12. BEAT - Kerouac

A New Kind of Writing

In this Blog. . . we focus on Jack Kerouac

1. Jack's Kerouac's stream of consciousness - A new kind of literature emerges.

2. Jack Kerouac - Bio on Kerouac, early days.

3. Kerouac discovered in New York, his love for Jazz - The form and freedom of Jazz music as well as the language of the musicians essential to Jacks emerging style.

1. Jack's Kerouac's stream of consciousness. . .

Up until this time writing styles were limited to form and structures a bit similar in concept to classical styles in painting, nobody would have even considered writing apart from the literary conventions. 

Writing had not experienced the same kind of renewal that painting had experienced towards the end of the 19th Century sparking the radical experimenting that eventually established modernism in the early 20th C. Of course there were some experimental ideas in writing for example by T. S. Eliot and James Joyce among others. 

But these were still "highbrow" intellectual styles that the Beat writers were not concerned about. They preferred the down to earth style of American poet Walt Whitman and were influenced by the radical poetry and pros of Alfred Jarry and Arthur Rimbaud, but they were imports from Europe. 

They wanted something from home,  a writing style of the streets, the common parlance that ordinary people use everyday in shops and bars. They also liked the distinct colloquialism of the the Jazz musicians that would soon find its way into all expressions of hip street talk and used in the lyrics of music that we take for granted today. 

The two main pieces of literature that epitomize these  "Beat" aspirations are Jack Kerouac's "on the Road" and Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" 

2.Jack Kerouac 

Was born in 1922 the son of French Canadian parents from Quebec Canada who emigrated to Lowell Massachusetts. He was a gifted sportsman and it was his prowess on the football field that got him a Scholarship to Columbia University in New York at age 17, but first he had to attend a year of preparatory school at the Horace Mann School for Boys in the Bronx. 

So, at the age of 17, Kerouac moved to New York, where he became entranced by the life he saw in the big city. It was also during his year at Horace Mann that Kerouac first began writing seriously. He worked as a reporter for the Horace Mann Record, and published short stories in the school’s literary magazine, the Horace Mann Quarterly.

3. Kerouac discovered in New York, his love for Jazz 

During the 1940’s he took every opportunity he could to frequent the Jazz Bars of New York, the world of Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker and Dexter Gordon, among others. The improvised rhythmic sounds made a deep impression on the young Kerouac and he wanted from the start to incorporate the feel of it into his writing style. 

This was not merely imitating the free flowing unfettered sound of the music in his writing style, but also he loved the style and language of the Jazz musicians themselves, colorful people with their own local culture filled with city slang that was almost incomprehensible to anyone on the outside of the New York Night scene. 

Nowadays one can easily conjure up the cliche image of a smoky bar filled with a hubbub of patrons sipping cocktails and the piano dude with his shades and cigarette dangling out of the corner of his mouth, blue smoke drifting lazily upward as he tinkles subversively on the keyboard with the muted sound of feathered drums and the gentle twang of a double base. But then it was new and for Kerouac, intoxicating. 

He described the feeling of walking past a jazz club in Harlem: “Outside, in the street, the sudden music which comes from the nitespot fills you with yearning for some intangible joy—and you feel that it can only be found within the smoky confines of the place.” 

4 Kerouac and the first Beat writers. 

1940 was his freshman year but he suffered a leg injury early in the season and found himself on the bench, the following season his leg had healed but he was sidelined again. It was then he impulsively quit Columbia University and began supporting himself with various odd jobs before joining the army in 1943, he was discharged for being "Schizoid" (which is puzzling) but after this he arrived in New York and met the group that was to make up the core of the Beat writers. 

Late night discussions at the West end Bar were filled with heated debates on how to reformulate the world with a society in which freedom of expression and Art would replace conventional forms of morality. An apartment at West Hundred and fifteenth street became the official hangout for the new vision group, and a gathering place for late night Hedonistic parties.

In 1944, Jack met three people who he felt completely at home with and with whom he would begin the beat literary movement, Allen Ginsberg Lucian Karr and William S. Burroughs. 

His first book was "The Town and the City". 

which was published with the help of Allen Ginsberg. It was well enough received, but brought no recognition or fame.

New York was the place for new ideas and new ways of doing things. The whole modernist movement was happening. Spontaneity and dismantling of conventional methods was the order of the day. It is this desire to move away from accepted forms and come up with a "new truth" uncluttered by literary conventions that was being pushed and promoted by the fabulously wealthy Art galleries and collectors of the New York Elitists. But the wealthy elitists were not publishing new kinds of literature at this time. They wanted a visual equivalent to match their philosophical ideas about modernism. For this they build great exhibition halls which needed to be populated not with artifacts from History but with the most outrageous and provocative work that money could buy. 

It is this approach that spawned a kind of painting movement that in my mind has many similar intentions and aims to those of the beat writers. The most obvious example that immediately brings to mind another kind of New York stream of consciousness, the drip and splat painting style of Jackson Pollock working at roughly the same time.  

