How the Car-Crash of Jack Kerouac's Spontaneous Prose Inspired Me To Get My Thumb Out of My Bottom and Hit the Road

Truman Capote famously trashed Jack Kerouac’s On the Road with the words: ‘That’s not writing. That’s typing.’ All I can say is, Capote must have been in an uncharacteristically charitable mood that day, because it’s not typing. It’s projectile vomiting.

‘Spontaneous prose’ Kerouac called it. Pretentiously.

Apparently…

'Kerouac typed rapidly on a continuous scroll of telegraph-paper to avoid having to break his chain of thought at the end of each sheet of paper. Kerouac's dictum was that "the first thought is the best thought", and he insisted that you should never revise a text after it is written.'

Wow. That's some seriously misguided egomania right there.

Now there were two things, it seems, that we can blame for spontaneous prose. The first was jazz. Not good jazz, however, but the interminably cacophonous crazy jazz that’s basically an improvised orgy of musical masturbation that you always have to turn down when it comes on the radio because you can’t hear yourself think. Kerouac loved jazz. (And he loved the spirited Negroes that made it!).

The second thing was Kerouac’s friend, Neal Cassady, portrayed in On the Road as Dean Moriarty.

Dean Moriarty is the driving force in On the Road, and the subject of the besotted narrator’s haphazard hagiography.

An odd character to idolise, Moriarty is, amongst other things, a thief, a woman-beater, a practising paedophile, an inveterate bullshitter and a ghastly, unreliable drunk. Worse than all of that, however, at least from the point of view of the beleaguered reader, Dean Moriarty is a monumental bore, obsessed with his own intellect and labouring under the embarrassing misapprehension that each and every one of his rather mundane thoughts and observations is intrinsically interesting.

What really fascinates and arouses Kerouac’s alter ego, Sal Paradise – barf – is Moriarty’s spirit. You see, Dean Moriarty is free. Like the Negroes and the Mexicans and the crippled boys and beggars, like the raw-living big-laughing yokels uncorrupted by affluence, Moriarty has soul and spirit and he lives pure and fast and beyond conventional morality. He does what he pleases. And he doesn’t stop talking and he doesn’t stop moving. He never stops. He is the patron saint of ego-propelled perpetual motion.

I get the impression that in 1957, this was all very interesting.

But I can’t really imagine it. I mean, I can't imagine what it must have been like to have been shocked by the ground-breaking innovation of this book. I suppose too much time has passed. Or else I don't have enough imagination. However, the book is not without its shocking aspects. The paucity of plot, for example, is horrifying. As is the piss-poor characterisation, the leadenness of the imagery, the humour bypass and the more general, all-pervasive joylessness.

They blather on, Kerouac's deadbeats, about their fascination with life, yet they seem utterly incapable of really enjoying it. And why do they have to be so earnest and pretentious and unassailably self-important? I think I’ve met people like Kerouac before. They’re the same people who refer to themselves as ‘artists’ far too readily and rarely, if ever, have the heart to laugh at themselves.

But maybe I’m missing the point. Maybe the book was important because, as Kenneth Rexroth suggested at the time, Kerouac demonstrated to the world – perhaps even unwittingly – that his generation of self-obsessed delinquents were in fact a pack of worthless hypocritical vermin. That’s not a quote. This is a quote:

‘These innocents dash madly back and forth across the country, but they aren’t even very good at hitchhiking … Their values are those of the most conformist members of the middle class they despise, but enormously hypertrophied. They are demoralized and unsuccessful little Babbitts. This novel should demonstrate once and for all that the hipster is the furious square.’

Rexroth also wrote, of Kerouac’s follow-up novel The Subterraneans:

‘The story is all about jazz and Negroes. Now there are two things Jack knows nothing about – jazz and Negroes. His idea of jazz is that it is savage drums and screaming horns around the jungle fire while the missionary soup comes to boil … As a natural concomitant, Kerouac’s attitude toward Negroes is what, in jazz circles, we call Crow-Jimism, racism in reverse.’

