On The 60th Anniversary Jean-bon Kerouac's "On The Road"- “Desolation Angels”-Book Review
Book Review
Desolation Angels, Jack Kerouac, Coward McCann, 1965
I have been on something of a Jack Kerouac “tear” over the past year or so since I started re-reading and reviewing his works and thinking through their influence on my own literary tastes around the commemoration of the 40th anniversary of his death (and re-reading, additionally, those of his “beat” generation friends, among the most prominent, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti , Gregory Corso, and Gary Snyder who also helped form those tastes and who find their way, under alias and alibi, into Desolation Angels). As noted previously this “tear” got its start “accidentally” with a trip on totally unrelated business that I took last summer to his hard-edged, hard luck, hard-times, hard-visioned, seen better days, ram-shackled, big two-hearted Merrimac River, water-powered, dust-choking textile-spinning and tannic acid-fumed shoe old working class mill town, Lowell, Massachusetts.
There are a thousand old worn out working class towns like Lowell that, by now, dot the great American highway night, towns formed before the great American mid-20th century pre-Interstate highway night (roughly). The pink blue sky westward trek (and back, as well) hard thumb up traveling, shoe leather-beating, rucksack-hanging, good luck diner/gas station-finding, coffee slurping, highway and back road by-way Lowell towns night, as sang out in various “on the road” chapter passages of Desolation Angels formed Jack Kerouac’s vision. And he sang of that good night, as Walt Whitman sang of the great American 19th century night as those same now forsaken towns began to rise and spit out all manner of thing, for delight or approbation. That worn out working class town, always just below the surface of the Kerouacian word play, and its fellaheen-driven ethos, moreover, was just the kind of town that I grew up in so unless it is something in the water around here in Massachusetts then it is no “accident” that old “beat” brother Kerouac “speaks” to me. And “speaks” loudly. Desolation Angels, in any case, stands in that tradition.
You see then why, when the deal goes down, down and dirty, I know Jack Kerouac. Oh no, not the way his many “beat” writer friends did , at least those who peopled, as in Desolation Angels, his many tell-the-truth-fast, quick judgment, acid-etched observations on the fly fast, write what you see and write it fast, “real” novels. Not, for sure, like renaissance Raphael did(Gregory Corso), poet of the streets, the streets of San Francisco poetry renaissance as well as homeboy streets of hard ethnic New York City, of the fast poem buck, of wine and women, of the sing to the masses whether they like it or not, mad man of a poet. Or not like Bull did (William Burroughs) of the dark, drear, dope-infested ding-dong daddy, shoot-‘em-up daddy, walking daddy, gong, bong, hash pipe-heavy, opiated dream world hiding out in the open in Tangiers (although it could have been anywhere, dope follows no flag, New Orleans, Houston, somewhere, although not old home St. Lo) waiting with open arms for Kerouac to take his “on the road” show international. And not like super-mantra, om-om-om om-ish poet Irwin (Allen Ginsberg, of San Francisco garage yell to the America ocean’s floor and mountain’s top Howl and New Jersey mother, death-be-not-proud cadenced Kaddish fame), who also sang that Kerouac-like Whitmaneque song of good fellowship, of death to the machine, of death to the death-machine, of death to the cardboard night, of the break-out Patterson night (or nights), and the break-out machine America, as well. And most certainly not like Cody (Neal Cassady) foot-clutched, brake-pedaled, “look ma, no hands”, “road” warrior extraordinaire to the great American expanse, day or night. (Although by the time of this novel the Ti Jean and Cody trails were heading in different directions, very difefretn directions.) There were others who knew him back on those lonely, down-at-the-heel, provocative post-World War II New York streets, friends of Ginsberg, of Burroughs and assorted hangers-on. That interconnectedness is the stuff of legend but well before my time, although I heard the echoes of that struggle, that fellaheen “beat” struggle, in my own youthful efforts to break out of the straightjacket of the 1950s childhood when my time of my time came in the 1960s.
