Those were the daze

Michael Horowitz

Kerouac Ann Charters (Andre Deutsch £3.95)

These were the daze — the last twenty years, the expanding moment, the continuous Present — picked up from Jack Kerouac as much as from anyone, from the mid-'fifties until NOW: days and timeless nights of euphoric zane rambling unpunctuated save for breath pause, dashes — as in jazz, the sacred river running through Kerouac's work. And hard work it was, though it included play — as witness his prescription: If Possible write 'without consciousness' in semitrance (as Yeats's later 'trance writing') allowing subconscious to admit in own 'uninhibited interesting necessary and so 'modern' language what conscious art would censor, and write excitedly, svvIftlY, with writing-or-typing-cramps, in accordance (as from centre to periphery) with laws of orgasm, Reich's 'beclouding of consciousness.' Come from within, out — to relaxed and said.

This first biography shows that although the continuing communal stream (most Popularly emulated and centralised over here around CND marches and so on, and channelled into the transatlantic/internationalist 'counter-culture') did largely spring from the fountainhead of his "spontaneous bop Prosody" sagas, his real-life sentences were ,Penned in solitary, born of suffering, alienation, and an idealism as genuine as that of his beloved Thomas Wolfe. He rejoiced in the Writing, like anyone who sweats to join others together, but he harked back constantly to the theme of modern man in search of a soul — articulating the common loneliness hitherto more often celebrated in American folk-song And spirituals, and in the cry of jazz and blues.

Coleridge distinguishes between Mechanic, and Organic "Form as Proceeding"; Kerouac's forms are of the latter kind, emanating directly from his personal experience with a strong oral bias and phenomenal recall. He was nick-named "Memory Babe" at junior school, and many of his narratives are interspersed with extensive conversations and Monologues apparently transcribed verbatim'. The main Relationships in his life seem to have been with his mother and with that Picaresque speed-freak extraordinary Neal Cassady (alias Dean Moriarty of On The Road and Cody in Visions of Cody). Cassady's sustained intensity at 'talk marathons, comparable to the locked-horn 'chase choruses' of Jam sessions, helped both Kerouac and Ginsberg towards the definition of their individual sounds — finding their voices by listening to them, obeying the natural (albeit 'heightened') flow. And so the 'beat generation' considered as a group of writers takes us back to the archetypal matter of looking into your heart; hospitalised from too much benzedrine, at the age of twenty-three, Kerouac "said that he first began to think. . . and understand 'that the city intellectuals of the world were divorced from the folkbody blood of the land and were just rootless fools.' He 'began to get a vision of my own of a truer darkness' overshadowing 'all this overlaid mental garbage.

. Ergo, with Neal/Dean at the wheel "we all realised we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move:' Ann Charters, loyal as Boswell throughout, speaks for most readers I've heard tell, with her encomium: "No book has ever caught the feel of sPeeding down the broad highway in a new car, the mindless joyousness of 'joy-riding' like On The Road." That., ingenuous art of Spilling the beans — all that's remembered laced with all that chimes in from the senses at the instant of writing, emptying consciousness as per action painter and jazzman's delivery — undoubtedly set the pace and changed the directions for much of the writing, talking, performance and concerted actions that were to follow. His. versions oT unadulterated (i.e. non-literary) confessional are unlikely to be improved upon. He wrote to Ginsberg six years and twelve books later:

I was originating (without knowing it, you say?) a new way of writing about life, no fiction, no craft, no revising afterthoughts . . all of it innocent go-ahead confession, the discipline of making the mind the slave of the tongue with no chance to lie or re-elaborate (in keeping not only with the dictums of Dichtung Warheit Goethe but those of the Catholic Church my childhood). . .

As with most explorations with anything religious about them — either you believe, and pursue them — or you don't. William Burroughs has always tempered his friendships with Kerouac and Ginsberg with a measure of earthy scepticism regarding their several metaphysical aspirations and conversions — and emphatically towards their embracing of Cassady's mystique of the Easy Rider: "for sheer compulsive pointlessness," Neal's driving back and forth across America "compares favourably to the mass migrations of the Mayans".

Ms Charters is more obviously infected by Kerouac's naivete, and it's difficult on occasion to be sure where his ends and hers begins — as when

He worked as a waiter in the officers' mess, which he found easier than being a brakeman. He thought he could stay on board, travelling to Europe and the Orient, until he'd built up a large stake. His new plan, now, was to buy memere a lot and a trailer so she'd have some place to live, while he would go to Paris and starve alone in a garret, writing.