Yes! That is so true. In your face, Kerouac! Rexroth is a great writer. You know just from reading a couple of his sentences that he didn't stick with the first thing that came into his head. To be fair, however – if I must – Rexroth also wrote this in his review of On the Road:

‘This is a book you should read. You are humane. You read good novels. This is the price in dehumanization society pays for your humanity. Kenneth Patchen has told people this in many books for many years, Henry Miller, too, Céline and Allen Ginsberg, whom the San Francisco police don’t like. Hosea said it long ago, and all the other prophets in the Bible. Things weren’t so bad then. They’ve got a lot worse. A lot worse. Still nobody pays any attention.’

So there you go. It was the American Psycho of its day.

But fifty years is a long time. Today, historical curiosity aside, On the Road is not a good book. In fact, it really is a car crash.

Having said all that, reading On the Road did inspire me. I confess. Because I’m convinced that it takes a special kind of negative energy to turn a subject as readily compelling as hitchhiking into something as painfully mundane as On the Road, I’m going to put my money where my mouth is and go on the road myself. And by God, if I don’t find something more interesting than Dean Moriarty on the way, I’ll cut off my own thumb and apologise.

So, next week when I begin the first of two weeks’ holiday, I’m going to celebrate by hitching up north to see how my gran’s getting on. I know that 250 miles up the sagging spine of Englandshire doesn’t really compare with Kerouac’s mammoth mythical treks back and forth across the United States, but, you know, size isn’t everything. And if William Blake could see the world in a grain of sand, I'm sure I can see something halfway interesting in the whole of the M1. Well, we shall see....

Found: Insane Typist Anecdote

Thank you so much to those of you who came to my rescue last night. I'm quite overwhelmed that within a few short hours, someone had typed out the passage, someone had scanned it, and someone had somehow sent me the entire book. I am indebted to all of you, particularly Timid Heathen for typing it out - that shows a special kind of devotion to niceness.

Anyhow, just in case you're interested, here's the anecdote. (Oh, and the Mark in question is Mark Vonnegut, Kurt's son):

I knew Kerouac only at the end of his life, which is to say there was no way for me to know him at all, since he had become a pinwheel. He had settled briefly on Cape Cod, and a mutual friend, the writer Robert Boles, brought him over to my house one night. I doubt that Kerouac knew anything about me or my work, or even where he was. He was crazy. He called Boles, who is black, "a blue-gummed nigger." He said that Jews were the real Nazis, and that Allen Ginsberg had been told by the Communists to befriend Kerouac, in order that they might gain control of American young people, whose leader he was.

This was pathetic. There were clearly thunderstorms in the head of this once charming and just and intelligent man. He wished to play poker, so I dealt some cards. There were four hands, I think—one for Boles, one for Kerouac, one for Jane, one for me. Kerouac picked up the remainder of the deck, and he threw it across the kitchen.

It was then that Mark came in, unexpectedly home for a weekend from Swarthmore College, where he was a religion major. He was also a middleweight wrestler in very good shape. He wore a full beard and a work shirt and blue jeans, and carried a duffel bag. Everything about his costume and even his posture might have been inspired by Kerouac's books.

The moment Kerouac saw him, Kerouac stood and looked him over smolderingly from head to toe. The calm before a fight settled dankly over the room.

"You think you understand me," said Kerouac to Mark.

"You don't understand me at all. You want to fight about it?" Mark said nothing, not knowing who Kerouac was or what he was so mad about.

Kerouac praised himself as a fighter, asked Mark if he really thought he was man enough to take him on.

Mark understood this much, anyway: that he might really have to fight this person. He didn't want to, but then again, he wouldn't have minded fighting him all that much.
But then Kerouac sat back down in his chair heavily, shaking his head and saying over and over again, "Doesn't understand me at all."

Later on that night, after Kerouac and Boles left, Mark and I talked some about Kerouac, who was then completing his seventeenth and last book. He would die very soon.

It turned out that Mark had never read Kerouac.

I don't care for Jack Kerouac – neither his writing nor the man, or at least what I can glean of the man from his writing – but I find this story very sad nonetheless.

Lost: Insane Typist Anecdote

More or less exactly a year ago this month I sold all of my books. It was one of the most difficult and unnatural things I’ve ever done, as the first scene of my one-day-surely-to-fuck award-winning-if-I-ever-finish-it play The Collector clearly testifies.

There were 700 of them and I’d been dragging them around with me, and loving them, adoring them, for years.

