More Babbitt Than Beatnik
By Andrew Sarris
If the latest spiritual adventures of Jack Kerouac lack the ebullience of earlier explorations, it may be because he is hunting down a pedigree rather than an identity. ("As in an earlier autobiographical book I'll use my real name hear, full name in this case, Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac, because this story is about my search for this name in France.") By his own admission, Kerouac was 43 years old when he braved Paris and Brittany. That's a bit old for a Dharma Bum drunk on Dante's Beatitude, a Rover Boy with a yen for Zen, a traveler of the fifties who managed to bypass Marx and Freud on the road across the American continent.Once upon a time it could be argued that the literary establishment was underestimating Kerouac's influence on a generation of vagrant visionaries, fellahin without fellowships. "Beat" was a movement and a mannerism, a dialect and a dialectic. Beat preceded Pop and Camp as a burp against liberal rhetoric and official culture.
Even in the beginning, however, Kerouac's Beatitude sounded as tinny as Henri Bergson's elan vital. Still, the evolution of a beat bohemian style did coincide with the collapse of liberal optimism in the Eisenhower era, and Kerouac lent the Beats their speech rhythms to the point that even Tennessee Williams could imitate them in Lois Smith's jukebox soliloquy in "Orpheus Descending."
Kerouac can still write a blued streak, but his skyrocketing prose no longer illuminates the landscape. He now travels alone, out of his time and place, more like a Babbitt than a beatnik. He now seems to revel in a calculating callousness, particularly in his country-club put-down of "a half dozen eager or worried future writers with their manuscripts all of whom gave me a positively dirty look when they heard my name as tho they were muttering to themselves Kerouac? I can write ten times better than that beatnik maniac and I'll prove it with this here manuscript called "Silence au Lips" all about how Renard walks into the foyer lighting a cigarette and refuses to acknowledge the sad formless smile of the plotless Lesbian heroine whose father just died trying to rape an elk in the Battle of Cuckamonga, and Phillipe the intellectual enters in the next chapter lighting a cigarette with an existential leap across the blank page I leave next, all ending in a monologue encompassing etc., all this Kerouac can do is write stories, ugh'"--Ugh, indeed. No there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-and- Grove-go-I feeling in Kerouac's credit-card sensibility.
At times, his aggressive religiosity resembles Cassius Clay's: Methinks women love me and then they realize I'm drunk for all the world and this makes them realize I can't concentrate on them alone, for long, makes them jealous, and I'm a fool in love With God. Yes." As for what a "Satori" actually is, he explicates in quasi-religious terms: "Somewhere during my ten days in Paris (and Brittany) I received an illumination of some kind that seems to've changed me again, towards what I suppose'll be my pattern for another seven years or more: in effect, a satori: the Japanese word for 'sudden illumination,' 'sudden awakening' or simply 'kick in the eye.'" Unfortunately, the illumination comes at the end of a shaggy dog story by a saloon Sartre who manages to get gushy over the straighforwardness of a Paris cab driver.
The main trouble with Kerouac is that he is too obtrusive a character to be the kind of observer his travel book requires. Whereas Burroughs can sit down in a corner and record things as they are, Kerouac has to be the center of attention, drinking, brawling, singing, and then writing the next morning, the next month, the next year with an awful hangover and no sense of artistic continuity. It might be said that he is to Mailer as Chateaubriand is to Stendhal, but the drop in discipline through the ages is too depressing for words.
Mr. Sarris is editor-in-chief of Cahiers du Cinema in English.
Even in the beginning, however, Kerouac's Beatitude sounded as tinny as Henri Bergson's elan vital. Still, the evolution of a beat bohemian style did coincide with the collapse of liberal optimism in the Eisenhower era, and Kerouac lent the Beats their speech rhythms to the point that even Tennessee Williams could imitate them in Lois Smith's jukebox soliloquy in "Orpheus Descending."
Kerouac can still write a blued streak, but his skyrocketing prose no longer illuminates the landscape. He now travels alone, out of his time and place, more like a Babbitt than a beatnik. He now seems to revel in a calculating callousness, particularly in his country-club put-down of "a half dozen eager or worried future writers with their manuscripts all of whom gave me a positively dirty look when they heard my name as tho they were muttering to themselves Kerouac? I can write ten times better than that beatnik maniac and I'll prove it with this here manuscript called "Silence au Lips" all about how Renard walks into the foyer lighting a cigarette and refuses to acknowledge the sad formless smile of the plotless Lesbian heroine whose father just died trying to rape an elk in the Battle of Cuckamonga, and Phillipe the intellectual enters in the next chapter lighting a cigarette with an existential leap across the blank page I leave next, all ending in a monologue encompassing etc., all this Kerouac can do is write stories, ugh'"--Ugh, indeed. No there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-and- Grove-go-I feeling in Kerouac's credit-card sensibility.
At times, his aggressive religiosity resembles Cassius Clay's: Methinks women love me and then they realize I'm drunk for all the world and this makes them realize I can't concentrate on them alone, for long, makes them jealous, and I'm a fool in love With God. Yes." As for what a "Satori" actually is, he explicates in quasi-religious terms: "Somewhere during my ten days in Paris (and Brittany) I received an illumination of some kind that seems to've changed me again, towards what I suppose'll be my pattern for another seven years or more: in effect, a satori: the Japanese word for 'sudden illumination,' 'sudden awakening' or simply 'kick in the eye.'" Unfortunately, the illumination comes at the end of a shaggy dog story by a saloon Sartre who manages to get gushy over the straighforwardness of a Paris cab driver.
The main trouble with Kerouac is that he is too obtrusive a character to be the kind of observer his travel book requires. Whereas Burroughs can sit down in a corner and record things as they are, Kerouac has to be the center of attention, drinking, brawling, singing, and then writing the next morning, the next month, the next year with an awful hangover and no sense of artistic continuity. It might be said that he is to Mailer as Chateaubriand is to Stendhal, but the drop in discipline through the ages is too depressing for words.
Mr. Sarris is editor-in-chief of Cahiers du Cinema in English.