This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
Click on the headline to link to the Rosa Luxemburg Internet Archives.
March Is Women’s History Month
Markin comment:
Usually I place the name of the martyred Polish communist revolutionary, Rosa Luxemburg, in her correct place of honor along with Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin and German revolutionary Karl Liebknecht when we of the leftist international working class movement honor our historic leaders each January. This year I have decided to, additionally, honor the Rose of the Revolution during Women’s History Month because, although in life she never fought on any woman-limited basis in the class struggle, right this minute we are in need, desperate need of models for today’s women and men to look to. Can there be any better choice? To ask the question is to give the answer. All honor to the memory of the Rose of the Revolution- Rosa Luxemburg.
******** *ROSA LUXEMBURG-THE ROSE OF THE REVOLUTION
Click on title to link to Rosa Luxemburg's' 1900 major article against the "revisionist" anti-Marxist revolutionary socialist position in the German Social Democratic Party (and internationally), "Reform OR Revolution"
BOOK REVIEW
ROSA LUXEMBURG, A LIFE IN THE INTERNATIONAL, RICHARD ABRAHAM, BERG PUBLICATIONS, OXFORD, UK, 1989
WOMEN'S LIBERATION THROUGH THE FIGHT FOR SOCIALISM
MARCH IS WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH
If you need to know in depth, and you should, what Rosa Luxemburg’s contributions to Marxist theory were and about her struggles within various European left-wing socialist parties to fight for her revolutionary perspective then this is not the book for you. You need to read the compilation of her own works edited in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks or read one of her eminent political biographers like P. Froelich or P. Nettl. If, however, you need a short primer about Rosa’s theories and political struggles then this book can provide some insights about what it was like to be a leading revolutionary socialist woman in early 20th century Europe.
Mr. Abraham takes some trouble to go through the details of Rosa Luxemburg’s political education in the early socialist movement in Poland; her rise in the German Social Democratic Party that was her home base for most of her career before her assassination by right-wing soldiers in 1919; and, her various trials and tribulations in connection with the Bolsheviks, particularly over the question of the national right to self-determination for Poland and other oppressed nations. He, thankfully, spends far less time on Rosa’s personal life than that of Ms. Elizabetza Etttinger (see archives) whose biography of Rosa, while admirable in its way, nevertheless almost consciously avoids politics.
I, however, take issue with Mr. Abraham on two points, at least in part. He attempts off-handedly to sneak Rosa into the feminist camp. While feminism may be the fashion in late 20th and early 21st century it is not belaboring the point to note the contempt Rosa held for the feminism of her time. One cannot in fact understand her political career other than as one of seeing that women’s liberation would occur though socialist revolution, or not at all. That, dear reader, has nothing to do with feminism.
The second point is his emphasis on the efforts that Luxemburg made to create a ‘third way’ for Marxist development away from the sterility of bureaucratic German social democracy and the rigidity of Russian Bolshevism. This again is more of a posthumous attempt to use her orthodox Marxist approach to create something more than her theoretical projections would warrant. Otherwise what is one to make of her long term bloc with those very Bolsheviks in the pre-World War I period and of her almost pathological fear of breaking with the German SPD when it was time, in fact past time, to do so, I will definitely take arguments on these disputes.
I read political biographies mainly to get a background look at what makes the subject of the biography tick. After reading this book it struck me, as it did after reading Ms. Ettinger’s more personal account, that even revolutionaries, and particularly revolutionary women, cannot fully transcend the facts of their personal upbringing and their times. Clearly, Rosa was a liberated woman by any measure. However, I got the overwhelming feeling that she could never fully transcend the 'outsiderness' of being Jewish or of the terrible strain of breaking free of the mores of Victorian Europe. It may be a truism of Marxism but true nevertheless that it will take some generations before the ‘new’ man and women fully take on the attributes of socialist comradeship but after reading this book it is also clear that even the ‘vanguard’ intellectuals of the movement can only go so far in transcending their capitalist environment. Nevertheless, Remember Rosa Luxemburg-the Rose of the Revolution.
*******
One of the nice things about these modern information technologies like word processors and data retrieval systems is that one can have easy access to his or her earlier work and therefore avoid starting from scratch on every commentary. That is the case with this comment. I have reposted an entry in this space from August 11, 2007. It concerns the question of missing weapons and their fate in that old, almost forgotten, Iraq war posed by the General Accounting Office (GAO) at that time. Recently I picked up a news item from “The Boston Globe” (via “Baltimore Sun”), dated February 13, 2009, concerning this same question posed by this same agency. Except the question is directed to missing guns in Afghanistan in the lead up to the Obama policy that is set to escalate the war there with an increased American troop presence. So, as I said previously, in the interest of “saving” cyberspace I have reposted the old comment. Just put in Afghanistan where I have Iraq and you’ll get the gist of the recent story. As to the numbers, well, the Afghanistan numbers are about 90,000 but who’s worried about the real numbers? Not the GAO, and not Obama. Read on.
August 11, 2007
“Where Did Those AK-47’s Go?
Apparently the American military juggernaut is arming both sides in the Iraqi conflict. What? Well, news has recently come out from the General Accounting Office (GAO) that something like 200, 000 AK-47 assault rifles- the most popular (and useful) weapon in the world for the common soldier- are missing along with plenty of other war material. Now a few thousand rifles mislaid in a war is just ‘breakage’ as they say in the shipping business. 200, 000 missing rifles (enough for several divisions in conventional military terms) that are suppose to be in the hands of the Iraqi security forces , however, is quite another matter. The Pollyanna-ish GAO is worried that such quantities might fall into the wrong hands, that is, the various insurgency groups operating in Iraq. Hello! One can be damn well sure that one way or another, through the black market, stealing or by being given them by those selfsame Iraqi security forces that a significant number have found, or will find, their way into insurgent hands. If we needed one more reason to call for immediate withdrawal from Iraq here it is, in living color.”
Needless to say, Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops From Iraq AND Afghanistan!
Click on title to link to the John Reed Internet Archive's presentation of John Reed's comments on the black question in America at the Colonial Commission of the Second Congress Of The Communist International (Comintern).
On The
100th Anniversary Of Newly-Fledged German Communist Leader Rosa
Luxemburg And Karl Liebknecht-Oh, What Might Have Been-
By
Frank Jackman
History
in the conditional, what might have happened if this or that thing, event,
person had swerved this much or that, is always a tricky proposition. Tricky as
reflected in this piece’s commemorative headline. Rosa Luxemburg the
acknowledged theoretical wizard of the German Social-Democratic Party, the
numero uno party of the Second, Socialist International, which was the logical
organization to initiate the socialist revolution before World War II and Karl
Liebknecht, the hellfire and brimstone propagandist and public speaker of that
same party were assassinated in separate locale on the orders of the then
ruling self-same Social-Democratic Party. The chasm between the
Social-Democratic leaders trying to save Germany for “Western Civilization” in
the wake of the “uncivilized” socialist revolution in Russia in 1917 had grown
that wide that it was as if they were on two different planets, and maybe they
were.
(By
the way I am almost embarrassed to mention the term “socialist revolution”
these days when people, especially young people, would be clueless as to what I
was talking about or would think that this concept was so hopelessly
old-fashioned that it would meet the same blank stares. Let me assure you that
back in the day, yes, that back in the day, many a youth had that very term on
the tips of their tongues. Could palpably feel it in the air. Hell, just ask
your parents, or grandparents.)
Okay
here is the conditional and maybe think about it before you dismiss the idea
out of hand if only because the whole scheme is very much in the conditional.
Rosa and Karl, among others made almost every mistake in the book before and
during the Spartacist uprising in some of the main German cities in late 1918
after the German defeat in the war. Their biggest mistake before the uprising
was sticking with the Social Democrats, as a left wing, when that party had
turned at best reformist and eminently not a vehicle for the socialist
revolution, or even a half-assed democratic “revolution” which is what they got
with the overthrow of the Kaiser. They broke too late, and subsequently too
late from a slightly more left-wing Independent Socialist Party which had split
from the S-D when that party became the leading war party in Germany for all
intents and purposes and the working class was raising its collective head and
asking why.
The
big mistake during the uprising was not taking enough protective cover, not
keeping the leadership safe, keeping out of sight like Lenin had in Finland
when things were dicey in 1917 Russia and fell easy prey to the Freikorps
assassins. Here is the conditional, and as always it can be expanded to some
nth degree if you let things get out of hand. What if, as in Russia, Rosa and
Karl had broken from that rotten (for socialism) S-D organization and had a
more firmly entrenched cadre with some experience in independent existence.
What if the Spartacists had protected their acknowledged leaders better. There
might have been a different trajectory for the aborted and failed German
left-wing revolutionary opportunities over the next several years, there
certainly would have been better leadership and perhaps, just perhaps the Nazi
onslaught might have been stillborn, might have left Munich 1923 as their
“heroic” and last moment.
Instead
we have a still sad 100th anniversary of the assassination of two
great international socialist fighters who headed to the danger not away always
worthy of a nod and me left having to face those blank stares who are looking
for way forward but might as well be on a different planet-from me. Click on title to link to V.I. Lenin's 1914 article "The European War and International Socialism". Timely, right? Change Europe to Afghanistan and Iraq (you can throw in Pakistan, too) and there you have it.
