JACK KEROUAC'S ON THE ROAD: THE ILLUSTRATED SCROLL by PAUL ROGERS

These wonderful drawings form part of an on-going project by illustrator Paul Rogers to record an image from every page of On The Road.

They capture not only America in the late 40s and early 50s but the mood of Jack’s writing; swinging from excited optimism to gloomy melancholy at the turn of a street corner.  

Rogers is approximately a third of the way through so hopefully publishers have knocked on his door already. If not, they need to.

For more images see Paul Rogers at Drawger and for a short interview see The Huffington Post. 

Thanks for Robin at Include Me Out for the tip-off.  

JACK KEROUAC’S ON THE ROAD: IN THE CINEMA and IN THE BRITISH LIBRARY

Having read On The Road half a dozen times the odds were stacked against liking the new film adaptation, and the bookies are seldom wrong. Director Walter Salles had a difficult task capturing Jack Kerouac’s poetic prose, so didn’t bother, instead he went for a stylised fashion-shoot/drinks commercial/pop video look and threw in some extra tits and arse.   

I don’t know how Sam Riley gets these parts; someone must think he’s kinda cute. He was okay as Ian Curtis in Control but as menacing as a bag of greasy chips as Pinkie in Brighton Rock, and here as Sal Paradise (Kerouac's pseudonym) his whole shtick is to look vacant and watery eyed. Jack might’ve been shy but was keen-eyed, even when drunk or stoned, famously logging everything in his prodigious memory. Whenever he’s a bit off his head in the film Salle shakes the camera, just to make it clear. Genius. Riley, I’m told, didn’t bother to read the novel and neither it seems did he listen to how Jack spoke, choosing to adopt a flat, generic American accent. His opposite number Garrett Hedlund as Dean Moriaty (real life Neal Cassady) was better - faint praise - but where was the drive, the burn-burn-burn? Kirsten Dunst was well cast as Camille and Viggo Mortensen got the easy but entertaining role of Old Bull Lee.

It makes no real difference what the film’s like, there’ll always be the book, but the worse thing is it won’t encourage many to read Kerouac. There was one short scene when Sal receives Carlo Marx’s (Allen Ginsberg’s) poem Denver Doldrums. He reads the lines, they appear on the screen, and it came alive. People will now be discovering Ginsberg; will they pick up On The Road or Visions of Cody? The film adaptations of William Burroughs's Naked Lunch and Allen Ginsberg's Howl worked as they used the classic Beat Generation texts to create something new and interesting. Salles only creates a poor imitation. 

Jack’s novel has shifted in meaning for me over the years. When I first read it I honed in on the energy, the excitement, the free-wheeling search for kicks. It’s like the opening scene in Easy Rider when Peter Fonda throws his watch to the ground and kick-starts his bike. It’s not the destination; it’s the journey, the experience. On The Road reads much sadder and gloomier nowadays. Jack’s lonely quest for love and belonging in a world “where we’re all going to die anyway” rises closer to the surface.

The original manuscript of On The Road is currently on display in the British Library and is amazing to see. According to legend, Jack wrote it in one three-week spontaneous burst of inspiration and perspiration at his kitchen table to tell his new wife about his travels. To negate the need to interrupt his flow he taped together sheets of tracing paper, loaded up the typewriter and off he went, fuelled on coffee and Benzedrine. When he unravelled the 120 foot long scroll for his publisher he was told where to go and had to wait another six years and make many changes before it finally saw publication. The truth isn’t quite as dramatic as research now shows On The Road was worked on for years until he typed that version. Although punctuated it’s written as one solid block of text with no paragraphs which makes it difficult to read within the special glass case in the library; it was nigh impossible for my eye to follow the next line. Made it like reading a Burroughs cut-up.

