James Metcalf on the fictionality of the latest archaeological page-turners
Stephen Puddicombe looks at the unusual appeal of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot
Ciaran Rafferty investigates the science of book classification
Although the book is an homage to friendship and in particular to Cassady it has a prominent sublevel of sexual freedom and the liberties it erodes. The line used by Hold Steady refers to a section of the book in which Sal meets a young girl at Montana Slim’s house party and stays with her for the night. Afterwards he feels guilty about consummating an affair that never developed beyond physical intimacy. In his later novella The Subterraneans, about his relationship with Arlene Lee, Kerouac as Leo Percepied reaches a deeper level of communication, reading Ulysses together naked by candlelight but later becomes obsessed with the jealousies of worthwhile relationships and has to lose her.
While in the bedroom pondering the perplexities of life Kerouac wants to ask the girl ‘what do you want from life?’ a question repeated in Robert Rodriguez’s gun-slinging Once Upon a Time in Mexico. ‘Que quieres de la vida?’ asks the Mariachi to Salma Hayek knowing that these are the questions that really matter if you are to spend the rest your life with the same person. Even Mos Def in Sunshine feels the same way ‘I aint concerned with what brand you are. I’m concerned what type of man you are, what your principles and standards are’.
It is perhaps relevant that the film was based in Mexico, the southern haven of the beats, appearing in all three big texts: Howl!, On the Road, and Junky. And that the song was written by another New York City native. Cities inherit a soul of their own so that it is possible to speak of a New York or Manchester Sound even if it comes from different times or stems from other ethnicities. As Kerouac travels throughout the United States he continually finds reasons to return to New York before departing again, as though he might die if he was apart from it for too long but might suffocate if he stayed for too long.
In New York City was the University that Kerouac crashed in his first novel Orpheus Rising. In the early 1950s Columbia offered Kerouac a sports scholarship and it was here that he first met Allen Ginsberg, author of Howl!. Fifty years later and after eventually appointing Ginsberg as literature professor Columbia is one of the most formidable universities in the world and a major player in the teaching of journalism. However its being in New York, as with the early development of Julliard, was its original attraction. Kerouac talks passionately about seeing Miles Davis and how his friends were interviewed by Kinsey in preparation for the publication of his groundbreaking books on sexual behaviour.
Also in the city was Fugazzi’s and Times Square and Greenwich village as well as the pier where Kerouac and Ginsberg talk through the night in Sunflower Sutra. It was in New York where guitar music was to develop through CBGB’s and where Grandmaster Flash was to collaborate with Blondie on the advent of Hip Hop’s globalization. Appropriately then Kerouac could sense the same mysticism that vibrated at his feet in Kansas. William S. Burroughs went as far as to drop out of Harvard and move to the city where he would eventually make his name.
However the original plan for the road trip was to get to San Francisco where Howl! Would eventually be published and where Kerouac would write most of The Subterraneans. When Kerouac and Moriarty reached San Francisco they stopped at the pier, they couldn’t go any further ‘cause there was no more land. Having travelled from the North East corner of a huge country they had finally found the limit of the automobile. Suddenly they had no desire to go any further; their fate was tied to the vehicle which had taken them down the Mississippi River of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and shifted them from Denver through Texas and it was just as the day when Nicolas Tesla saw the death of his pigeon and knew that his work was done.
After the book was completed both Kerouac and Cassady slipped into a deep alcoholism that was to mean neither of them was to see 50. Paradise’s acceptance in the last chapter that he could never keep up with Moriarty became strongly prophetic as Kerouac’s later novels saw him travelling between other friends and Cassady appearing only briefly in The Subterraneans before he joined the Merry Pranksters and Kerouac started to take more retreats among the wilderness of his youth.
You must log in to submit a comment.