Every January militants of the international communist movement, the European sections more than the American, honor the Three L’s, the key leaders of the movement in the early 20th century- Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht. Since opening this space in early 2006 I have paid individual honor to all three in successive years. For this year’s (2009)and future January observances, in that same spirit, I will to add some other lesser figures of the revolutionary pantheon or those who contributed in some way to the development of this movement, some previously noted others not, including other pro-communist, or pro-socialist trends in the international movement as well. The theme of the series will fall under the headline of "Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits".
I will also be including a selection of writings from the Three L's under the heading "From The Pen Of....." this year and in the future.
Click on title to link to V.I. Lenin's 1914 article, "The European War And International Socialism".
On The
100th Anniversary Of Newly-Fledged German Communist Leader Rosa
Luxemburg And Karl Liebknecht-Oh, What Might Have Been-
By
Frank Jackman
History
in the conditional, what might have happened if this or that thing, event,
person had swerved this much or that, is always a tricky proposition. Tricky as
reflected in this piece’s commemorative headline. Rosa Luxemburg the
acknowledged theoretical wizard of the German Social-Democratic Party, the
numero uno party of the Second, Socialist International, which was the logical
organization to initiate the socialist revolution before World War II and Karl
Liebknecht, the hellfire and brimstone propagandist and public speaker of that
same party were assassinated in separate locale on the orders of the then
ruling self-same Social-Democratic Party. The chasm between the
Social-Democratic leaders trying to save Germany for “Western Civilization” in
the wake of the “uncivilized” socialist revolution in Russia in 1917 had grown
that wide that it was as if they were on two different planets, and maybe they
were.
(By
the way I am almost embarrassed to mention the term “socialist revolution”
these days when people, especially young people, would be clueless as to what I
was talking about or would think that this concept was so hopelessly
old-fashioned that it would meet the same blank stares. Let me assure you that
back in the day, yes, that back in the day, many a youth had that very term on
the tips of their tongues. Could palpably feel it in the air. Hell, just ask
your parents, or grandparents.)
Okay
here is the conditional and maybe think about it before you dismiss the idea
out of hand if only because the whole scheme is very much in the conditional.
Rosa and Karl, among others made almost every mistake in the book before and
during the Spartacist uprising in some of the main German cities in late 1918
after the German defeat in the war. Their biggest mistake before the uprising
was sticking with the Social Democrats, as a left wing, when that party had
turned at best reformist and eminently not a vehicle for the socialist
revolution, or even a half-assed democratic “revolution” which is what they got
with the overthrow of the Kaiser. They broke too late, and subsequently too
late from a slightly more left-wing Independent Socialist Party which had split
from the S-D when that party became the leading war party in Germany for all
intents and purposes and the working class was raising its collective head and
asking why.
The
big mistake during the uprising was not taking enough protective cover, not
keeping the leadership safe, keeping out of sight like Lenin had in Finland
when things were dicey in 1917 Russia and fell easy prey to the Freikorps
assassins. Here is the conditional, and as always it can be expanded to some
nth degree if you let things get out of hand. What if, as in Russia, Rosa and
Karl had broken from that rotten (for socialism) S-D organization and had a
more firmly entrenched cadre with some experience in independent existence.
What if the Spartacists had protected their acknowledged leaders better. There
might have been a different trajectory for the aborted and failed German
left-wing revolutionary opportunities over the next several years, there
certainly would have been better leadership and perhaps, just perhaps the Nazi
onslaught might have been stillborn, might have left Munich 1923 as their
“heroic” and last moment.
Instead
we have a still sad 100th anniversary of the assassination of two
great international socialist fighters who headed to the danger not away always
worthy of a nod and me left having to face those blank stares who are looking
for way forward but might as well be on a different planet-from me.
Click on title to link to V.I. Lenin's 1914 article "The Europeon War and International Socialism". Timely, right? Just change to Afghanistan and it is.
On The
100th Anniversary Of Newly-Fledged German Communist Leader Rosa
Luxemburg And Karl Liebknecht-Oh, What Might Have Been-
By
Frank Jackman
History
in the conditional, what might have happened if this or that thing, event,
person had swerved this much or that, is always a tricky proposition. Tricky as
reflected in this piece’s commemorative headline. Rosa Luxemburg the
acknowledged theoretical wizard of the German Social-Democratic Party, the
numero uno party of the Second, Socialist International, which was the logical
organization to initiate the socialist revolution before World War II and Karl
Liebknecht, the hellfire and brimstone propagandist and public speaker of that
same party were assassinated in separate locale on the orders of the then
ruling self-same Social-Democratic Party. The chasm between the
Social-Democratic leaders trying to save Germany for “Western Civilization” in
the wake of the “uncivilized” socialist revolution in Russia in 1917 had grown
that wide that it was as if they were on two different planets, and maybe they
were.
(By
the way I am almost embarrassed to mention the term “socialist revolution”
these days when people, especially young people, would be clueless as to what I
was talking about or would think that this concept was so hopelessly
old-fashioned that it would meet the same blank stares. Let me assure you that
back in the day, yes, that back in the day, many a youth had that very term on
the tips of their tongues. Could palpably feel it in the air. Hell, just ask
your parents, or grandparents.)
Okay
here is the conditional and maybe think about it before you dismiss the idea
out of hand if only because the whole scheme is very much in the conditional.
Rosa and Karl, among others made almost every mistake in the book before and
during the Spartacist uprising in some of the main German cities in late 1918
after the German defeat in the war. Their biggest mistake before the uprising
was sticking with the Social Democrats, as a left wing, when that party had
turned at best reformist and eminently not a vehicle for the socialist
revolution, or even a half-assed democratic “revolution” which is what they got
with the overthrow of the Kaiser. They broke too late, and subsequently too
late from a slightly more left-wing Independent Socialist Party which had split
from the S-D when that party became the leading war party in Germany for all
intents and purposes and the working class was raising its collective head and
asking why.
The
big mistake during the uprising was not taking enough protective cover, not
keeping the leadership safe, keeping out of sight like Lenin had in Finland
when things were dicey in 1917 Russia and fell easy prey to the Freikorps
assassins. Here is the conditional, and as always it can be expanded to some
nth degree if you let things get out of hand. What if, as in Russia, Rosa and
Karl had broken from that rotten (for socialism) S-D organization and had a
more firmly entrenched cadre with some experience in independent existence.
What if the Spartacists had protected their acknowledged leaders better. There
might have been a different trajectory for the aborted and failed German
left-wing revolutionary opportunities over the next several years, there
certainly would have been better leadership and perhaps, just perhaps the Nazi
onslaught might have been stillborn, might have left Munich 1923 as their
“heroic” and last moment.
Instead
we have a still sad 100th anniversary of the assassination of two
great international socialist fighters who headed to the danger not away always
worthy of a nod and me left having to face those blank stares who are looking
for way forward but might as well be on a different planet-from me. Commentary/Book Review
Post World War II Socialist Blahs
Every January militants of the international labor movement, the European sections more than the American, honor the Three L’s, the key leaders of the movement in the early 20th century- Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht. Since opening this space in early 2006 I have paid individual honor to all three in successive years. For this year’s and future January observances, in that same spirit, I will to add some other lesser figure of the revolutionary pantheon or those who contributed in some way to the development of this movement, mainly American at first as befits the title of this blog but eventually others in the international movement as well. So to honor the Three L’s this year I will start with an American revolutionary figure from the mid-20th century who I have written extensively on in this space, James P. Cannon. Cannon, pound for pound warts and all, represented to this militant’s mind the most accomplished (if not the most successful and therein lies the bitter irony) communist of that first American generation who formed the core of cadre directly influenced to the left by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
The following review is another in a fairly large series of books featuring the writings of James P. Cannon published by Pathfinder Press (or its subsidiaries) the publishing arm of the party that Cannon was instrumental in organizing and leading, the Socialist Workers Party. I will, as I have done with previously reviewed Cannon writings, use the same couple of introductory paragraphs that sets out the important questions concerning Cannon’s place in the revolutionary pantheon.
The Struggle For Socialism in the “American Century", James P. Cannon, Pathfinder Press, New York, 1977
If you are interested in the history of the American Left or are a militant trying to understand some of the past lessons of our history concerning the socialist response to the victorious American (mainly) outcome to World War II then this book is for you. This book is part of a continuing series of the writings of James P. Cannon that were published by the organization he founded, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), in the 1970's, a few years after his death in 1974. Look in this space for other related reviews of this series on this important American Communist.
In their introduction here the editors motivate the purpose for the publication of this book by stating the Cannon was the finest Communist leader that America had ever produced. This an intriguing question. The editors trace their political lineage back to Cannon's leadership of the early Communist Party and later after his expulsion to the Trotskyist SWP so their perspective is obvious. What does the documentation provided here show?
This is certainly a continuation of the period of Cannon's political maturation after a long journeymanship working with Trotsky. The period under discussion starts as Cannon reaches his mid 50's, shortly after his release from federal prison for his principled (along with 17 other leaders of the SWP and Minneapolis Teamsters Union) opposition to America's entry into World War II. The party at that time needed to adjust strategy in order to come to terms with the ramifications of a victorious American imperialism in that war, some internal opposition (to be discussed below) from those who wanted to, again, fight out the "Russian" question that seemingly had been firmly resolved in 1940 and the fight to determine whether it was appropriate to "unite" with that opposition that split from the party and formed its own organization (also addressed below). One thing is sure- in his prime which, arguably, includes this period Cannon had the instincts to want to lead a revolution and had the evident capacity to do so.
