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The Garlic Ballads THE REDWOOD COAST Volume 15, Number 2 REVIEW Spring 2013 A Publication of Friends of Coast Community Library in Cooperation with the Independent Coast Observer BOOKS HOME TRAVELING Hilda Johnston f all the many striking state- ments made by deSelby, I “Odo not think any of them can rival his assertion that a journey is an hallucination,” says the narrator of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman refer- ring to deSelby’s theory, arrived at by watching old cinematograph films, that any progress and even human existence is really “a succession of static experiences each infinitely brief.” When deSelby finds it necessary to travel between Bath and Folkestone, he shuts himself in a room with a supply of picture postcards Jack Kerouac around 1957, the year On the Road was published of the area to be traveled and an elaborate arrangement of clocks and barometric in- struments. On exiting the room, he finds he is still in Bath, but he declares himself “to have been to Folkestone and back Pull Over, Jack again.” The narrator of The Third Police- man quotes freely from this fictional phi- losopher deSelby, whose words, he says, Kerouac’s biographers have been taken for a ride “have a heart-lifted effect more usually associated with spirituous liquors.” Jonah Raskin Several years ago when an artist friend went to Cinque Terre for a few weeks in October, I imagined I too was in Italy. hinking about the sixty-eight identified her corpse after she jumped been published. To borrow Michael Mc- This was not too difficult in the Bay Area, books about St. Jack Kerouac from a building in San Francisco and the Clure’s apt phrase, we’re still “scratching with our warm Mediterranean climate, (1922-1969) published over police scraped her off the pavement. No the Beat surface,” Lombardy poplars, and narrow Italian the past four decades I’m one has ever written about Jackson and Sixty-eight Kerouac books add up cypress. The tall poplars were golden; reminded of the one authentic as long as no one does the history of the to overkill; if there were one definitive the maples and plane trees, russet, burnt Tnovelist—besides Kerouac—who lived Beats won’t be complete. biography there probably wouldn’t be sienna and umber. On my way to work, near Huntington, Long Island, my home- I’ve written a half dozen biographies sixty-eight. But perhaps there are sixty- I began to read Dante, English on one town. His name was Pietro di Donato. and have guidelines of my own for writ- eight because no one single work can side, Italian on the other. When my friend Christ in Concrete (1939), his bestsell- ing biography which I’ve learned the encompass a writer who kept changing came home, I was surprised to hear that it ing novel, inspired a movie directed by hard way: don’t allow the subject of the the narratives about himself, a fact that had been raining most days on the Ligu- Edward Dmytryk. After his one big novel, biography to dictate its meaning; treat the makes him an appealing and an elusive rian coast, and though neither of us had di Donato moved on to lives of the saints, stories the subject tells as information to subject. Forty years ago, there was clearly learned Italian, only I had enjoyed the rich which had advantages over fictionalized be interpreted; construct a biography as a real need for a book about the author of colors of an Italian autumn. This was my versions of his immigrant parents—Ital- dramatically as a novel; and have access On the Road that would dispel the myths first venture in home traveling. ians rather than French Canadians like to archives. Kerouac’s earliest biographers about him, including the myth that he was The philosopher deSelby praises “the Kerouac’s. With lives of the saints, there were denied the opportunity to read his just typing, not really writing—a charge equilibrium of water, its circumambiency, was a built-in readership, a powerful papers. Then, too, many manuscripts have made by Kerouac’s snotty contemporary equiponderance and equitableness,” and institution—the Catholic Church —be- only recently seen the light of day. Viking Truman Capote. Forty years on, it’s clear he was once accused of hoarding water, hind them, and a ready-made formula of didn’t publish Kerouac’s Wake Up: A Life that many of the books have perpetu- “police testifying that every vessel in temptation and redemption. Ditto Jack of the Buddha until 2008. The Sea Is My ated myths and not punctured them. So, the house, from the bath to a set of three Kerouac, whose work has long been Brother, a novel written in the 1940s, ap- Kerouac has taken his place alongside ornamental egg-cups was brimming with under the thumb of