Although I said at the time that I felt a certain lightness on letting them go – and no doubt at the time it was true – it’s also true that I’ve missed them, a lot, in the last year. Not all of them, obviously, but some of them, and frequently.

I’m missing one of them now, and because I am a) skint b) short of time, and c) loath to buy any book that I owned for so many years and was then forced by circumstance to get rid of, I really don’t want to have to track down a new copy. And my local library doesn’t have it. So I’m asking you, the internet, for your help.

So, are there any Kurt Vonnegut fans out there? I should bloody well hope so. The man was a god. Anyhow, what I’m looking for is a copy of an anecdote that appears in Vonnegut’s autobiographical hotchpotch Palm Sunday.

I had this copy by the way.



Hardback. I got it secondhand. In Brixton I think.

Oh, bloody hell. I really miss my books. It's weird. In some ways I miss them more than I miss the people I sometimes miss. My books never hurt me. Actually, that's not true, but when they did, and when they made me cry, I loved them all the more. Go figure.

Anyway, the anecdote relates to an evening in which, toward the end of his life, Jack Kerouac comes round to Kurt Vonnegut’s house and, if I recall correctly, talks about Hitler (in an inappropriately positive way) and offers to fight Vonnegut’s son.

I’ve had a root around online, and have managed to find proof that I’m not imagining the whole thing, including this quote from Vonnegut:

‘He [Kerouac] was crazy. There were clearly thunderstorms in the head of this once charming and just and intelligent man.’

But I really need to read the whole episode again. I want to remember. So – do you have a copy of Palm Sunday and would you be prepared to scan or photocopy the Kerouac bit and stick it in an email for me? It’s probably only a page or two at most. I would be ever so ever so grateful. I’ll even buy you a drink if you can come along on June 4th. Hmm? What do you say?

Come on, internet! Do your thing.

Please.

Thanks!

Motion

I’m on the train.



From the north, back to the south. The coastline is really quite breathtaking. I wish I'd taken a photo of that. It's beautiful. It's the polar opposite of the inner cities. The sun is out at the moment and bright as a giant barbecue, making blinding clumps of whatever the heckfire that yellow flowered bush is that litters the hills above the sea. It's lovely.

I have two weeks holiday at the end of this month, beginning of the next. I was going to go away somewhere, on my own. Somewhere foreign, at least for a week of it. But I can’t afford it. I can’t afford anything in fact, for the rest of the year. Golf course! That looks like fun. I've never played golf. Oh, God. Please don't let David Cameron be our next Prime Minister.

What I’ve realised is, what with my tax debt, and my credit card debt, and my grandmother debt, I should be able to pay everything off by the end of this year – just in time for this job to finish. I feel like I’m in jail. I've got six and a half months. No remission. But of course it’s all entirely my own fault. So I should just shut the shit up and get on with it. And that’s what I’m doing. Honest, I am. Apart from the shutting up.

Rabbits! Fields full of 'em. Frolicking, they are. Glorious, glorious rabbits. Someone should write a poem about them. They're so full of life. And so tasty. God, I haven't had rabbit pie for years.



So anyway, I’ve decided – instead of going on holiday at the end of the month – I’m going to come back and see my grandmother again. Bless her. Not for the whole two weeks, but for a while. I think it does me good to see her. It’s been just a couple of days this time, but it’s definitely done me good. It puts things in perspective. Not just the paranoia of the spectre of death, but taking care of, and actually thinking about someone else for a change.

Next time I come up here, however, I’m going to hitch.

That's right.

I’m about 20 pages from the end of On the Road and I’m pretty convinced that no one has ever written a more tedious, self-indulgent or pretentious book. I’m also pretty convinced that I could find better hitching stories to tell on one trip from London to the north east than Jack Kerouac managed to distil from five years or so hitching across the States. And I don’t say that arrogantly. I think just about anyone could come up with better hitching stories in one day.

Anyway, we'll see. For now it's back to work.

I leave you with something my grandmother told me only this morning. She told me: 'Never cast a clout till May's out.'

God knows.

By the way, she was feeling much better this morning. She's still got to go back to the doctor tomorrow and she's got to have blood tests on Wednesday, but I'm not so worried now. So that's good.

Pheasant!