It is almost axiomatic in the Marxist movement to state that war is the mother of revolution. Certainly the experiences of World War I would serve those formed by those years as a signpost. Trotsky, in his various manifestoes, pamphlets and other writings from shortly before the outbreak of World War II in Europe until his murder by a Stalinist assassin in Mexico in 1940 hammered away on this theme. With the proviso that the forces around the Fourth International, including importantly the SWP, had to redouble their efforts at programmatic clarity and cadre recruitment in order to take advantage of the post-war possibilities (if not before).
It is that spirit that animated the worldview of the SWP in the immediate post-war period. The party had been recruiting based on its black liberation perspective and its opposition to the various Communist Party and AFL and CIO labor bureaucracy efforts to continue to enforce a war time 'no strike' pledge. There were other empirical examples such as increased readership and efforts in the GI movement that further buttressed their upbeat prognosis. Moreover, as a practical matter, in the hard, hard tasks of trying to create a new society by overturning the old one completely revolutionaries better be animated, at least in part, by optimism.
That said, the post-war program prognosis got totally undermined from the beginning by the virulent campaign by the American ruling class to clamp down on "reds", especially in light of the foreign policy disputes with an emergent and militarily strong Soviet Union and the domestic fights by organized labor for wage increases to play catch up after the wage stagnation of the war period. Reading the SWP programmatic notes of this period, the rather Pollyannaish expectations in light of what really happened and a certain denial of reality did not stand the party in good stead for the oncoming "red scare" that effectively politically defeated a whole generation of militants- Stalinist, Trotskyist and others- for at least a decade. We, those of us who came of political age later, have faced other such periods such as during the Reagan years and partially in the 9/11 period where we were also isolated so we are painfully aware of that optimistic/ pessimistic dichotomy that runs through every revolutionary movement.
Many of the articles in this book center around Cannon's leadership of the fight against an internal opposition, the so-called Morrow-Goldman faction. That faction formed based on an reflexive anti-Sovietism, a conciliation toward American imperialism and, more importantly, a craven desire to forge unity with the previously-mentioned 1940 anti-Soviet opposition that split from the SWP and formed the Workers Party, led by former Cannon associate Max Shachtman, with a rightward social democratic orientation. Moreover, the glue that held the whole cabal together was the inevitable question of the party "regime", meaning always the leadership of one James P. Cannon.
In the American revolutionary socialist milieu the so-called "Russian question", that is, practically, the need for militants to military defend the Soviet Union as the blemished but fundamental example of the baseline for socialist evolution was fought out in the SWP in 1939-40. The results were that a significant minority of the party, led by Shachtman, split and formed the Workers Party. During the war years both organizations led very separate and different existences. In the immediate post-war period, at a time when the question of defense of the Soviet Union was NOT a burning issue there was considerable talk about a unification of the two organizations. This is the impact of the so-called Morrow-Goldman dispute that takes up much of this book. In the end no unification came about, nor was one truly possible under any rational standard of political discourse, especially as the American-led anti-Soviet Cold war heated up with the introduction of the Truman Doctrine and the ratcheting up of the "reds scare". The later personal fates of Morrow and Goldman (and Shachtman's and his various organizational incarnations, as well) as apologists for American imperialism only highlight the differences between Cannon's party of the Russian Revolution and Shachtman's "State Department" socialism- that is craven support for every American imperialist adventure they could get their hands on.
Although this dispute, seemingly, is strictly for insiders or aficionados of the esoterica of extreme left-wing politics there are many points made by Cannon that still ring true today for those of us who still wish to create a revolutionary party capable of making the revolution. Those include the role of the press as a party organizer (Cannon gives a very good description of the sometimes absurd prior socialist practice in this regard.), a serious attitude toward the question of unification and splits as a means for creating a revolutionary party unlike the SWP-WP fiasco, the very different tasks and obligations that confront a propaganda group as a opposed to a mass party (and the former's stronger need to have a homogeneous political and organizational line) and, most importantly, as has been true since 1917 a correct evaluation of that thorny "Russian Question".
Although defense of the Soviet Union is not an issue today that issue is still with us in the form of the question of China (and other non-capitalist states like Cuba). China is that Russian Question for today's militants. For a still relevant analysis of what to do (and what not to do) about Stalinism in its Chinese form Cannon's long article here "American Stalinism and Anti-Stalinism" reads, in part, like it was written today.
That said, let's place Cannon in prospective. Earl Browder, William Z. Foster, Jay Lovestone, Max Shachtman, Albert Glotzer, these now obscure names were political associates of James P. Cannon's at various stages of his political development as a communist. Some became hardened Stalinist leaders; some became hardened social democratic leaders but a comparison of the political profiles of them and Cannon shows that they lacked one thing that Cannon did not. That evident capacity to lead a socialist revolution in America, if circumstances arose to permit such a fight.
No one can read Cannon's works from early in his career as a rising Communist functionary in the 1920's through to his adherence to Trotsky and not notice that here was a man who was trying to work these problems through. Of course, to his opponents, particularly those who one way or the other split from the Trotskyist movement and who always placed their opposition in the context of the abhorrence of the "regime" meaning, basically, they could not do just as they pleased Cannon was like their worst political nightmare. They, in turn, however had not problems touting the virtues of American imperialism when the political situation warranted their essentially literary inputs thereafter.
Finally, no one has to take Cannon for a political saint to realize that, on the record, the various "regimes" that he ran based on political support from the worker cadre would cause the so-called `free spirits" to chaff at his acknowledged policy of not suffering fools gladly (if at all). This reviewer having personally been in and around, as a youth, various Stalinist organizations before coming over to Trotskyism knows that the mere fact that there were vigorous factions and other political oppositions INSIDE the SWP and that they survived leaves the charges of Cannon as a crypto-Stalinist, or better, a Zinovievist, as so much hot air. Read Cannon's Struggle For A Proletarian Party along with this book to see what I mean.
Ti
Jean wondered sitting on Pawtucketville silts listening to the rushing rock-strewn
Merrimack coming by, wondered like maybe those old-time Dutch sailors sighting
that green fresh breast of land that would become Long Island as they entered the sound, another
waterway a metaphor for Jack life, and found a new world unspoiled for that
fifteen minutes before they laid anchor and claim on the cheap. That wonder
drove Jack boy, all fourteen- year old Jack boy so not worried by red dress
Paula Cole coming hither Friday night dates or that damn Maggie down by the almost
Chelmsford dream side of the river, damn already the river is in play with her
Irish braids and that god damn Bible between her knees to wonder if James was
it MacNeil Abbott or Abbott MacNeil Whistler sat beside this same river
thinking about his own Mere, his mother and how he could do justice to that
forlorn Puritan face which razzled him with blacks, browns and greys, as if to
mock the very idea of mother. Hell, James, he would never be called Jimmy like
the other boys once he “did” his mother in those woe begotten colors decided he
would use the old dame, and she was an old dame to star in his various studies
of colors and only philistines would dare to call the work some mother lode
draught.
This
is where the story gets interesting, although we know that Jack was not
bothered just then by come hither girls in red dresses or Bible-kneed Irish
girls since he had, playing hooky, crept into his holy of holy spots in the
cubicle at the school library gone beyond the wonder of those muddy splat
riverbanks where he first wondered the wonder akin to those Dutch sailors
seeking his own fresh green breast of land, the land of the mind. Wondering how
to stop wondering Jack picked up a biography of James Whistler complete with
mother on the front except she was painting title called some study in black
and white, something like that by one Lancelot Grey who Jack would later find
out was the central figure in what he would wind up calling the pre-war art
cabal that was attempting to “dress up,” read, protect American art and artists
from the onslaught of European critics who basically call that art “folk art”
meaning show the bastards the door and maybe get them shown in Peoria or better
Grand Island but stay away from European shores.
Grey’s
take on Whistler, taking the American born but life-long ex-patriate in was
that he never left the American shores and stuff like that. What interested
Jack though was not that art cabal stuff (art cabal a term he would not know
until later when landing in New York he came face to face with the denizens of
that cabal through various Student Art League girlfriends and others met in
Village garrets when garrets were there and not in Soho). But that was after
the war (World War II in case a younger reader has happened on this piece) when
New York told cheapjack art Europe to fuck off, to step back and various
abstraction movements were all the rage. Just then Grey delved into Whistler’s
various non-mother pieces (than mother painting an iconic come on since back
then only the art cabal knew other paintings and the publisher insisted that
that painting be on the front).
Jack
popcorn for eyeballs sitting in the last row of the orchestra section of the
old Majestic Theater off of Bridge Street across from the offices of the Lowell Sun waiting as the screen heated
up after some very ordinary news of the week reels and an off-color cartoon
which he never did get even after watching several times over the next few Saturday
matinee double-feature week. The films changed every Friday but Mr. Le Blanc
cheapened up his operation by re-running those silly cartons built for
ten-years olds with no brains but silly to a strapping boy of sixteen who
actually took girls to the shows. (Le Blanc also sold stale popcorn with so
much salt laid in it would make your eyelids curl and watered down the tonic,
old-fashioned New England word for soda, so much it might as well have been
water and even made boys like Jack with strong kidneys ran to restrooms
frequently.) Of course, that was a totally different proposition, that messing
with girls stuff that he had pretty much figured out by sixteen with plenty of street advise some of it recklessly
dangerous and no, zero, parent advise but that was when you asked a girl if she
wanted to sit in the orchestra section or go up to the heavy-breathing pitch
dark moaning balcony. If the former that would be a last date (one time he left
the girl in the front lobby to fend her herself on the way home while he went
off to Renoir’s Ice Cream Shop with Even Stephen and Dizzy Izzy). This day,
this Thursday afternoon first show skipping afternoon classes was different when
Jack was all business trying to figure some stuff out that was going to appear
on the satin silk screen.
