The Subterraneans - Jack Kerouac

 THE SUBTERRANEANS - JACK KEROUAC

Apparently, for a fair number of Kerouac readers The Subterraneans is their favourite Kerouac book. As for me? I'm still reading through Kerouac's canon in search of the key to understand his place in culture and his impact upon it - or something like that - so don't yet have a favourite. The Subterraneans to me is just another of his books though probably one of his more better known ones. Before reading it I'd advise there are things to know that are inarguably going to enhance the experience. You need to know for example that Kerouac wrote The Subterraneans in a three-day-and-night long burst of creative energy fuelled - I like to think though not verified - by a healthy dose of Benzedrine. 'Speed jive', as Mott The Hoople in All The Young Dudes would call it. 'Spontaneous prose' as Kerouac described it. A method that both Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs enquired about and later utilised in the creation of Howl and Naked Lunch.

As with practically all of Kerouac's books, The Subterraneans is based on real events and real people. The lived experience. All of his characters are pseudonyms and once you know who's who, it enhances everything. It reveals a lineage. So, when Kerouac talks about his old drinking buddy Larry O'Hara he actually means Lawrence Ferlinghetti. When he talks about Adam Moorad he means Allen Ginsberg. When he talks about the writer Frank Carmody who's just returned from living in North Africa, he means William Burroughs. And so on and so forth. It also helps to know that all the events Kerouac writes about in The Subterraneans actually took place in New York though he's transposed it all to San Francisco.

The 'subterraneans' is the name given by Ginsberg to the people who hang out together at the same clubs, cafes and parties during the early 1950s. They're all would-be bohemians, getting off on jazz, poetry, reefer, shooting the breeze and 'riding the mystic'. Kerouac (going under the name Leo Percepied), ever the struggling artist makes their acquaintance and is up to his neck in source material for his next book. Simply recording the conversations around him along with all the anecdotes he's privy to would have been plenty in itself but into this mix he adds a love interest in the form of a young black girl by the name of Mardou Fox.

This specific love element is the thing that makes The Subterraneans of much more interest than it already is. It was written, it should be remembered, at a time when mixed-race relationships were frowned upon and could bring the participants to the attention of the authorities who might assume there was some kind of communist conspiracy afoot.

Moreover, it begs the question as to what exactly is a young girl of colour doing hanging out with a lot of self-confessed homosexuals and drug addicts? It's a bit of a mystery. Kerouac becomes enamoured with her immediately and they're sleeping together soon after, though it's a relationship that's complicated to say the least.

The biggest mystery, however, is who exactly is Mardou Fox? In real life her name was Alene Lee but beyond that, very little is known about her. In fact, it's almost as if she's been wiped out of Beatnik history. Literally. The dancing girl pictured on this particular edition of The Subterraneans, for example, is it meant to be a depiction of Mardou? I would presume so but then why is she white and ginger-haired? I realise the picture has been taken from the poster of the 1960 film adaptation starring George Peppard and Leslie Caron, and I know it makes for a good cover but basic details matter.

Written as a Joycean stream of consciousness, Kerouac was obviously on to something here whereby language was being pulled out of shape to reveal the hidden impulses beneath. It's all good stuff but some of what this technique reveals sits uncomfortably. It's obvious, for example, that Kerouac's drinking and carousing with the boys takes precedence over his writing, and that both his carousing and writing takes precedence over any relationship. The carousing, of course, gives Kerouac material to write about but then so do his relationships, particularly his one with Alene Lee.

There are things in The Subterraneans that are so obviously private that in no way would Alene Lee have given her consent to having it written about, even if disguised by the use of a pseudonym and being transposed to another State. Apparently when she was shown the manuscript of The Subterraneans she was shocked and rightly so. How would you like it if your visits to your psychoanalyst were made public along with what was meant to have been private pillow talk and even the details of what you've got between your legs?

There is a lack of decorum here on Kerouac's part and an insensitivity to the fact that being a young black girl in 1950s America was fraught with enough hardships as it was, without having her whole private life exposed for the world to see. Which leaves us all with the undeniable truth that The Subterraneans is a classic of its kind but a classic that leaves a bit of a bad taste in the mouth and a bit of a stain upon Jack Kerouac's judgement if not his character.

