My introduction to Kerouac was the 1968 Paris Review interview he gave to Ted Berrigan (accompanied by Aram Saroyan, if I recall right – they did have to crawl through a bedroom window to get around Kerouac's watchdog wife). The idea of typing on long scrolls of teletype paper was something I certainly took up after graduation from college – many mornings I had to go into the newsroom before dawn to attend to the teletype machines and replace the rolls of paper. Nobody else was interested in the discarded bolts.
I've never been able to get through On the Road but have read about everything else he wrote, especially Dharma Bums. What appealed in the hippie experience of the early '70s was Kerouac's narrative of similar questing for transcendental awarenesses in music and poetry, music, travel, spirituality/religion, and romantic love – often in the realities of borderline squalor. His experiments with Buddhism resonated with my early yoga, though I now see how much it was more an exploration of French-Canadian Catholicism. The jazz details the excitement of the transformations of the '50s and its Beat movement, history as it happened.
At the time, I didn't realize how much Binghamton in upstate New York resembled Kerouac's native Lowell, Massachusetts, but without the French-Canadian dimension. The rawness of his freeform narrative was nevertheless entrancing.
Eventually, when I moved to Manchester, New Hampshire, I encountered the Quebec element in the city's West Side and then in the mills of Lowell itself. We even had obituaries for some of his distant kin who spelled the name Kirouac.
For a fact-oriented journalist like me, his dark and cloudy and openly emotional approach to a story was a revelation. As an aside, I must confess that I now see Henry Miller's earlier stream-of-thought fiction is superior.
As for Kerouac's celebrated and lamented Cody? I seriously doubt that he measured up to his image. But that's a matter of being human, too.
No comments:
Post a Comment