Then
it, no, she started. All fresh as a new born daisy fending off some sidewalk
Lothario, if only in Jack’s imagination, really only some lug like a million
lugs he knew in Lowell High School and who if he hadn’t been on a mission this
afternoon could have stood in front of the high school at close of day and
counted the number of lugs from the class of 1939 carousing out the door some
he could name by name. So, no this lug was going nowhere, was getting nothing
except the desert breezes from this girl. Jack swore the girl with the Bette
Davis eyes after beating the clown off with a car jack sat in her dust-filled
private reading spot reading some French poet from the fourteenth century. Jack
pressed his popcorn eyeballs to see book jacket cover and his heart beat a mile
a minute once he saw that she, Gabby let’s give her a name, was reading his
hero prince bandit poet Francois Villon, like him a Breton when that meant
something before the wave of diasporas which led angelized angel-headed
Kerouacs to the shores of the Saint Lawrence River and downwardly mobile fates
stripped the clan of their respective dignities.
Yes,
Villon the prince of thieves who Jack had discovered in that broken- down
school library where he hid out when he could not deal with bullshit chemistry
classes or some such subject around the time that he read that book by Lancelot
Grey about that pimp daddy, holy goof (first use of the term “holy goof” came
from reading Grey) James Whistler the artist who kept himself from the Thames
and watery graves by selling his paintings or more usually “selling” his
mistresses to make the rent money when times were tough. He still loved
Whistler (although he could only mock a guy who had to practically handcuff his
mother to the chair to get her to stand still for what he called a study in
black and white, something like that) if only because he was Lowell, was a
native son and that counted a lot for Jack then even if James was not a Breton.
(Funny later he would go through seven kinds of hell with his own mother before
telling her to kiss off.) But Villon was a legitimate bandit-prince who hung
with the lumpen outside the guarded moats ready to pounce one minute on the
next jackroll victim (some historians have speculated that Villon and his
scumbags invented the jackroll, taking a bag of nails or coins if they had any
wrapping them in a small cloth and under cover of darkness bopping some old
lady or drunken sot for their dough). A lost art that Jack would use more than
once in Times Square when some pansy hipster tried to do tricks on him and he
bopped him for hot dog money at Howard Johnson’s stuff like that, yes, a lost
but helpful art for those who lived outside the law, for those whose only road
was the road.
And
there she was the girl with the Bette Davis eyes all dewy even as a desert dust
storm was brewing just outside the Gates of Eden reading Villon in French (her
mother was French a catch for her woe begotten father during World War I
service in France with the American Expeditionary Force who came back to Eden
saw the dust and stone wood and left on the next train with some Singer sewing
machine salesman with four quarters and a quart of wine). That Garden of Eden
business a gag, a gag of sorts since the diner that he father owned, no, really
her grandfather who was getting too old to run the place but too ornery to let
his deadbeat son who couldn’t keep a French whore, Gramp’s words, in the middle
of the desert from running away with the next time that came by with long pants
on was just outside the main entrance to the Petrified Forest (couldn’t later a
guy like Allan Ginsberg or even novice poet Dean Moriarty have a field day with
that idea as the 1930s was tearing America, tearing the world apart, making the
world turn in on itself). The gag was that Gramps an old Kentucky coalminer
until he was thirteen and figured out that he would rather not die in
Appalachia with the muskrats had headed out of the hills and hollows as fast as
he could. Head out to California where he had heard had streets paved of gold
and young girls ready to give whatever they had to give. But see Gramps and his
forbears were sitting folk, were tied to the tired land so long that they would
sit down anywhere where that didn’t have to pretend to seek prosperity. So
Gramps stopped at the Petrified Forest once he ran into some Nevada Jane
heading east after busting out heading west who worked at the diner and who
played the flute for him until she too ran off with some calico salesman. Gramps
just stayed put and married the first woman who smiled at him (Gabby’s grandma)
and that ended the road west in that generation.
So
poor rattled and pestered Gabby was torn between sweet perfume dreams of Left
Bank Paris cafes and that endless rock-hard dust. Then out of the blue some
pretty hobo came walking up the road to the diner all dusty and road worn, a
hobo whose name turned out to be Leslie Howard (that would be important later
to Gabby if meaningless to Jack when she inherited his life insurance policy
but that was later long after Jack had gathered in the wanderlust that set that
first Breton to Canadian shores and that fucking raging Saint Lawrence River of
no returns) Listen up, Jack did, this Leslie Howard was no stumble bum like
half the hoboes, tramps, bums, and there are social distinctions among the
brethren who were running around the country stopping at railroad jungle camps
or sleeping under unkempt bridges and arroyos but a real live itinerant
intellectual who had when he had seen the first turnings of the world inward in
those times got the hell out of Europe
as fast as he could (he would be found later when Gabby looked for next of kin
to see if anybody would contest the life insurance policy to have been Jewish
not a good thing to be in Europe in those times to be a “rootless
cosmopolitan”) This Howard, let’s call him that since it is as good as any
other and who knows what he real name was if he was on the run bedazzled Gabby
from minute one leaving that lug gas jockey out to dry with the trees. Knew his
Villon cold, knew that he too was a bandit prince who hung outside the moats
with the lumpen.
Right
then Jack’s already strong flight of fantasy knew that he was kindred, here was
guy who loved to read but could not settle down with at crazy-mixed up world
pounding tattoos in his fevered brain. If anybody had been near Jack in that
darkened orchestra section fit only for one-date girls and sullen adults they
would have heard him gasp every time this Howard said anything of import to
Gabby. Jack’s fevered mind started sketching things out, read like crazy, write
like crazy and keep on the move, always on the move. What Jack would call later
in one of his lesser but more philosophical books the quest, the grail hunt,
the breaking from the holy goofs that keep you penned in and unfree, that holy
goof a well-worn word in Jack talk. For now though just the germ of a plan.
They
say that Bretons are not only are hearty but also headstrong and Jack sensed in
Gabby just such characteristics even though she was nothing but some dirt
farmer Okie, Arkie descendent. He would forever search for his Gabby but never
find her, and frankly that search was just one among a number of searches
later. This guy Leslie, what made him tick, why Jack was drawn to him like
lemmings from the sea was more problematic. The Villon, hobo road warrior
philosopher king part was straight up. He would have a million sleepless night
visions of being out on some tramp road in say Winnemucca or Yuma facing no
dough and no food or water and glad-tiding himself into soft spot, some soft
bed if that was the way the thing played out. Pearl-diving, you know washing
dishes for his meal in some such Garden of Eden diner somewhere if necessary
just to stay on the road one more day. That part held romance, held him in
thrall.
What
Jack couldn’t figure out especially since the girl with the Bette Davis eyes
was totally smitten by him and his wayward ways against the lugs, demented
grandpas, jelly-fish fathers and abandoned down some Seine River mother not
unlike the Merrimack always close to his dreams especially that rocky crest
around the old Lowell Textile Institute why this modern day troubadour had so
little regard for himself that he would let a bum like the notorious Duke
Mantee, yes, that Duke who was the scourge of the West just then put two random
slugs into his body. He tries, and would continue to try later to understand
the idea of the retreat of the intellectuals, that the time of the caveman was
making a reappearance after so much spent trying to come up from the mud and
slime. Backwards. Damn, that bothered Jack, would bother him until his own
dying breath when he turned on the intellectuals with a vengeance. The now dank
dark movie hall left him utterly perplexed about what would happen to him when
he had to face his own road west.
Outside
the movie theater, actually he had been in the lobby when he spied her and then
hailed her, Jack stopped that come hither Paula Cole and asked her if she would
like to go to the movies that next Friday night when the films changed. When
she answered yes Jack now a veteran of the ploy asked Paula -orchestra or
balcony? Answer: “don’t be silly I would not have accepted if we weren’t going
to the balcony.” With that he would put the fate of Howard in the back of his
mind. First things first.
********************
Jack
brought the Tokay, the cheap wine of the day that got him through the day and
the only other wine beside kosher Mogen David mad monk (although just then
demurely so) Allan Ginsberg, hereafter Monk, would drink to set himself up to
read some sliver of a poem. This night expecting a bunch of people to of all
things a North Beach (San Fran) converted garage gallery something the Monk
would put an end to guys like T.S. Eliot, bum of the month Nazi-symp Ezra Pound
and about fifty other guys and twenty other gals including his high school
prose father. Would burn their old-fashioned words now of no account on a pile
of burnt offerings, a pile of faggots (he would not learn until later that
word’s common origins use to destroy brethren fellow homosexuals). Would get
the world well, for a minute, in search of some fatherless compadre, in search
of the father Jack claimed he had never known, and not he alone in the welter
of great depressions and slogging through war. Maybe in the end they were
searching for Father Death who knows. Jack passed the wine, passed all
understanding before that search was consummated.
