Sun 26 Jul 2009
We took a trip around Memorial Day to Williams Arizona, an old cowboy town on Route 66, and thence to the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas, and I spent the rare idle hours reading Jack Kerouac’s 1957 memoir/novel On the Road. Or rather, re-reading it for the first time in 40 years.
Wow.
It’s one of those books that makes you see things differently while you’re reading it. I could never subscribe to the lifestyle (In fact, I spent a big chunk of my life trying to curb those who did.) but Kerouac’s visceral prose is the kind of writing that goes right through the eyes and into the brain.
Every drunk and drug-addict has, when smashed, felt the sensation of discovering something wild and important, deep, secret and beautiful (and how quickly that feeling is lost the next morning!) but Kerouac is one of the few who can get it down on paper and put it across to a relatively sane and completely sober reader.
His characters are wonderfully flawed and brilliantly etched in a few lines, the backgrounds and situations vividly evoked, and the sheer, rambling plotlessness of the thing somehow makes up a startling momentum of its own.
I have to say that this is a book that needs a soundtrack album to go along with it — I had a bit of trouble relating to some of the passages sitting in bars listening to blues, jazz and more blues — but I really fell in love with the scene of the flat-broke Sal Paradise and his friends living for a day and a night in an all-night movie house, sitting among bums and winos, watching the same double-bill over and over again.
I’m tempted to quote the passage as a whole, but just let me throw in:
It’s a passage that resonates clearly with the old-movie-buff in me, and one I can relate to, having spent much of my youth sitting in the local grind house for hours on end, letting the Technicolor wash over me as I nursed my adolescent angst.
And I mark it as a sign of Kerouac’s brilliance that a wild and shiftless wanderer like Sal Paradise could reach out and touch a hide-bound old fudd like this one.
Covers shown: The Viking Press, hardcover, 1957. Signet D1619, paperback, 1958. Pan M39, UK, paperback, 1961.
July 26th, 2009 at 11:29 pm
I also read ON THE ROAD when it first came out. I still have the paperback edition I read in 1958 as a teenager. However unlike Dan Stumpf the references to jazz and blues had a tremendous impact on me. To this day I still love the blues and jazz, especially the bebop and avant garde jazz of Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Monk, Bud Powell, Dexter Gordon, etc.
While my friends were listening to the usual rock and roll, I discovered that music could be enjoyable and complex. When I listen to the piano of Cecil Taylor, my book friends beg me to turn it off, but to me it sounds beautiful. ON THE ROAD started me on my musical education.
July 26th, 2009 at 11:50 pm
I came to Kerouac because he had written about jazz, and still love the book. I don’t say it is a flawless book, but it is one you never forget once you have read it.
I was only eight when it came out, but read the Signet paperback shown in the second picture when I was in college.
Of course it is also the book Truman Capote said “That’s not writing, that’s typing” about, but it may well have been jealousy. Truman or not it’s a great book, and one I sometimes pick up and read a bit of as the mood strikes.
July 27th, 2009 at 5:01 am
“George Raft, Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre in a picture about Istanbul”
This sure sounds like BACKGROUND TO DANGER (Raoul Walsh, 1943). Walsh is indeed a hypnotic director, with strong atmosphere.
I’ve never read a word of Kerouac. Clearly, this should change!
July 27th, 2009 at 6:13 am
BACKGROUND was yet another Warners attempt to re-create CASABLANCA. And like CASABLANCA it offers no exchanges between Lorre and Greenstreet. Worth seeing, but it won’t make any 10-best lists.
July 27th, 2009 at 11:14 pm
Background to Danger is only loosely based on Eric Ambler’s novel, but it has a good screenplay by W.R. Burnett, and while no classic, it is a good Warner’s spy film of the era.