I know Jack Kerouac. Although not as a latter day academic prier into each Kerouac word ever written or even as a latter-day devotee of his spontaneous prose writing style. Certainly not as an adherent of his standoffish, sideline view of life and consciously apolitical (maybe, more appropriately, anti-political) lifestyle, as that was embarrassingly emphasized in a famous segment on old prep school chum William F. Buckley’s Firing Line public television show where he went out of his boozy, woozy, floozy way to dump on the counter-cultural movement (“hippies”, okay) of the 1960s. From early on in my youth I was more likely, much more likely, to be immersed in reading things like The Communist Manifesto (if only to dismiss it out of hand-then) and had no time for reading a simple “beat” travelogue like On The Road although I was personally struggling along those same lines to ‘find myself’ (sound familiar ?), to find that great American night. Later I would devour the thing (repeatedly) along with the rest of his major works like Dharma Bums, Visions Of Cody, Big Sur, Doctor Sax and others. None more so, after On The Road, than Desolation Angels.
I know Jack Kerouac. I know, like Kerouac did, as a youth painfully but now with a sense of deep pride, what being from the lower edges of the working class was all about. One does not easily shake off the slow incremental deathblows to the psyche of avoiding authority, avoiding challenges to the status quo, avoiding failure by being a non-starter and most of all avoiding negative public (read neighborhood) notice. I, moreover, know, physically and emotionally, the very constricted ethos of the old time New England mill towns and the working class quarters of Manchester, New Hampshire, Saco, Maine and in Massachusetts Waltham, Lawrence, Quincy and Jack’s own beloved river-divided, brick on brick-piled mill town of Lowell. Without going into great detail, after all this review is about Kerouac, I know in great personal detail the effects of that clannish French-Canadian and Gallic Catholic cultural gradient as it worked it way through the working class base of many of those above-mentioned mill towns. Moreover, some of that detailed knowledge of mine is directly linked to the city of Lowell that factored so much into Kerouac’s life and writings (and death, the city has a small urban park named after him in the center of town and people, I am told, still go to visit his grave there).
Most of all, though, I know Jack Kerouac because a generation, more or less, after him I was, like a million others who formed the “Generation of ‘68”, taking to the ‘road’, some road, in search of personal destiny, greater consciousness, some political wisdom, the truth, a little look at the great continental expanse, or just trying, and trying with both hands, to get out of the stunted, shunted, dark night, memory-fogged family house. The previously disdained apolitical “On The Road” became something of a personal bible for me in that minute, as like Whitman before him, Kerouac tried to do by interior monologue, but more importantly, by physically putting some space between the here of whatever was bothering him and the there of some inner peace (that he, at least from what I can tell, never found). The road I took then, or later, was not Jack’s road. Or Dean Moriarty’s road. But, thanks Jack for On The Road, The Dharma Bums, Doctor Sax, Visions of Cody, the present Desolation Angels, and a bunch of other books that got me through many a sleepless night as I tried to find the keys to the kingdom.
Here is the real “skinny” though. Jack, as media-proclaimed ‘leader’ of the “beats” (and, in retrospect, he really was the most talented and original of the lot) never overcame all those crooked river-flow, old time dusty mill town anxiety-producing, drawing on generations of suffering ignoble anonymity-beating down, Lowell night whispers. And the wheels, his wheels, driven as well by that old devil alcohol, came off. The effects of that cloistered, repressed working class youth, as surely as if he had spent thirty years in the mills, began to take its toll. The final section of Desolation Angels in which he travels, in "style" on a Greyhound bus (“on the road, part ten, part whatever”) with his mother (dear memere) from Florida to California in search of peace only to run back a few weeks later here reflect that inner drive to withdraw, to go home to mill town memere and quiet.
Moreover, a recent re-reading of some of Dharma Bums gives at least some clue to what else happened to this superior and innovative writer in that dark night sixties Jack by-passed American road. He was, after all, as the work that is remembered today will attest to, a young, very young, writer writing for the young about youthful experiences. There is only so much fresh inner-directed material that that market can absorb from one writer. The aging media celebrity Kerouac, sadly, could not, or would not, face the fact of aging and shift gears. I have already given my kudos elsewhere for that youthful work of his. That will have to do here.