the Sampas estate, the peared in 2012. As far as I know, no one larger-than-life writers such as Ernest the liquid.” Viking Press, and in the hands of literary has published Kerouac’s 1952 story Sur le Hemingway and Jack London—one of his I am also fond of water, but having apostles who have described him as a long Chemin, written in French and discovered earliest role models, a fact often ignored twice traveled on a freighter to Europe, I suffering, Christlike American author who in 2008 by Quebecois journalist Gabriel by biographers. still have nightmares of being surrounded wandered in a wilderness of sex and drugs Anctil. The movie version of On the Road Arthur Calder-Marshall, a Jack London by ocean. When a friend was invited on and was redeemed by the publication of has brought renewed interest in Kerouac’s scholar, noted that the subject of a biogra- a seventeen-day cruise as a companion On the Road (1957). Hollywood connections; his correspon- phy usually receives the kind of attention to an elderly woman, I did not envy her, I’ve been reading Kerouac biographies dence with producer Jerry Wald has never he or she deserves. His observation is as but then since my life is circumscribed by since 1974, though I have only recently true for Kerouac as for London. Indeed, my bicycle route, like a character in The come to appreciate Emily Dickinson’s both authors traduced facts and created Third Policeman, “going to a particular keen sense that biographers are in the Sixty-eight Kerouac mythologies, and both have received destination or other on his bicycle every business of constructing lives and that in biographies that traduce facts and extend hour of the day or coming back from there the process of writing biography some- books add up to over- mythologizes. That’s poetic justice. at every other hour,” I realized It would thing of the life is inevitably lost. “Biogra- be easy to imagine I too was on a cruise, phy first convinces us of the fleeting of the kill; if there were eat publishers such as Paul Slovak my scenery, like the water seen from Biographied,” Dickinson wrote, though no one definitive biog- Bat Penguin are beginning to feel it’s shipboard, changing only with the light Kerouac biographer has seen fit to heed time to call a moratorium on books about and weather. her words. I’ve also come to side with raphy there probably Kerouac, but perhaps a biographer is now Home traveling, like home schooling, Virginia Woolf, who threw up her hands writing the great biography. If so, he or depends on the quality of the books and I in dismay at the biography industry that wouldn’t be sixty-eight. she probably won’t disagree with Beat had Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman fed, she recognized, on the lives of rich, Perhaps there are scholar Matt Theado who says that “to along with some books by the Spanish famous, powerful men, whether generals understand Jack Kerouac, readers must author Enrique Vila-Matas. I did not yet or poets. In A Room of One’s Own, she sixty-eight because no know a few things about his life.” But have his most recent book, Dublinesque, wrote that she would much rather read precisely what things? Not surprisingly, but I guessed that he would be fond of the the “true history” of an unknown girl single work can en- there isn’t universal agreement about Irish writer O’Brien, because like Franz who worked in a tawdry shop than “the compass a writer who them. Theado lists seven and doesn’t Kafka and Robert Walser, O’Brien spends hundred and fiftieth life of Napoleon or include important stuff: Kerouac’s formal a long time getting nowhere, which, I seventieth study of Keats and his use of kept changing the nar- education; voluminous reading in Melville suppose, is a kind of home traveling for Miltonic inversion.” I’d love to read a true and Dostoyevsky; and his wives, includ- writers. In any case, from Vila-Matas I history of the New Jersey–born shop girl ratives about himself. ing Joan Haverty, for whose edification he got the idea to leaven my writing with named Natalie Jackson whom Kerouac claimed he wrote On the Road. quotations. and Ginsberg both wrote about in poetry and fiction. Jackson’s lover, Neal Cassady, See HOME page 8 See KEROUAC page 10 Page 2 THE REDWOOD COAST REVIEW Spring 2013 EDITOR’s noTE Oscar Night: Worst performance by an industry in crisis Stephen Kessler atching the Academy Godfather. It seemed the Awards this year was even stars onstage at the Oscars more painful than usual— this year were desperately not because of who won or dancing their socks off to did not win Oscars but that keep from crying over their Wthe show looked like amateur night at the own irrelevance.
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