Some
guy, some guy who claims that his mother had worked at City Lights Bookstore in
those days and had had an affair with the poet Phillip Larkin and had brought
the dago red and him to the reading. Claimed to know Jack, or maybe it was the
Monk in the old days, in the days when they raged with so many words they
couldn’t keep enough Woolworth 5 &10 notebooks in flannel shirts or golf
scorecard pencils ready wrote this, second hand about being present at the creation,
second hand. At this far remove it is hard to tell fact from fiction, tell who
is bullshitting and who has the goods especially since virtually all the
background characters are gone, some long gone. Make of that what you
will.
********
I have seen the best
poet of the generation before mine, no, let me start over, I have seen a
universal max daddy poet speaking some truths to put old Homer and freaking
staid T.S. Eliot in the shade. Starting off by
declaring that he had seen that the
best minds of his generation, guys like brother in soul Kerouac, be-bop Charlie
Parker, Phil Larkin when he was sober, Johnny Spain when off the needle and
doing cold turkey and of course the daddy them all one Carl Solomon turn to
mush. Turned out in the barren wilderness, not the friendly desert-scrapes
heading west on lonely Greyhound buses or Tourist Bureau hang-ups wilderness
out pass Butte or Boise but what a novelist named Nelson Algren who called the
shots and gave many a troubled youth the keys to the fixer man and
wellness called the neon wilderness,
called that place where the bright lights of the city blinded a proper man (or
woman) some junkie Frankie Machine haven with a wife he hated and a girlfriend
who couldn’t stick with him when he was on the junk. That neon beast from which
no one returned except for quick stays in safe haven mental asylums (called
ironically funny farms but even the Monk, whose own mother had her share of
sorrows in such places could find no humor in such designations).
Get this, no, let me
start again against the cold nose of my sister filled heart. Saw, he the Monk
okay in case I lose my train of thought passing through Salt Lake City and
thoughts of Joseph Smith’s grand hustle taking a bunch of farmers from burned
over lands to the searing sun of the western depot. Saw the same Negro streets Jack,
and one time Jack and he when he, Jack was looking for some rough trade sailors
just off the China Seas pierce earring trail saw around Blue Hill Avenue and
Dudley Street blank, 125th Street blank, Dearborn Street blank,
MacArthur Boulevard blank, Central Avenue blank, Cielo Street in Tijuana blank,
Plaza del Mayo, Montezuma revenge Mexico blank, and wasted in the sweated fetid
humid Thunderbird-lushed night dreaming of pink Cadillacs and stony-faced fixer
men getting wise by the hour on Carl’s ancient fears. (And, this is funny or so
the winos and every hobo, vagrant, escapee, drifter and grafter yelling out in
unison thought so “what is the word-Thunderbird-what is the price forty twice.”
Ready to jackroll some senior citizen lady for the price, for fucking eighty
cents which any self-respecting junkie could cadge in two minutes even in Cielo
Street, Tijuana and that is a hard peso to drill,-ready to commit mayhem at
Park Street subway stations for their “boy,” to be tamped by girl but I will be
discrete since the Feds might raid the place sometime looking for the ghost of
Trigger Burke who eluded them for a very long time. (Trigger who captured
Jack’s imagination and the Monk’s but here is the weird part Carl’s too who
started strutting like him too after the prince of bandit-poets Corso showed
him how to do that slinky swagger on the last visit before the blade at
Sandhill).
Thought that those
angel-headed hipsters hearing choruses of angels strumming their noiseless
wings, those cold as ice in a man’s veins hep cats hanging around Times,
Lafayette, Dupont, Harvard squares (you can fill in your own squares, square
the Monk laughed and Jack hee-hawed) crying in pools of blood coming out of the
wolves-stained sewers around the black corner would never stop bleating for
their liquor. Would not stop until they got popular and headed for the sallow
lights of Harvard Square where they, those angel-headed hipsters in case you (and Carl) forgot hustled young college students, young
impressionable college students green as grass whose parents had had their best
minds, those hallowed students’ mines, okay, wasted in the turbid streets of
south Long Island (not the West Egg of Gatsby’s dream out of Fitzgerald’s fresh
green breast of land to stir even sullen rough trade Dutch sailors looking for
whips and cuts, conquering everything in sight like any other poor-boy
arriviste with too much money and not enough imagination and not East Egg of
the fervid elites but any-town, Levitt-town of those who would escape to Boston
or Wisconsin to face the angel of death, that angel frightening even Monk when
Carl was not around to anchor his brain. Up front and say no go, pass, under
luminous moons which light up sparks and say to that candid world which could
have given a fuck hard times please come again no more.
Here is the beauty of
the green as grass hustle working fast to get enough to fix that jones. Dangle
some college guy, maybe with a girl, shy, with dreams of hard-core liquor or a
well-twisted joints to loosen her up and her fragile come hither virginity (reminding
Jack of that Paula Coe who played the flute for him more than one time in that
Majestic Theater balcony some hardcore Friday night and the Monk, searching for
some blue-eyed Adonis, settling for some
pimpled has been teenager seeking his own father dreams). Lay out the story-kid
your booze and something for me. Done. Later, a big bottle wrapped tight in a
paper bag. Trick, a very thin brew of whiskey split and cash for him to get
himself well. Oh the hipster cons which would have made even the Monk laugh.
You already know about
what you need to know about Protestant girls with their upfront Protestant
lusts although they would not be caught dead, or alive, in Sally splendor
although they certainly could play the penny whistle and damn those world
historic fucks. Maybe tasty Jewish girls from the shtetl not in East or West
Egg who flocked to the other side of the river and gave Irish guys who
previously had dribbled their spunk behind dumpsters after losing out to ten
bucks and virginity in tack tickey-tack Catholic girls who refused to give that
head that would have brought some of the best minds some freaking relief
(better not say fucking relief because that would be oxymoronic). Maybe some off-center
sullen fair-skinned and blonded Quaker, Mennonite, Primitive Baptist or
Brethren of the Common Life kind of Protestant girls, like I said off-center,
who spouted something about one god and no trinities, no god and no trinities
and just feel good stuff.
All three varieties and
yes there were more off-centers but who even knew of Quakers, Mennonites, lusty
Amish girls run away from home, Tantric card-wheelers, and fresh- faced red
light district sluts who at least played the game straight-played the cash
nexus for pure pleasure and maybe to even up some scores. All-Catholic, Jewish,
Protestant, yeah, Quakers (fakirs, fakers and Shakers included), the sluts,
Mennonites and yes those lusty red-faced Amish runaways all coming together
after midnight far from the negro streets, the Monk’s beat and no anachronism
like saying black or Afro-American back to those Mister James Crow days, but
not far from the all night hustlers and dime store hipsters with their ten-cent
cigar store rings and cheap Irish whiskeys bought on the installment plan who
converged around the Hayes-Bickford just a seven league jump from the old end
of the line dead of night Redline subway stop in order to keep the angel of
death at arms’ length. The angel of death a tough bitch to break, and tougher
to cross when they deal went down. There to listen until dawn to homosexuality-
affixed hungry for the keyhole blast or the running sperm fakir poets, the Monk
number one of all the number ones and
slamming singsters (to keep up with the gangster, mobster, hipster theme, okay)
fresh out of cheapjack coffeehouses where three chords and two-line rhymes repeated
in call and response got you all the action you wanted although maybe a little
light on the breadbasket sent around to show that you were appreciated. Yeah,
now that I think about the matter more closely hard times please come again no
more.
I have seen frosted
lemon trees jammed against the ferrous night, the night of silly foolish
childhood dreams and misunderstanding about the world, the world that that poet
spoke of in a teenage dream of indefinite duration about who was to have and who
was to have not once those minds were de-melted and made hip to the
tragedies of life, the close call with the mental house that awaits us all.
Yeah Monk was right even about Carl Solomon and all his sorrows before the
knife.
***********
What
the hell did sullen Carl Solomon start before he went under the knife with his
pleading for his father, a father that he had never known since he had been
left back in Poland to peddle his fruits and vegetables to his brethren and his
mother and the four kids headed to the Americas on some tub of a boat and never
looked back. Rumors abounded that he survived because he had a gentile mistress
grabbed after his wife and kids left. That at least is the story Carl told,
told endlessly which would not be so bad but the Monk picked it up in his own
moment of despair.
Monk
searched his valium brain for his own prose-filled father but that was not
nearly good enough, kept him awake at night because he had strange dreams that
his father was not some fake high school teacher writing awful poems in broken
down post-war America. Was afraid that his real father was William Appleton
Williams who denied him three times, didn’t want to believe that his broken
words would mesh so well. Had better dreams that his real father was sexy Walt
Whitman (this remember in dialogue with Carl Solomon before the knife so it is
not clear whether Carl remembered) whose vagabond dreams matched his and his homosexual
desire beating out some Johnny Reb who could give Walt the ride he desired.
Here is the trick though the Monk had sweet dreams whenever he read Leaves of Grass (usually on grass) and
he passed that on to Jack in some secret moment in Denver when some screwball
Adonis was looking for his father.