Pollock's approach was an attempt to show a painting that is specifically about the process rather than an external subject, and this process was an attempt to be more in touch with the primordial self. This was "action painting" in which the 'process' becomes the subject rather than an "image" that the process produces, there is no attempt at image making here, just raw spontaneous expression.

So where's the connection? Well we know that Kerouac felt that once he had written down what he had in mind, it must be left in this state, to revise his writing would interfere with its integrity, the first immediate impression was the truest one, which is exactly the intention of the  action style of Pollock in which the most immediate and unplanned mark making was the "truest".  Kerouac wanted to write in a style that resembled peoples actions and the jumbled and confused interplay of conversation in real time. He preferred the use of language and expression that people used everyday just the way it sounds in the street. . 

Although many will go to some lengths to explain that he planned books like "on the road" for quite sometime beforehand, his method of writing was to write as spontaneously as possible by threading a hefty roll of teletype paper into his typewriter and setting down his story on one continuous sheet. What resulted he would later transcribe for forwarding to his publisher, but never revised. 

There is also many points of divergence in the aims and intentions of these artists, but the point I am making is there was a specific climate at that time in which these kinds of innovations were actively being encouraged and sought after by people who had the financial backing to make it happen. 

But the difference is clearly illustrated in the involvement of the patron. Pollock's works were basically manufactured to cater to the taste of extremely wealthy New York collectors such as the Guggenheims and the Vanderbilts. There is a fascinating if not sardonic description of these self appointed Patrons of the Arts in a sharply critical essay by writer Tom Wolfe called the "The Painted Word" (discussed at length in a previous blog) In this he wittily describes how the whole process was undertaken. Firstly the construction of fabulously futuristic Art Galleries out of which emerged,  hordes of eager talent Scouts, freshly graduated with Art degrees, who would spread far and wide over Manhattan to comb the lofts and studios of aspiring moderns who lived and worked in places like Greenwich village. There they were to seek out new fresh modern art that fulfilled the correct criteria, of the modernist agenda and then haul them back to their gallery collections to proudly display as great examples of the new high brow elitist Art that no-one but them a few critics understood.

Conversely to this, Kerouac's work was decidedly low-brow and far removed from the pretentious  hi-brow society that poor Jackson Pollock felt so ill at ease in. 

Jackson Pollock - Unwilling prophet of doubt and uncertainty, a leading force behind the abstract expressionists

Whitney Museum in Manhattan 

Kerouac would never have countenanced the New York Elitists maybe he could have been tempted by money but he would have felt like a fraud just like we know Pollock did. Maybe Jackson Pollock would have really enjoyed the more earthy company of the Beat writers instead of getting hopelessly drunk at boring elitist cocktail parties. 

Neil Cassady 

Wouldn't Pollock have enjoyed the smokey interiors of the Jazz clubs and the buzz of the conversation of beat poets sitting up all night drinking smoking and debating? Perhaps he and Kerouac would have been good mates. . . but we shall never know. Kerouac did however met another fascinating character in one of the these clubs who for better and probably for worse did become a very close friend. His name was Neal Cassady infamous for his unstoppable energy and his overwhelming charm, his savvy hustle and his devil-may-care attitude. He was so typical of the beat type that we would expect to read about him in the beat literature, and we certainly do. 

David Amram at the Five Spot Cafe in New York City, 1957 

In 1946, a drifter called Neil Cassady traveled to New York City to visit a friend at Columbia University.There, he met Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, all of whom were enthralled by Cassady's energetic persona. He moved to New York City with his 16-year-old wife, LuAnne Henderson who was soon to discover her husband in bed one day with Allen Ginsberg and another girl from Denver called Carolyn Robinson who Cassady then also married. Which was clearly a mistake since he was notoriously unfaithful and was constantly having affairs and even marrying another girl, Diane Hansen whilst still married to Carolyn.

It seems Cassady "swung both ways" but this could be traced back to a time when he was apparently been "groomed" by a man who was supposed to mentor young wayward boys. His name was Justin W. Brierly a prominent Denver educator whose philanthropic gesture to reform young boys came at a price since he was also a closet homosexual and peodophile who secretely preyed on his young proteges. 

So much for reforming young Cassady who already had a rotten start in life a troubled kid who was brought up by an alcoholic father and had became a petty criminal and now was taken advantage of by someone he was supposed to trust.  

Kerouac and Neil Cassady

But he was also an adventurous and colourful character and by the time he met Jack Kerouac they had found a kindred spirit in each other. Immortalized as Dean Moriarty by Jack Kerouac in his epic novel, "On the Road", he went on several road trips with Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. It is these journey's that make up the stories featured in Kerouac's famous book.

In 1958, Cassady was arrested for selling marijuana and served two years in San Quentin Prison. Fed up, Carolyn divorced Cassady in 1963. Afterward, he joined author Ken Kesey and his group, the Merry Pranksters, on a cross-country, drug-filled road trip. Their adventures are detailed in Tom Wolfe's 1968 book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, we will certainly return to this episode in greater depth in a next blog. 

Heavy drug use ultimately led to Cassady's death, on February 4, 1968. He was found on railroad tracks after a party in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. 
His autobiography was published posthumously as The First Third.