Book Review
Desolation Angels, Jack Kerouac, Coward McCann, 1965
I have been on something of a Jack Kerouac “tear” over the past year or so since I started re-reading and reviewing his works and thinking through their influence on my own literary tastes around the commemoration of the 40th anniversary of his death (and re-reading, additionally, those of his “beat” generation friends, among the most prominent, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti , Gregory Corso, and Gary Snyder who also helped form those tastes and who find their way, under alias and alibi, into Desolation Angels). As noted previously this “tear” got its start “accidentally” with a trip on totally unrelated business that I took last summer to his hard-edged, hard luck, hard-times, hard-visioned, seen better days, ram-shackled, big two-hearted Merrimac River, water-powered, dust-choking textile-spinning and tannic acid-fumed shoe old working class mill town, Lowell, Massachusetts.
There are a thousand old worn out working class towns like Lowell that, by now, dot the great American highway night, towns formed before the great American mid-20th century pre-Interstate highway night (roughly). The pink blue sky westward trek (and back, as well) hard thumb up traveling, shoe leather-beating, rucksack-hanging, good luck diner/gas station-finding, coffee slurping, highway and back road by-way Lowell towns night, as sang out in various “on the road” chapter passages of Desolation Angels formed Jack Kerouac’s vision. And he sang of that good night, as Walt Whitman sang of the great American 19th century night as those same now forsaken towns began to rise and spit out all manner of thing, for delight or approbation. That worn out working class town, always just below the surface of the Kerouacian word play, and its fellaheen-driven ethos, moreover, was just the kind of town that I grew up in so unless it is something in the water around here in Massachusetts then it is no “accident” that old “beat” brother Kerouac “speaks” to me. And “speaks” loudly. Desolation Angels, in any case, stands in that tradition.
You see then why, when the deal goes down, down and dirty, I know Jack Kerouac. Oh no, not the way his many “beat” writer friends did , at least those who peopled, as in Desolation Angels, his many tell-the-truth-fast, quick judgment, acid-etched observations on the fly fast, write what you see and write it fast, “real” novels. Not, for sure, like renaissance Raphael did(Gregory Corso), poet of the streets, the streets of San Francisco poetry renaissance as well as homeboy streets of hard ethnic New York City, of the fast poem buck, of wine and women, of the sing to the masses whether they like it or not, mad man of a poet. Or not like Bull did (William Burroughs) of the dark, drear, dope-infested ding-dong daddy, shoot-‘em-up daddy, walking daddy, gong, bong, hash pipe-heavy, opiated dream world hiding out in the open in Tangiers (although it could have been anywhere, dope follows no flag, New Orleans, Houston, somewhere, although not old home St. Lo) waiting with open arms for Kerouac to take his “on the road” show international. And not like super-mantra, om-om-om om-ish poet Irwin (Allen Ginsberg, of San Francisco garage yell to the America ocean’s floor and mountain’s top Howl and New Jersey mother, death-be-not-proud cadenced Kaddish fame), who also sang that Kerouac-like Whitmaneque song of good fellowship, of death to the machine, of death to the death-machine, of death to the cardboard night, of the break-out Patterson night (or nights), and the break-out machine America, as well. And most certainly not like Cody (Neal Cassady) foot-clutched, brake-pedaled, “look ma, no hands”, “road” warrior extraordinaire to the great American expanse, day or night. (Although by the time of this novel the Ti Jean and Cody trails were heading in different directions, very difefretn directions.) There were others who knew him back on those lonely, down-at-the-heel, provocative post-World War II New York streets, friends of Ginsberg, of Burroughs and assorted hangers-on. That interconnectedness is the stuff of legend but well before my time, although I heard the echoes of that struggle, that fellaheen “beat” struggle, in my own youthful efforts to break out of the straightjacket of the 1950s childhood when my time of my time came in the 1960s.