Now
Jack, funny before Carl grabbed Monk with the father who we never knew
religion, always thought he knew his father, knew the con artist, poker
cheater, movie theater ticket taker great bear of a French-Canadian who came
down the Jackson, Maine road with five cents Canadian in his pocket and dreams
of printing up ads. But that was not the father that he knew but some skinny
stiff wino pissant who he sought out in greater Denver cattle yards. Always
deferred to everlasting Mere, Mere out of some fresh Breton conceit never
getting some whiplash from old father time who died before his time of
heartache and heartbeats. So Jack conned himself into some holy goof, his words
exactly, metaphysical search going up the Bear Mountain, Jackson, Wyoming
Jackson not that trail of tears from down in Maine Jackson where the red brick
and mortar spinning wheels beckoned and he spent and spilled his young manhood
trying to get the fuck out from under even if he couldn’t drive, made him
nervous, to save his life. Funny again that fame never stopped the bleeding
inside looking behind some bushes for some father death, some father time
pissing against that Tokay dream he figured out back in about 1946 but could
never get past. The Monk did him no service on that long trail drive from
Monument Creek to Sunnyvale and then drop off and outs at Big Sur where he got
sober for a week.
Damn
that stuff is contagious, will drive you crazy, when twice removed Lance, me,
went looking for the father he never knew too. Looked for him behind closed
doors to his heart. That distant slightly dim figure who brought home not
enough pay checks. Who never talked about but never got over the Pacific war
like a lot of guys who found themselves on tubs picking up stray comrades from
washed-up beaches, picking up too guys who got too close to chore, got wasted
in some windless fire and fell down into the green-gray-blue surf that gets us
all in the end. The old man, father, never talked much, much about anything
that Lance, me would understand and so Jack-like Ma, Mere, Mom, Mere whatever
you want to call her ran rough-shot over childish dreams and insecurities.
Here’s the worst of it though, Jack-like, he never got to say good-bye to that
father he never knew and crushed his days with regret, total regret that he
didn’t have the sense of a holy goof, Jack talk, to have called a truce, even
an armed truce to the madness that wracked his silly excuse for a family, and
now all his has is slate grey stone to place the remnants down in some unknown
holy place where he can never dwell, yes, Lawrence, me, got caught in the
Monk’s version of Carl’s plainsong, no, got stuck in the damn mire.
Silly
to think that the father time search would only apply to men, young men, holy
goofs like Lawrence, me, when the max daddy sin of all was the way Jack, in
Jack speak, abandoned his Jan, his spitting image Jan, denied like Christ was
denied three times by the count. Jan who would search like some strange Kenneth
Rexroth figure for the father we all knew, or thought we knew once he pointed
us toward the light, once we got the beat, the second-hand beat that washed us
clean in places like Big Sur and Todo el Mundo where Jan still searches in some
desperate wild water surf for some broken down guy who wasted away with drink,
and she with drink too. Jesus, funny he was searching for his father too out in
Middle Eastern wildernesses, will it never end.
Contagious
that is what Sam Lowell said about the freaking search for that lost father
world made up of pure sand and not much else. Some goof, the holy part excluded
was looking for his father, his famous private detective father, a guy named
Lew Archer, who back around Jack time in California ran the rack on few good
cases and then rested for forty years something like that. Tried to claim that
his father’s life death was due to his father’s overused whip, his sorrows that
he could not go the distance with his wife, this goof’s grandmother, his code
of honor that once he took a job he was in, totally in, for good or evil,
and
maybe
that he drank too much Tokay, Jack-like when he wound up behind some freaking
wino pissant dumpster saved but some sister of mercy who could not save him in
the end. Get this though that junkie weirdo so-called grandson, some modern-day
Carl Solomon without the sorrows before he went under the knife could not be
searching for Lew, Lew Archer since Lew never had a son, had no children. Sorry
goof,
Out
on the Jersey looking east first to see the great ocean that drove his forbears
to search for fresh green breasts of land then west to seek dungeon filled
fathers never known in Denver, Santa Fe, Salt Lake City Salvation Army hotels
or whatever they call those blessed places of rest the whole deal was to figure
out a way to look for some American cowboy past, looking for the Monk’s Adonis
if he couldn’t make it with sexy Walt Whitman with the furl of whiskers. There
sat Dean Moriarty, no, fuck that, one Neal Cassidy who would ride the freight
trains west looking for that father the others really did think they had found.
Neal’s old man was in some wino jailcell speaking in tongues to a candid world.
Maybe Carl was right, Monk too we should all cry to the high heavens looking
for the fathers we never knew.
Upon The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of The "King
Of The Beats" Jack Kerouac- On The 60th Anniversary Of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road" (1957) Beat Writers' Corner- John Clennon Holmes' Famous Article -"This Is The Beat Generation"
“Advertisements for Myself”-Introduction by
Allan Jackson, a founding member of the American Left History publication back in 1974 when it was a hard
copy journal and until 2017 site manager of the on-line
edition.
[He’s back. Jack Kerouac, as described in
the headline, “the king of the beats” and maybe the last true beat standing.
That is the basis of this introduction by me as we commemorate the 50th anniversary
of his untimely death at 47. But before we go down and dirty with the legendary
writer I stand before you, the regular reader, and those who have not been
around for a while to know that I was relieved of my site manage duties in 2017
in what amounted to a coup by the younger writers who resented the direction I
was taking the publication in and replaced me with Greg Green who I had brought
on board from American Film Gazette to run the day to day operations while I oversaw the whole
operation and planned my retirement. Over the past year or so a million rumors
have, had mostly now, swirled around this publication and the industry in
general about what had happened and I will get to that in a minute before
dealing with Jack Kerouac’s role in the whole mess.
What you need to know first, if you don’t
know already is that Greg Green took me back to do the introductions to an
encore presentation of a long-term history of rock and roll series that I
edited and essentially created after an unnamed older writer who had not been part
of the project balled it all up, got catch flat-footed talking bullshit and
other assorted nonsense since he knew nada, nada nunca and, about the subject
having been apparently asleep when the late Peter Markin “took us to school”
that history. Since then Greg and I have had an “armed truce,” meaning I could
contribute as here to introductions of some encore and some origin material as
long as I didn’t go crazy, his term, for what he called so-called nostalgia
stuff from the 1950s and 1960s and meaning as well that Greg will not go crazy,
my term, and will refrain from his ill-advised attempt to reach a younger
audience by “dumbing down” the publication with odd-ball comic book character
reviews of films, graphic novels and strange musical interludes. Fair is fair.
What I need to mention, alluded to above,
is those rumors that ran amok while I was on the ropes, when I had lost that
decisive vote of no confidence by one sullen vote. People here, and my enemies
in the industry as well, seeing a wounded Allan Jackson went for the kill, went
for the jugular that the seedy always thrive on and began a raggedy-ass trail
on noise you would not believe. In the interest of elementary hygiene, and to
frankly clear the air, a little, since there will always be those who have
evil, and worse in their hearts when “the mighty have fallen.” Kick
when somebody is down their main interest in life.
I won’t go through the horrible rumors like I was panhandling down in
Washington, D.C., I was homeless in Olde Saco, Maine (how could that be when
old friend and writer here Josh Breslin lives there and would have provided
alms to me so at least get an approximation of the facts before spinning the
wild woolly tale), I had become a male prostitute in New York City (presumably
after forces here and in that city hostile to me put in the fatal “hard to work
with” tag on me ruining any chances on the East Coast of getting work, getting
enough dough to keep the wolves from my door, my three ex-wives and that bevy
of kids, nice kids, who nevertheless were sucking me dry with alimony and
college tuitions), writing press releases under the name Leonard Bloom for
a Madison Avenue ad agency. On a lesser scale of disbelief I had taken a job as
a ticket-taker in a multi-plex in Nashua, New Hampshire, had been a line
dishwasher at the Ritz in Philadelphia when they needed day labor for parties
and convention banquets, had been kicking kids out of their newspaper routes
and taking that task on myself, and to finish off although I have not given a
complete rundown rummaging through trash barrels looking for bottles with
deposits. Christ.
Needless to say, how does one actually
answer such idiocies, and why. A couple of others stick out about me and some
surfer girl out in Carlsbad in California who I was pimping while getting my
sack time with her and this one hurt because it hurt a dear friend
and former “hippie girl” lover of mine, Madame La Rue, back in the day that I
was running a whorehouse with her in Luna Bay for rich Asian businessmen with a
taste for kinky stuff. I did stop off there and Madame does run a high-end
brothel in Luna Bay but I had nothing to do with it. The reason Madame was hurt
was because I had lent her the money to buy the place when it was a rundown
hotel and built it up from there with periodic additional funds from me so she
could not understand why my act of kindness would create such degenerate noise
from my enemies who were clueless about the relationship between us.
I will, must deal with two big lies which also
center of my reluctant journey west (caused remember by that smear campaign
which ruined by job opportunities in the East, particularly New York City. The
first which is really unbelievable on its face is that I hightailed it directly
to Utah, to Salt Lake City, when I busted out in NYC looking for one Mitt
Romney, “Mr. Flip-Flop,” former Governor of Massachusetts, Presidential
candidate against Barack Obama then planning on running for U.S. Senator from
Utah (now successful ready to take office in January) to “get well.” The
premise for this big lie was supposedly that since I have skewered the guy
while he was governor and running for president with stuff like the Mormon
fetish for white underwear and the old time polygamy of his great-grand-father
who had five wives (and who showed great executive skill I think in keeping the
peace in that extended family situation. The unbelievable part is that those
Mormon folk, who have long memories and have pitchforks at the ready to rumble
with the damned, would let a sinner like me, a non-Mormon for one thing
anywhere the Romney press operation. Christ, I must be some part latter day
saint since I barely got out of that damn state alive if the real truth were
known after I applied for a job with the Salt Lake Sentinel not knowing the
rag was totally linked to the Mormons. Pitchforks,
indeed.
