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