For the most part, however, the biography is lucid, probing and shrewd — notably in her exposition of his diffidence, a shy mama's boy who would have been happier to have fulfilled his ambitions of football stardom than he turned out to be as 'King of the Beats.' She outlines the need for hero-worship that drew him to Cassady, and their attitudes to women: "They both were emotionally incapable of any sustained sexual relationship . . . both Catholics whose narrow upbringing had led them to regard sex as something unclean and unholy." And she confirms that The Subterraneans, which I've always taken to be his most honest and revealing testament, writ in three nights, to chronicle his tempestuous affair with a black girl for whom he eventually proved too soft, "was closest in its desperateness and vulnerability to the way Kerouac actually lived." For all his anti-intellectualism he was pretty badly stuck in the impotent grooves of the 'white negro;' and yet his real love of the dark sun of America comes across, paradoxically, as effective literature — which has since catalysed diverse upheavals for the better, in observation that was typical and accurate for all that it was vastly sentimental.

At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro,.

feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darknesss, music, not enough night . . I

wished I were a Denver. Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap, anything but what 1 was so

drearily, a "white man" disillusioned. All my life I'd 'had white ambitions. . I passed the dark porches of Mexican and Negro homes; soft voices were there, occasionally the dusky knee of some mysterious sensuous gal; and dark faces of the men behind rose arbors. Little children sat like sages in ancient rocking chairs.

The Deutsch (1973) edition of Visions of Cody is graced with a substantial introduction by Ginsberg, who rhapsodically interprets "'War will be impossible when marijuana becomes legal.' How truly lovely the primitive faith, in depths of 1951 cop-lobbied national Dope Fiend Hallucination, that his private experience of grass would become, as it did, a ,national experience?" — This last phrase conjures grimmer phantoms to my mind, asscloes Ginsberg's subsequent harder-headekallusion to "the Vietnam War just about to be continued American bodied (as 'twas already funded American dollar'd via opium pushing . France and French-Corsican Intelligence agencies)." I don't mean to disparage the way the prophetic, role played by Kerouac (and certainly by Ginsberg) under-wrote the antiwar Movement, which in turn at least informed Nixon's all-too-slow withdrawal; but opiates and drug-escape generally did become the religion of the "American bodied" troops, and it didn't do much to deter them from waging war. Earth's grass is of course, as Lenny Bruce pointed out, not at all "dangerous, but friendly" in itself — certainly compared to the heroin. that killed him or the dipsomania that killed Kerouac. At the outset and at the finale, Kerouac's was the boozy mode of 'letting go,' not the Buddhist one he attempted more or less in vain: 'On the mountain top with Snyder he felt out of his element . . . Roadside diners and country liquor stores where he later bought himself a bottle of muscatel and a cigar, bragging to the clerk he'd just climbed the Matterhorn, were Jack's scene" — and nonetheless relevant, for a still predominantly alcohol-oriented public.

It's not as a mystic or prophet or spokesman that I value him — or that he emerges from this book, but as a compulsive writer who insisted on laying down his vision -of reality, bleak as well as exultant; beatific in squalor, he uniquely held his mirror to the nature he saw and knew. With Dylan Thomas before him, Bob Dylan unsuspected ahead, Kerouac was essentially a word-magician and a bard: but. . . being constitutionally incapable of either running with the radical commitments. of his immediate poetic peers, or staying within the limits of even the newest open verse forms, he kissed the leper of prose — and cured it! His purity is what was Unique. Insofar as he projects himself, it's hardly the spectacle of a man attaining wisdom, but rather all the awkward complexity of a weak and puritanical/average-sensual seeker after truth, declaring his quest with a kind concern and compassion for the people he encounters on it — not forgetting the reader; hence presaging the renaissance of authentic human communion looked for by that other late-lamented jazz-poet, Kenneth :Patchen: "Men were made to talk to one another . • The writing of the future will be just this kind of writing — one man trying to tell another man of the events in his own heart." And hung-up though he was on his legend,' Kerouac was saved by a fine excess of inspirational energy from wasting his words to polish a monument, carve an acceptable image or jostle with literati for reputation. His heriosm was not in the 'holy goof who sadly, in the closing chapter of his life, seemed to degenerate into almost a caricature of rednecked lush-hood: it lay, even then, in sticking to his last: whatever happened (and a helluva lot did, in his forty-six short years) "bringing it all back home," from travels and travails to notebook and typewriter, 'artificial aids' notwithstanding.

'Michael Horovitz is the editor of the Penguin *anthology, Children of Albion,