Howard Cunnell, editor of On The Road – The Original Scroll (published in 2007) gave a very persuasive lecture at the British Library the other weekend when he argued the exaggerated myth Jack created around his spontaneous prose technique harmed him as it enabled critics to easily dismiss him and his style. Truman Capote’s put-down “That’s not writing, that’s typing” is almost as well-known as any of Jack’s lines. However, the main thrust of Cunnell’s hour-long talk was to champion Visions of Cody as “the real On The Road” and as Kerouac’s masterpiece. The link between the two – both centred on Neal Cassady and covering much of the same ground but in a different style - is complicated so I won’t recount it here but will read Cody again. When I read it 20 years ago I didn’t get it at all – thought it was a mess - and remains the only main Kerouac book I’ve read just once. Salles’s film didn’t inspire but the British Library has.

On The Road: Jack Kerouac’s manuscript scroll is on display at the British Library, 96 Euston Road, London, NW1 2DB until Thursday 27^th December 2012. Admission free. 

BEAT SCENE - ISSUE 65, SUMMER 2011

Every quarter Beat Scene magazine turns up at my door, more like a groovy uncle than a foxy new girlfriend, but it’s fiercely loyal, dependable, and I always put the kettle on to enjoy a few hours in its company.

It brings me news and tells tales of days of yore. For example, it reports there will presently be two film adaptations of, in my opinion, Jack Kerouac’s best two books: On The Road and Big Sur. I’m fairly ambivalent about these types of projects. Whether good or bad, they’ll come out and disappear, most won’t even notice, but a handful of observers will go back to Jack himself and possibly the Beats in general. They need all the help they can get these days. When Jack needed help he didn’t get much. As far back as 1959, Beat Scene editor Kevin Ring observes in his thorough account of Jack’s relationship with his agent Stirling Lord, “Jack was disappointed that film adaptations of his books seemed slow in materialising”. Jack, at the time his star shone brightest, already needed the money; ten years later in near poverty and tatters, he drunk himself to death. Ring’s account is close to a classic be-careful-what-you-wish-for story.

Happier news comes in the shape of an excerpt from a forthcoming Charles Bukowksi collection; lots of book reviews; articles about Ed Sanders, Gary Snyder, Janine Pommy Vega and more; and, especially for David Beckham, a 1987 interview with Allen Ginsberg.

A bumper 68 A4 page edition for a four pounds sterling. I’ll drink to that. Find ordering details at beatscene.net

ANGELHEADED HIPSTERS: IMAGES OF THE BEAT GENERATION at the NATIONAL THEATRE

“Angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night”.

Many of those hipsters who hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in cold-water flats contemplating jazz in Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” can now be seen adorning the walls of the National Theatre on London’s Southbank; a far cry from when they were the motley crew of aspiring writers, junkies and madmen (some all three, and always men) the world had yet to discover.

Ginsberg was obsessive in chronicling and championing the lives of himself and his friends in diaries, notebooks, poems and letters, and when he happened upon a second-hand Kodak camera in New York in 1953 he added photography to his arsenal. The pictures he took that year turned out to be the most historically important and thus interesting. The Beat Generation nucleus of Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs together again in New York had yet to achieve fame and notoriety and their lives would soon take different paths but here we see them in Allen’s apartment variously larking around, reading, deep in thought or outright posing – most amusingly in the case of a skinny, shirtless Burroughs adopting the improbable stance of a bare knuckle fighter.

For all Kerouac’s good looks - and their rapid disappearance – it’s the Burroughs pictures that are the most revealing. There’s a touching shot of him sitting on a rooftop with Arlene Lee (“Mardou Fox” in Jack’s The Subterraneans): she dressed in archetypal beatnik black with headscarf and looks at him with a cute cheeky face, he in return wears a beatific smile at odds with his persona as a misogynistic cold fish. Mind you, she was typing up his manuscripts of Queer and The Yage Letters.

By 1957, the year of On The Road, it was Kerouac’s turn at the typewriter as he worked through nightmares attempting to fashion readable pages from Burroughs’s notes that would eventually become Naked Lunch. Ginsberg catches him taking a breather in the yard, cuddling a cat in the afternoon sun.

Credit though to the curators for also including the likes of Herbert Huncke, Joan Vollmer, Carl Solomon, Lucien Carr, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Peter Orlovsky and more. Oh yeah, Neal Cassady.