John Serpico

Anti-Fascist - Martin Lux

 ANTI-FASCIST - MARTIN LUX

My only criticism of this book is in regard to the cover as it makes it look like one of those 'books for teenagers' that you see in sections of libraries and bookshops under the same name. The fact is, however, that actually it's what might be called in the vernacular 'the dog's bollocks'. Anti-Fascist by Martin Lux is the real deal.

I should hold my hands up here and declare I've met Martin Lux on a number of occasions. I've sat and drank with him in pubs where he's regaled me with tales of hardened skinheads on their knees begging Martin for mercy. I was at the launch for this book at one of the London Anarchist Bookfairs, and I publicised Martin's mini book tour of Holland as I was living there at the time when he went over to do some readings. The Dutch, by the way, loved him.

Anti-Fascist is a book that needed to be written because if it hadn't then the stories and the history it records would have been written out of history. Rubbed out like all the images of Trotsky from photographs during the Stalin purge. Quietly and conveniently forgotten by polite society. Martin's story, you see, is one that is often frowned upon by certain sections of society if not outrightly condemned. It's about violence on the streets. It's about going head-to-toe with the Far Right and tackling perpetrators, supporters, advocates, enablers and exponents of Fascism head-on.

Rather than writing devastating articles in The Guardian critiquing the conduct of Nazis, it's about going at them instead with baseball bats, knuckledusters, bricks and any suitable weapon at hand, and simply doing the bastards. It's about chasing them physically off the streets and not allowing them an inch. It's about removing them from any platform and denying them any space. Martin's book is about anti-fascism in the raw, in the here and in the now.

The book starts with a description of Martin's background and how he arrived at being a somewhat fearsome anti-fascist streetfighter, and it's an interesting one. Born into poverty with a natural anarchist-like aversion to authority and conservatism in all its manifestations, Martin's political education was fuelled by reading the underground press at that time such as Oz and IT, along with weekly visits to Speakers' Corner. His working class, street-level take on society combined with the then alternative culture's advocacy of revolution, sex, drugs and rock'n'roll made for a heady cocktail.

There was also the little matter of 1968 and the failure of England to partake in the revolutionary upheaval spreading around the globe from Paris, Germany and Italy to Czechoslovakia, America and Japan. But not England, remaining instead as Martin puts it 'a bastion of dull conformity and reactionary crap'.

Martin not only sought to escape from miserable, impoverished conformity but also ways to fight the prevailing ethos; finding suitable tools for the job in the possibilities offered through riot, looting, burning, occupations, barricades, insurrection and revolution.

His story is mapped-out by various confrontations with the Far Right throughout the 1970s, the most significant of these being in Lewisham in '77 where he witnessed the first use of police riot shields on the UK mainland, and Southall in '79 where protester Blair Peach was murdered by the police.

He also records the constant criticism and ostracisation from anarchist circles dominated at that time by what he describes as 'bearded pacifists and their floppy chicks', all telling him that 'racists and fascists are human beings too' and rather than being all 'macho' and 'sexist' could Martin not 'just try talking to them'?

The book culminates with the now infamous story of Martin acting as security at a Crass and Poison Girls gig at the Conway Hall in London where the venue is invaded by forty plus Far Right skinheads. Martin keeps a lid on things before help arrives in the form of a dozen fellow anti-fascists who launch a pulverising attack on the skinheads, turning the concert into a veritable bloodbath.

There are lessons in Anti-Fascist for the taking though it all depends where on the political spectrum you sit as to what those lessons are. The main one, obviously, is in regard to the effectiveness of violence when it comes to dealing with fascism or politics at street level generally. Martin lays out his stall though at the same time concedes that any violent momentum cannot be maintained forever and that other tools and tactics are also demanded. It's always horses for courses, essentially.

The disturbing thing about Anti-Fascist, however, is in how the circumstances, events, situations and racist tropes of the 1970s that Martin writes about are all back with us again now today - with a vengeance. All that has changed are the names of those espousing racist and Far Right rhetoric and the doubling down by the Right-wing media in its support of it along with the demonisation of its opponents.

These are interesting but very unsettling times that we now find ourselves in but unlike the night of the Crass/Poison Girls gig at the Conway Hall there's no sign of any anti-fascists of the (as described by Martin) 'right heavy geezers' kind coming over the hill to help deal with the problem. In fact there's no sign of them even on the horizon. Which means that unfortunately it's going to be down to us and no-one else to step up in whatever way we feel able and in whatever way we see fit.

John Serpico