The biggest lie though is the one that had
me as the M.C. in complete “drag” as Elsa Maxwell at the “notorious” KitKat
Club in San Francisco which has been run for about the past thirty years or so
by Miss Judy Garland, at one time and maybe still is in some quarters the “drag
queen” Queen of that city. This will show you how ignorant, or blinded by hate,
some people are. Miss Judy Garland is none other that one of our old corner
boys from the Acre section of North Adamsville, Timmy Riley. Timmy who like the
rest of us on the corner used to “fag bait” and beat up anybody, any guy who
seemed effeminate, at what cost to Timmy’s real feelings we will never really
know although he was always the leader in the gay-bashing orgy. Finally between
his own feeling and Stonewall in New York in 1969 which did a great deal to
make gays, with or with the drag queen orientation, a little less timid Timmy
fled the Acre (and his hateful family and friends) to go to friendlier Frisco.
He was in deep personal financial trouble before I was able to arrange some
loans from myself and some of his other old corner boys (a few still hate Timmy
for what he has become, his true self) to buy the El Lobo Club, his first drag
queen club, and when that went under, the now thriving tourist trap KitKat
Club. So yes, yes, indeed, I stayed with my old friend at his place and that
was that. Nothing more than I had done many times before while I ran the
publication.
But enough of this tiresome business
because I want to introduce this series dedicated to the memory of Jack Kerouac
who had a lot of influence on me for a long time, mostly after he died in
1969
******
All roads about Jack Kerouac, about who was the
king of the beats, about what were the “beats” lead back to the late Pete
Markin who, one way or another, taught the working poor Acre neighborhood of
North Adamsville corner boys what was up with that movement. Funny, because we
young guys were a serious generation removed from that scene, really our
fathers’ contemporaries and you know how far removed fathers were from kids in
those days especially among the working poor trying to avoid
going “under water” and not just about mortgages but food on tables
and clothing on backs, were children of rock and roll, not jazz, the beat
musical medium, and later the core of the “Generation of ‘68” which took off,
at least partially, with the “hippie” scene, where the dying embers of the beat
scene left off. Those dying embers exactly the way to put it since most of our
knowledge or interest came from the stereotypes-beards before beards were cool
and before grandfather times -for guys, okay, berets, black and beaten down
looks. Ditto on black for the gals, including black nylons which no Acre girl
would have dreamed of wearing, not in the early 1960s anyway. Our “model”
beatnik really came, as we were also children of television, from sitcom
stories like Dobie Gillis with stick character Maynard G. Krebs
standing in for all be-bop-dom.
So it is easy to see where except to ostracize, meaning harass, maybe beat up
if that was our wont that day, we would have passed by the “beat” scene, passed
by Jack Kerouac too without the good offices, not a term we would have used
then, if not for nerdish, goof, wild and woolly in the idea world
Markin (always called Scribe for obvious reasons but we will keep with Markin
here). He was the guy who always looked for some secret meaning to the
universe, that certain breezes, winds, metaphorical breezes and winds, were
going to turn things around, were going to make the world a place where Markin
could thrive. Markin was the one who first read Kerouac’s breakthrough
travelogue of a different sort novel On The Road.
Now Markin was the kind of guy, and sometimes we
let him go on and sometimes stopped him in his tracks, who when he was on to
something would bear down on us to pay attention. Christ some weekend nights he
would read passages from the book like it was the Bible (which it turned out to
be in a way later) when all we basically cared about is which girls were going
to show up at our hang-out spot, the well-known Tonio’s Pizza Parlor and play
the jukebox and we would go from there. Most of us, including me, kind of
yawned at the whole thing even when Markin made a big deal that Kerouac was a
working-class guy like us from up in Lowell cut right along the Merrimac River.
The whole thing seemed way too exotic and moreover there was too much
homosexual stuff implied which in our strict Irish-Italian Catholic
neighborhood did not go down well at all -made us dismiss the whole thing and
want to if I recall correctly “beat up” that Allan Ginsberg character. Even
Dean Moriarty, the Neal Cassidy character, didn’t move us since although we
were as larcenous and “clip” crazy as any character in that book we kind of
took Dean as a tough car crazy guide like Sonny Jones from our neighborhood who
was nothing but a hood in Red Riley’s bad ass motorcycle gang which hung out at
Harry’s Variety Store. We avoided him and more so Red like the plague. Both
wound up dead, very dead, in separate attempted armed robberies in broad
daylight if you can believe that.
Let’s fast forward to see where Kerouac
really affected us in a way that when Markin was spouting forth early on we
could not appreciate. As Markin sensed in his own otherworldly way a new breeze
was coming down the cultural highway, a breeze push forward by the beats I will
confess, by the folk music scene, by the search for roots which the previous
generation, our parents’ generation, spent their adulthoods attempting to
banish and become part of the great American vanilla melt, and by a struggling
desire to question everything that had come before, had been part of what we
had had no say in creating, weren’t even asked about. Heady stuff and Markin
before he made a very bad decision to quit college in his sophomore years and
“find himself,” my expression not his, spent many of his waking hours figuring
out how to make his world a place where he could thrive.
That is when one night, this is when we
were well out of high school, some of us corner boys had gone our separate ways
and those who remained in contact with the brethren spent less time hanging out
at Tonio’s, Markin once again pulled out On The Road, pulled out Jack’s exotic
travelogue. The difference is we were all ears then and some of us after that
night brought our own copies or went to the Thomas Murphy Public Library and
took out the book. This was the spring of the historic year 1967 when the first
buds of the Summer of Love which wracked San Francisco and the Bay Area to its
core and once Markin started working on us, started to make us see his vision
of what he would later called, culling from Tennyson if I am not mistaken a
“newer world.” Pulling us all in his train, even as with Bart Webber and if I
recall Si Lannon a little, he had to pull out all the stops to have them, us,
join him in the Summer of Love experience. Maybe the whole thing with Jack
Kerouac was a pipe dream I remember reading about him in the Literary
Gazette when he was down in
Florida living with his ancient mother and he was seriously critical of the
“hippies,” kind of banged on his own beat roots explaining that he was talking
about something almost Catholic beatitude spiritual and not personal freedom,
of the road or anything else. A lot of guys and not just writing junkies
looking for some way to alleviate their inner pains have repudiated their pasts
but all I know is that when Jack was king of the hill, when he spoke to us
those were the days all roads to Kerouac were led by Markin. Got it. Allan
Jackson
***********
I culled this from a Google search. The "my commentary" is from the person who placed it on the website. 'This Is The Beat Generation' by John Clellon Holmes This is the complete text of the article by John Clellon Holmes that ran in the New York Times Magazine on November 16, 1952. This article introduced the phrase 'beat generation' to the world, although the writers who would come to personify this generation would not be published for several years more. For more on the origin of the term 'beat', click here. My commentary : There are some interesting points in this article, but I can't help feeling annoyed at the idea of categorizing an entire generation. I don't believe any true statement can be made about a million or more people, except statements that are so general they are true for all times. So, for the hipster and the Young Republican here, substitute the hippie and the straight of twenty years ago, or the slacker and the yuppie today. Newspapers and magazines love to get excited about how 'different' each new generation is, but each new generation is just going through the same crisis the one before it went through. It's called 'growing up.' In saying this, I don't mean to 'flame' John Clellon Holmes, a good writer who recognized the inanity of labelling a generation and even alluded to it in this article. Furthermore, I'm sure the idea of defining a generation was nowhere near as played out in the early 50's as it is now. ******** This Is The Beat Generation by John Clellon Holmes The New York Times Magazine, November 16, 1952 Several months ago, a national magazine ran a story under the heading 'Youth' and the subhead 'Mother Is Bugged At Me.' It concerned an eighteen-year-old California girl who had been picked up for smoking marijuana and wanted to talk about it. While a reporter took down her ideas in the uptempo language of 'tea,' someone snapped a picture. In view of her contention that she was part of a whole new culture where one out of every five people you meet is a user, it was an arresting photograph. In the pale, attentive face, with its soft eyes and intelligent mouth, there was no hint of corruption. It was a face which could only be deemed criminal through an enormous effort of reighteousness. Its only complaint seemed to be: 'Why don't people leave us alone?' It was the face of a beat generation. That clean young face has been making the newspapers steadily since the war. Standing before a judge in a Bronx courthouse, being arraigned for stealing a car, it looked up into the camera with curious laughter and no guilt. The same face, with a more serious bent, stared from the pages of Life magazine, representing a graduating class of ex-GI's, and said that as it believed small business to be dead, it intended to become a comfortable cog in the largest corporation it could find. A little younger, a little more bewildered, it was this same face that the photographers caught in Illinois when the first non-virgin club was uncovered. The young copywriter, leaning down the bar on Third Avenue, quietly drinking himself into relaxation, and the energetic hotrod driver of Los Angeles, who plays Russian Roulette with a jalopy, are separated only by a continent and a few years. They are the extremes. In between them fall the secretaries wondering whether to sleep with their boyfriends now or wait; the mechanic berring up with the guys and driving off to Detroit on a whim; the models studiously name-dropping at a cocktail party. But the face is the same. Bright, level, realistic, challenging. Any attempt to label an entire generation is unrewarding, and yet the generation which went through the last war, or at least could get a drink easily once it was over, seems to possess a uniform, general quality which demands an adjective ... The origins of the word 'beat' are obscure, but the meaning is only too clear to most Americans. More than mere weariness, it implies the feeling of having been used, of being raw. It involves a sort of nakedness of mind, and, ultimately, of soul; a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness. In short, it means being undramatically