Satori In Paris - Jack Kerouac

 SATORI IN PARIS - JACK KEROUAC

Satori In Paris, or 'what I did on my holidays', by Jack Kerouac. Written in 1966, that's nine years after the publication of On The Road and just three years before Kerouac's passing. It's a memoir, essentially, of Kerouac's trip to France in search of his ancestors, what with him being French Canadian and wanting to trace his roots. 'Satori' is the Japanese word for 'sudden illumination', 'sudden awakening', or simply 'kick in the eye'.

To be truthful, it's unclear what his 'sudden illumination' was or when precisely during his ten days in France did it take place because when he's not quaffing cognac he's mostly being given the runaround by all the locals he's meeting. For most of his time there he's also wet from the rain and he even manages to lose his suitcase by missing the aeroplane it's been loaded on to. His stay in France is more akin, in fact, to Withnail And I, particularly the part when they plea for help from the farmer after telling him they've "come on holiday by accident".

There are obvious signs in Satori In Paris that Kerouac is on a decline and that he feels the world is set against him. His only joy and his only solace, it seems, is found in drinking. And of course, that's how he died, wasn't it? From cirrhosis of the liver due to alcohol abuse.

At the time of writing Satori In Paris, Kerouac was world famous though it doesn't seem to have done him much good or to have been of any use. He obviously has enough money to fly to France and to travel around a bit by train and taxi but he's still counting his pennies because he's not a wealthy man in the slightest. His fame back then only really stretched to younger generations which meant that to older people in France he was just some American tourist who by some freak of nature happened to speak French. Again, this would probably have been belittling to Kerouac, accentuated by him being unable to even get to meet his French publishers for a business chat as they're all 'out to lunch'.

Satori In Paris is a quick and easy read. It's a postcard from the edge. It's Kerouac as a Reuters war correspondent reporting that all is not well. There's movement on the borders and trouble in the hills, and Kerouac is letting us know that he's running out of tape. This is Kerouac drowning, not waving.

John Serpico

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

Heart Beat - My Life with Jack And Neal - Carolyn Cassady

 HEART BEAT - MY LIFE WITH JACK AND NEAL - CAROLYN CASSADY

Carolyn Cassady - wife of Neal Cassady, the Dean Moriarty of Jack Kerouac's 'On The Road' - puts her two penn'orth in on the subject of the Beats and I for one welcome it. The problem I have with Heart Beat - My Life With Jack And Neal, however, is the cover. I mean, isn't that one of the worst book covers you've seen in your life? It's almost like it was intentionally designed to put anyone off even being seen dead with this book in their hands. Look at it. I presume it was published as a tie-in for the movie of the same name starring Nick Nolte, Sissy Spacek and John Heard? A movie I've not seen, I might add, but am now determined to watch just to find out if it could possibly be as bad as it looks.

The Beats was always a bit of a boys' club but with that much homosexuality running through it, it should hardly be surprising. Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs were always rampant when it came to man-love but did Kerouac and Dean Cassady ever have 'relations'? I'm not sure, but it's obvious they were but a cigarette paper away from it. As a sort of surrogate love, in stepped Carolyn Cassady who evidently loved both her husband and Kerouac equally and so with good intentions slept with both.

Presumably ménage à trois' and polyamorous relationships have always been with us since time immemorial but to read about the one taking place between Kerouac and Neal and Carolyn Cassady in America of 1952 is heart-warming particularly because the usual depiction of Fifties America is as a decade of anti-communist, ultraconservatism.

Unfortunately, Heart Beat is slim pickings though the fact that it's written from a woman's point of view from within the inner circle of the original Beat writers lends a currency to what is revealed. Taking up a relationship with Kerouac whilst he's living at the Cassady's house is not only encouraged by her husband but fully enabled by him. Neal Cassady was quite the cuckold. The outcome, however, is complicated because everything is unspoken and whilst true feelings are on display it's obvious that Neal is the lynch-pin and both Kerouac and Carolyn bend to his mood swings.

Of possibly more interest to the keen Beat aficionado are the letters reproduced throughout the book between Allen Ginsberg, Kerouac and both the Cassadys. There's one in particular from Ginsberg to Neal and Carolyn where after receiving a copy of the completed manuscript of On The Road, Ginsberg is fuming and accusing Kerouac of self-sabotage: 'It's a holy mess,' he writes 'It's great all right but he did everything he could to fuck it up with a lot of meaningless bullshit. Page after page of surrealist free association doesn't make sense to anybody. I don't think it can be published anywhere in its present state. Why is he tempting rejection and fate? Fucking spoiled child. He done fuck up his writing money-wise and also writing-wise.'

