, about the neighborhood, about the beauties of the Merrimack River, and above all, about women, the episodes here clearly fall under the category of high school hi-jinks which have had a long literary exposition. Still, this is a nice little trip down memory lane and I can visualize some of the same streets and same building that he refers in this book from those long ago connections that I mentioned above
Note to Jack Kerouac wherever you are: Damn, you should have ‘talked’ to me about Maggie before you got involved. I grew up in a part of a town that while not “Little Dublin” was close enough to bear that title here in America. I knew a million Maggies (and Moe Coles) and I could have warned you that chandelier, lace curtain or shanty, these nice Irish Catholic girls will break your heart, or something else, every time. Now that I think about it though I never listened either. Farewell grand working class fellaheen.
Allen Ginsberg, beat generation, beat poets, beatniks, Gregory Corso, Jack Keroauc, Neal Cassady, post- World War II New York, william s.burroughs
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