pushed up against the wall of oneself. A man is beat whenever he goes for broke and wagers the sum of his resources on a single number; and the young generation has done that continually from early youth. Its members have an instinctive individuality, needing no bohemianism or imposed eccentricity to express it. Brought up during the collective bad circumstances of a dreary depression, weaned during the collective uprooting of a global war, they distrust collectivity. But they have never been able to keep the world out of their dreams. The fancies of their childhood inhabited the half-light of Munich, the Nazi-Soviet pact, and the eventual blackout. Their adolescence was spent in a topsy-turvy world of war bonds, swing shifts, and troop movements. They grew to independent mind on beachheads, in gin mills and USO's, in past-midnight arrivals and pre-dawn departures. Their brothers, husbands, fathers or boy friends turned up dead one day at the other end of a telegram. At the four trembling corners of the world, or in the home town invaded by factories or lonely servicemen, they had intimate experience with the nadir and the zenith of human conduct, and little time for much that came between. The peace they inherited was only as secure as the next headline. It was a cold peace. Their own lust for freedon, and the ability to live at a pace that kills (to which the war had adjusted them), led to black markets, bebop, narcotics, sexual promiscuity, hucksterism, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The beatness set in later. It is a postwar generation, and, in a world which seems to mark its cycles by its wars, it is already being compared to that other postwar generation, which dubbed itself 'lost'. The Roaring Twenties, and the generation that made them roar, are going through a sentimental revival, and the comparison is valuable. The Lost Generation was discovered in a roadster, laughing hysterically because nothing meant anything anymore. It migrated to Europe, unsure whether it was looking for the 'orgiastic future' or escaping from the 'puritanical past.' Its symbols were the flapper, the flask of bootleg whiskey, and an attitude of desparate frivolity best expressed by the line: 'Tennis, anyone?' It was caught up in the romance of disillusionment, until even that became an illusion. Every act in its drama of lostness was a tragic or ironic third act, and T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land was more than the dead-end statement of a perceptive poet. The pervading atmosphere of that poem was an almost objectless sense of loss, through which the reader felt immediately that the cohesion of things had disappeared. It was, for an entire generation, an image which expressed, with dreadful accuracy, its own spiritual condition. But the wild boys of today are not lost. Their flushed, often scoffing, always intent faces elude the word, and it would sound phony to them. For this generation lacks that eloquent air of bereavement which made so many of the exploits of the Lost Generation symbolic actions. Furthermore, the repeatedinventory of shattered ideals, and the laments about the mud in moral currents, which so obsessed the Lost Generation, do not concern young people today. They take these things frighteningly for granted. They were brought up in these ruins and no longer notice them. They drink to 'come down' or to 'get high,' not to illustrate anything. Their excursions into drugs or promiscuity come out of curiousity, not disillusionment. Only the most bitter among them would call their reality a nightmare and protest that they have indeed lost something, the future. For ever since they were old enough to imagine one, that has been in jeapordy anyway. The absence of personal and social values is to them, not a revelation shaking the ground beneath them, but a problem demanding a day-to-day solution. How to live seems to them much more crucial than why. And it is precisely at this point that the copywriter and the hotrod driver meet and their identical beatness becomes significant, for, unlike the Lost Generation, which was occupied with the loss of faith, the Beat Generation is becoming more and more occupied with the need for it. As such, it is a disturbing illustration of Voltaire's reliable old joke: 'If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him.' Not content to bemoan his absence, they are busily and haphazardly inventing totems for him on all sides. For the giggling nihilist, eating up the highway at ninety miles an hour and steering with his feet, is no Harry Crosby, the poet of the Lost Generation who planned to fly his plane into the sun one day because he could no longer accept the modern world. On the contrary, the hotrod driver invites death only to outwit it. He is affirming the life within him in the only way he knows how, at the extreme. The eager-faced girl, picked up on a dope charge, is not one of those 'women and girls carried screaming with drink or drugs from public places,' of whom Fitzgerald wrote. Instead, with persuasive seriousness, she describes the sense of community she has found in marijuana, which society never gave her. The copywriter, just as drunk by midnight as his Lost Generation counterpart, probably reads God and Man at Yale during his Sunday afternoon hangover. The difference is this almost exaggerated will to believe in something, if only in themselves. It is a will to believe, even in the face of an inability to do so in conventional terms. And that is bound to lead to excesses in one direction or another. The shock that older people feel at the sight of this Beat Generation is, at its deepest level, not so much repugnance at the facts, as it is distress at the attitudes which move it. Though worried by this distress, they most often argue or legislate in terms of the facts rather than the attitudes. The newspaper reader, studying the eyes of young dope addicts, can only find an outlet for his horror and bewilderment in demands that passers be given the electric chair. Sociologists, with a more academic concern, are just as troubled by the legions of young men whose topmost ambition seems to be to find a secure birth in a monolithic corporation. Contemporary historians express mild surprise at the lack of organized movements, political, religous, or otherwise, among the young. The articles they write remind us that being one's own boss and being a natural joiner are two of our most cherished national traits. Everywhere people with tidy moralities shake their heads and wonder what is happening to the younger generation. Perhaps they have not noticed that, behind the excess on the one hand, and the conformity on the other, lies that wait-and-see detachment that results from having to fall back for support more on one's capacity for human endurance than on one's philosophy of life. Not that the Beat Generation is immune to ideas; they fascinate it. Its wars, both past and future, were and will be wars of ideas. It knows, however, that in the final, private moment of conflict a man is really fighting another man, and not an idea. And that the same goes for love. So it is a generation with a greater facility for entertaining ideas than for believing in them. But it is also the first generation in several centuries for which the act of faith has been an obsessive problem, quite aside from the reasons for having a particular faith or not having it. It exhibits on every side, and in a bewildering number of facets, a perfect craving to believe. Though it is certainly a generation of extremes, including both the hipster and the radical young Republican in its ranks, it renders unto Caesar (i.e, society) what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's. For the wildest hipster, making a mystique of bop, drugs and the night life, there is no desire to shatter the 'square' society in which he lives, only to elude it. To get on a soapbox or write a manifesto would seem to him absurd. Looking at the normal world, where most everything is a 'drag' for him, he nevertheless says: 'Well, that's the Forest of Arden after all. And even it jumps if you look at it right.' Equally, the young Republican, though often seeming to hold up Babbitt as his culture hero, is neither vulgar nor materialistic, as Babbitt was. He conforms because he believes it is socially practical, not necessarily virtuous. Both positions, however, are the result of more or less the same conviction -- namely that the valueless abyss of modern life is unbearable. For beneath the excess and the conformity, there is something other than detachment. There are the stirrings of a quest. What the hipster is looking for in his 'coolness' (withdrawal) or 'flipness' (ecstasy) is, after all, a feeling on somewhereness, not just another diversion. The young Republican feels that there is a point beyond which change becomes chaos, and what he wants is not simply privelege or wealth, but a stable position from which to operate. Both have had enough of homelessness, valuelessness, faithlessnes. The variety and the extremity of their solutions are only a final indication that for today's young people there is not as yet a single external pivot around which they can, as a generation, group their observations and their aspirations. There is no single philosophy, no single party, no single attitude. The failure of most orthodox moral and social concepts to reflect fully the life they have known is probably the reason for this, but because of it each person becomes a walking, self-contained unit, compelled to meet, or at least endure, the problem of being young in a seemingly helpless world in his own way. More than anything else, this is what is responsible for this generation's reluctance to name itself, its reluctance to discuss itself as a group, sometimes its reluctance to be itself. For invented gods invariably disappoint those who worship them. Only the need for them goes on, and it is this need, exhausting one object after another, which projects the Beat Generation forward into the future and will one day deprive it of its beatness. Dostoyevski wrote in the early 1880's that 'Young Russia is talking of nothing but the eternal questions now.' With appropriate changes, something very like this is beginning to happen in America, in an American way; a re-evaluation of which the exploits and attitudes of this generation are only symptoms. No single comparison of one generation against another can accurately measure effects, but it seems obvious that a lost generation, occupied with disillusionment and trying to keep busy among the broken stones, is poetically moving, but not very dangerous. But a beat generation, driven by a desparate craving for belief and as yet unable to accept the moderations which are offered it, is quite another matter. Thirty years later, after all, the generation of which Dostoyevski wrote was meeting in cellars and making bombs. This generation may make no bombs; it will probably be asked to drop some, and have some dropped on it, however, and this fact is never far from its mind. It is one of the pressures which created it and will play a large part in what will happen to it. There are those who believe that in generations such as this there is always the constant possibility of a great new moral idea, conceived in desparation, coming to life. Others note the self-indulgence, the waste, the apparent social irresponsibility, and disagree. But its ability to keep its eyes open, and yet avoid cynicism; its ever-increasing conviction that the problem of modern life is essentially a spiritual problem; and that capacity for sudden wisdom which people who live hard and go far possess, are assets and bear watching. And, anyway, the clear, challenging faces are worth it.