I know Jack Kerouac. Although not as a latter day academic prier into each Kerouac word ever written or even as a latter-day devotee of his spontaneous prose writing style. Certainly not as an adherent of his standoffish, sideline view of life and consciously apolitical (maybe, more appropriately, anti-political) lifestyle, as that was embarrassingly emphasized in a famous segment on old prep school chum William F. Buckley’s Firing Line public television show where he went out of his boozy, woozy, floozy way to dump on the counter-cultural movement (“hippies”, okay) of the 1960s. From early on in my youth I was more likely, much more likely, to be immersed in reading things like The Communist Manifesto (if only to dismiss it out of hand-then) and had no time for reading a simple “beat” travelogue like On The Road although I was personally struggling along those same lines to ‘find myself’ (sound familiar ?), to find that great American night. Later I would devour the thing (repeatedly) along with the rest of his major works like Dharma Bums, Visions Of Cody, Big Sur, Doctor Sax and others. None more so, after On The Road, than Desolation Angels.
I know Jack Kerouac. I know, like Kerouac did, as a youth painfully but now with a sense of deep pride, what being from the lower edges of the working class was all about. One does not easily shake off the slow incremental deathblows to the psyche of avoiding authority, avoiding challenges to the status quo, avoiding failure by being a non-starter and most of all avoiding negative public (read neighborhood) notice. I, moreover, know, physically and emotionally, the very constricted ethos of the old time New England mill towns and the working class quarters of Manchester, New Hampshire, Saco, Maine and in Massachusetts Waltham, Lawrence, Quincy and Jack’s own beloved river-divided, brick on brick-piled mill town of Lowell. Without going into great detail, after all this review is about Kerouac, I know in great personal detail the effects of that clannish French-Canadian and Gallic Catholic cultural gradient as it worked it way through the working class base of many of those above-mentioned mill towns. Moreover, some of that detailed knowledge of mine is directly linked to the city of Lowell that factored so much into Kerouac’s life and writings (and death, the city has a small urban park named after him in the center of town and people, I am told, still go to visit his grave there).
Most of all, though, I know Jack Kerouac because a generation, more or less, after him I was, like a million others who formed the “Generation of ‘68”, taking to the ‘road’, some road, in search of personal destiny, greater consciousness, some political wisdom, the truth, a little look at the great continental expanse, or just trying, and trying with both hands, to get out of the stunted, shunted, dark night, memory-fogged family house. The previously disdained apolitical “On The Road” became something of a personal bible for me in that minute, as like Whitman before him, Kerouac tried to do by interior monologue, but more importantly, by physically putting some space between the here of whatever was bothering him and the there of some inner peace (that he, at least from what I can tell, never found). The road I took then, or later, was not Jack’s road. Or Dean Moriarty’s road. But, thanks Jack for On The Road, The Dharma Bums, Doctor Sax, Visions of Cody, the present Desolation Angels, and a bunch of other books that got me through many a sleepless night as I tried to find the keys to the kingdom.
Here is the real “skinny” though. Jack, as media-proclaimed ‘leader’ of the “beats” (and, in retrospect, he really was the most talented and original of the lot) never overcame all those crooked river-flow, old time dusty mill town anxiety-producing, drawing on generations of suffering ignoble anonymity-beating down, Lowell night whispers. And the wheels, his wheels, driven as well by that old devil alcohol, came off. The effects of that cloistered, repressed working class youth, as surely as if he had spent thirty years in the mills, began to take its toll. The final section of Desolation Angels in which he travels, in "style" on a Greyhound bus (“on the road, part ten, part whatever”) with his mother (dear memere) from Florida to California in search of peace only to run back a few weeks later here reflect that inner drive to withdraw, to go home to mill town memere and quiet.
Moreover, a recent re-reading of some of Dharma Bums gives at least some clue to what else happened to this superior and innovative writer in that dark night sixties Jack by-passed American road. He was, after all, as the work that is remembered today will attest to, a young, very young, writer writing for the young about youthful experiences. There is only so much fresh inner-directed material that that market can absorb from one writer. The aging media celebrity Kerouac, sadly, could not, or would not, face the fact of aging and shift gears. I have already given my kudos elsewhere for that youthful work of his. That will have to do here.
No comments:
Post a Comment