On The Road, of course, went on to be recognized as - if not a work of genius - a work of huge importance. Ginsberg's criticism and rejection of the manuscript, however, hit Kerouac hard. So much so, in fact, that according to another letter written a little after to the Cassadys, Kerouac hinted at withdrawing from writing and even withdrawing from the world forever.

Luckily for us, Kerouac changed his mind and went on to write a series of books that came to define a generation. It's probably fair to say, even, that without Kerouac's influence the world wouldn't be quite the same culturally as it is today. Without his influence, Carolyn Cassady would certainly never have written Heart Beat, and that in itself would be a shame because if we can forget about the cover for a moment, it's actually a pretty enjoyable read.

John Serpico

Pic - Jack Kerouac

 PIC - JACK KEROUAC

Jack Kerouac's last novel, completed just weeks before his death and what springs to mind on reading it is the 10000 Maniacs song Hey Jack Kerouac from their In My Tribe album, and the lines: "Hey Jack Kerouac, I think of your mother and the tears she cried for none other, than her little boy lost in our little world that hated and then dared to drag him down. Her little boy courageous who chose his words from mouths of babes got lost in the wood." And that, essentially, is the story of Jack Kerouac and the story also of Pictorial Review Jackson, the ten-year-old narrator of Pic.

In many ways this is On The Road but through the eyes of an orphaned black child, told and written phonetically in a patoi-like North Carolina dialect. It's the story of that child as he travels across America with his elder brother, first to New York and then to California, with him describing the places he sees and the people he meets in a wide-eyed manner brimful of innocence and wonder. Pictorial, or 'Pic' for short, is the proverbial 'little boy lost' searching for a place he might call a home in a world daring to drag him down.

As might be expected and even hoped for, there are a lot of familiar Kerouac traits within these pages as in the sense of forward motion through the act of travelling, descriptions of places and people encountered, the celebration of jazz, the sense of adventure, and the sense of enthusiasm unbound. As exclaimed by Pic's elder brother at the start of their travels: 'Boy! You and me's hittin that old road for the WAY-yonder. Hey, look out everybody, here we come.' And it very much continues in that vein from there on, even when dealing with poverty, hunger, exhaustion and despair.

An interesting part of the story is when they cross the Mason Dixie line when travelling on a bus and on being told this by his brother, Pic is confused as he hadn't seen any kind of line at all so can only presume he must have been asleep when they crossed it.

'What did the line look like?' Pic asks him, to which his brother replies that he didn't know because he hadn't seen it either. 'But there is such a line,' he tells Pic 'Only thing is it ain't on the ground, and it ain't in the air neither, it's jess in the head of Mason and Dixie, jess like all other lines, state lines, parallel thirty-eight lines and iron Europe curtain lines is all jess 'maginery lines in people's heads and don't have nothing to do with the ground. Yes sir, that's all it is.'

And then there's the old man they meet along the road past the Susquehanna River who tells them he's heading to Canada, who doesn't stop talking and doesn't stop walking. Pic and his brother follow him for some miles until they realise he's probably crazy and so leave him to forge ahead alone until he's gone like a ghost. And then it dawns upon Pic's brother that it probably was a ghost, doomed to walk the highways and byways of America forever, always looking to find Canada but never getting there because he's going the wrong way all the time. And you wonder: Was this Jack Kerouac himself? And in fact, are all the characters in Pic aspects or depictions of how Kerouac saw himself?

At the age of 47 Jack Kerouac died from an abdominal hemorrhage brought about by a lifetime of alcohol abuse. He left behind him, however, numerous books and poems that have influenced generations of readers, his crowning glory being On The Road. The thing is, it's actually debatable as to whether On The Road is Kerouac's best book or not? It's the most influential, without any doubt, but for a fuller and better understanding and appreciation of him and the whole Beat Generation 'explosion' it's advisable to read his other books as well, Pic being just one of them.

John Serpico

The Beat Scene - Edited by Elias Wilentz

THE BEAT SCENE - Edited by ELIAS WILENTZ

When you go to the music section of any bookshop nowadays you'll see any number of books detailing and documenting in photos the story of a plethora of bands, solo singers, musical events and scenes. It's an industry and it goes with the territory that where there are photos available there will one day be published a book of them; and long may it be so, I say, as it's a genre of books I quite enjoy.

The Internet has obviously had an effect on this once-cornered market of photo-documentary books, particularly platforms such as tumblr, which is a very good thing, I think. For all that, however, you still can't beat the physical medium of looking at photos in a book (or a magazine) as opposed to viewing them on a screen. And you never will.

Published in 1960, The Beat Scene is probably one of the first of this kind of book. Edited by Eliaz Wilentz, it documents as it says in the blurb on the back cover, 'the world of the young bohemian writers of New York's Greenwich Village'. To this end, it includes a large number of black and white photographs of all the poets of that time who whether by accident or design had picked up the mantel of 'Beatnik'. Alongside the photos there is also one poem from each of them plus essays from others describing the beat scene.

The photographs themselves capture a sense of something very fresh and exciting happening, particularly in those depicting the poets in full flow, reciting their poems to a rapt and attentive audience. All the usual suspects are here - Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky - but also a whole host of others that I'd never heard of before.

Regarding the poems themselves, two stand out: Playmates by Ted Jones, and Tentative Description of a Dinner Given to Promote the Impeachment of President Eisenhower by Lawrence Ferlinghetti; both for the simple reason of having a political edge to them. And being politicised - much to the chagrin of Jack Kerouac - was what gave the Beats an edge which without having would have left them as being just a bunch of would-be-poets writing about clouds and chasing butterflys with nets in the countryside.

The Beats, of course, begat the hippies and the hippies begat the punks; with the punks being the full-stop at the end of the exclamation mark. That's putting it very simply as there was obviously very many other factors and influences involved in the process but without the Beats there would never have been Punk and without Punk I wouldn't be the person I am today and I wouldn't be writing this and you, child, wouldn't be reading it.

As George Santayana once said: 'Those who fail to remember the past are condemned to repeat it'.

John Serpico

Visions Of Gerard - Jack Kerouac

VISIONS OF GERARD - JACK KEROUAC

It's true what William Burroughs said about Jack Kerouac in that he was instrumental in starting a world-wide cultural movement. It's true also that he ended up a drunk, disparaging of the hippy movement that his writing - in particular On The Road - helped create.

I think what it is with Kerouac is that he was first and foremost a writer and an apolitical one at that. On The Road though written in 1951 wasn't published until 1957 and Kerouac would have been rightly pleased with the recognition and the huge audience it garnered. What writer wouldn't be? But whilst pleased with the original Beatnik scene in its purest form, the emergent hippy movement was like a Frankenstein's monster that he felt much antipathy to.

Patently, Kerouac never had a problem with drugs as supposedly a lot of his writing was done whilst on Benzedrine. No, it was the more overtly political wing of the hippy scene that he disliked, feeling it akin to a communist hi-jacking.

Visions Of Gerard was written in 1956 and is essentially a homage to his elder brother who had died at the age of nine when Jack was just four years-old. It's a beautiful yet rather self-indulgent book but then how could it not be? His brother, Gerard, is described as a near-saint as seen through the eyes of a four year-old though clearly he's actually being described through the eyes of Jack as a thirty four year-old man.

There are scenes in it that might well have happened such as Gerard rescuing a mouse from a mouse-trap and trying to nurse it back to health, only for it to be eaten by the family cat. Or Gerard coming home one day with a boy from the neighbourhood who is obviously very hungry; Gerard knowing that his mother would be able to feed him.

Events such as this are used to illustrate Gerard's saintliness and allows him to question why God allows such suffering in the world. Gerard's parents and teachers can only tell him that it's just the way it is but that heaven is there as a reward which only causes him to wonder why heaven can't be here and now?

Other events are clearly imagined by Jack, such as when Gerard is confessing his sins to a priest and admits to looking at another boys 'dingdong' in the urinal. And whilst this scene is being played out in a little church at dusk, elsewhere in the world wars are raging.

Or when Gerard ventures out alone into the cold one evening to fetch his mother some aspirin from the drugstore whereupon he spies an old man returning home from a days work, embittered with the cold and heading back to an empty, leaky room where no mother, father, little sister or brother awaits him. And meanwhile, Gerard's own mother has a headache.

"Why did God leave us sick and cold?" he asks his mother "I don't like it. I wanta go to Heaven. I wish we were all in Heaven."

"Me too I wish," his mother replies.

"Why can't we have what we want? Aw Mama, I don't understand."

Kerouac's story is clearly a very heartfelt one and goes a long way to explain what made him the person he ended up as. It reveals the marriage between his Catholicism and his Buddhist leanings along with his quest to find a meaning to life. It's a story that's very easy to criticise but because it's so heartfelt, out of respect for his dead brother and for the impact his death had upon Jack, it doesn't deserve to be criticised.

I always thought On The Road was speed jive, like the line out of All The Young Dudes by Mott The Hoople. Visions Of Gerard is more like an opium dream and for this reason they're two very different books in style, mood and content. Of the two, even though On The Road won Kerouac all the plaudits and acclaim, I actually suspect Visions Of Gerard might be the better one.

John Serpico