Not everything in the exhibition was taken by Ginsberg but he was the source for the majority and as years go by it’s noticeable how his photography changes from the quick snapshots in the ‘50s to the studied compositions of the ‘80s and ‘90s, which include Gary Synder, David Hockney, Robert Frank and of course, still, William Burroughs, at home thumbing through a pile of gun magazines.

Their minds may have been destroyed by madness but these hipsters still burn and this collection offers eyeball kicks a-plenty. Allen Ginsberg – I’m with you in London.

Angelheaded Hipsters is in the National Theatre foyer, Southbank, London until 20 March 2011. Admission free.
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TALKIN' 'BOUT MY BEAT GENERATION

I was asked a few questions by a glossy Italian style magazine a while back for an article about the Beat Generation. I’m still waiting to be flown to San Francisco for the photo shoot of me sagely thumbing the paperbacks in City Lights or supping a beer in Vesuvio’s with The Subterraneans casually placed on the bar.

Why do you think there’s an ongoing fascination with characters like Ginsberg, Kerouac etc?
They were groundbreaking in their writing; shaking up the staid, conservative, dull and frightened America. They looked it dead in the eye and challenged it. That alone would be enough but when you discover further controversy, court cases, links to the criminal underworld, prostitution, homosexuality, mental illness, lobotomies, murder, suicide, mysterious deaths, firearms, alcohol abuse, drug experimentation and addiction, travel, religion, wife sharing and bigamy, you’ve all the ingredients of a fantastic soap opera that continues to develop with every new publication of their correspondence (see the recent Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters).

Were the Beats perhaps more a cult than anything else?
For me, the Beats were solely Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and their close associates – nothing to do with the cartoonish Beatniks that followed. The Beat Generation term came from a drunken Kerouac which Ginsberg was savvy, passionate and generous enough to use as the means to get his friends published in the aftermath of Howl. There’s little stylistically to link Howl, On The Road and Naked Lunch so it’s difficult to categorize them as a genuine literary movement; really they were/are a media phenomenon – even if they created it themselves.

Do they have a true legacy when it comes to poetry and literature?
They do, but time is dusting over the tracks of that legacy. The obscenity trials of Howl and Naked Lunch paved the way for greater freedom of expression and people like City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti shouldn’t be forgotten in all this. They made poetry and literature exciting, even dangerous. On The Road reads somewhat quaintly these days but the rhythm and phrases in Howl, exploring and questioning the soul of America, could be hip hop lyrics of today and if Naked Lunch was published tomorrow its nightmarish visions could scarcely be any less powerful.

What are you expecting from the Howl film? Do you think Coppola’s On The Road project is a good idea (what I mean is, can you really hope to capture the essence of the book on film etc?).
From the short trailer, I can’t wait to see Howl . Visually looks spot-on, Franco looks convincing, a gripping courtroom drama and the greatest poem of the 20th Century. Looks like a winner to me. On The Road is a harder task to pull off. I can’t see any film doing the book justice but I’m not precious about it; it’ll come out and be forgotten just as quickly whereas Jack’s novel will continue to be read for another fifty years.

JACK KEROUAC’S TYPEWRITER FOR SALE

I wasn’t going to share this in case you lot push the price up and scupper my bid but Christie’s in New York is auctioning Jack Kerouac’s last typewriter on 22 June 2010. As you can instantly tell, it’s a Hermes 3000 manual typewriter (model no. 3337316) and comes in its original protective case, with cleaning implements, and is in good working condition. It sells itself but if you need convincing here’s some auctioneering guff:

“Kerouac’s last typewriter, which he used from 1966 until his death in 1969. He announces its arrival in a 29 August 1966 letter to his agent, Sterling Lord: "How do you like my new typewriter?" The new machine "was necessary," he explains, "as the old one broke in two, but, and that's what broke my budget, and now it'll be taxes." Lord received many letters from this machine about Kerouac's money problems: "Where are the ROAD royalties to 6/30/66," he asks on 18 January 1967, "and same royalties (6/30/66) for SUR... Great time of stress. Need money to fence-in magnificent part wooded yard." He also hoped to build a study "where I'll be writing VANITY OF DULUOZ in month of March after Greek Orthodox Church wedding in February" (to Stella Sampas). Vanity was published in 1968. It would be the last novel published in his lifetime. His novella Pic would appear in 1971. This typewriter had to make a visit to the repairman in January 1969. The repairman's receipt for $22.83 (which survives in the Kerouac Papers), diagnoses the problem as "Dropped." The Kerouac Papers also contain the Hermes operating manual for this typewriter.”

The estimated sale price is $20,000-$30,000 but I’d bet my old rucksack it goes for way more than that. Christie’s have a few other pieces including a rather splendid 1959 painting Jack produced of Cardinal Montini (later Pope Paul VI) which hung in his (Jack’s not the Pope’s) house. I don’t know the circumstances to the auction but I’m guessing it’s going to further feather the Sampas family nest.

I’m off to rummage down the back of the sofa for chump change.

THE AWAKENER: A MEMOIR OF JACK KEROUAC AND THE FIFTIES by HELEN WEAVER

Twenty years in the writing and over fifty years since the event, no one can accuse Helen Weaver of being quick to cash in on her short love affair with Jack Kerouac.

Kerouacologists (just made that up) will know Weaver as “Ruth Heaper” in Jack’s Desolation Angels. When Jack turned up on her New York doorstep with Allen Ginsberg in late 1956 looking for a pad to crash, they immediately got together and Jack stayed for a couple of months until his drinking and general disturbance gave her too many sleepless nights. Asking him to find somewhere else to stay during the week so she could get some kip for work in the mornings, Helen hadn’t meant to finish the relationship, but that was the effect as Jack quickly hooked up with Joyce Glassman. For Joyce’s version of events, see Minor Characters by Joyce Johnson (nee Glassman).

According to Jack, he was dumped on the advice of Helen’s analyst, which wasn’t the case. “I rejected him for the same reason America rejected him” she says, “he interfered with our sleep”.

It’s fascinating to read Desolation Angels, Minor Characters and The Awakener side by side to compare accounts. Joyce referred to Helen as “boyish, sloe-eyed and under analysis”, and in turn Helen calls her “a little round blonde person” and with obvious glee reports others coining her “Pudding Face” and “The Unbaked Muffin”. It is far from a bitch-fest though and there’s a touching moment in 1994 when the women embrace at a Beat conference.

Using her diaries, letters and notes she kept, Weaver writes with an engaging, warm style and paints an intimate portrait of Kerouac. With On The Road still a year until publication, he was in bad shape both mentally and physically with his alcoholism apparent for all who cared to look. “I had seen the sadness in his eyes and pretended in was poetry. Now I looked into his eyes and saw not poetry but despair. They were the eyes of a man looking down the road that led nowhere but the grave”.

Their relationship didn’t last long but Helen explains how her attachment has grown over the years as her appreciation of Jack’s writing has increased. The Awakener is a thoughtful tribute to a man who not only awoke Helen Weaver but who helped wake America with his unique poetic style. Not that they thanked him of course, until it was much, much too late.

The Awakener: A Memoir of Jack Kerouac and the Fifties by Helen Weaver is published by City Lights, priced $16.95.

BEAT SCENE NUMBER 60

The new season rolls in, and a new Beat Scene rolls off the press. This one is a bit special as it devotes every one of its 64 (advert free) pages to Jack Kerouac.

New articles on Jack’s hometown of Lowell; his brief trip to London; Neal Cassady’s first letter to Jack; an interview with girlfriend, and author of The Awakener, Helen Weaver; reprinted letters to and from John Clellon Holmes and Gary Snyder; a rejection letter for On The Road; reviews of new books and films; and much, much more.

There’s no magazine like it. It deserves your support. Subscribe at www.beatscene.net.

ONE FAST MOVE OR I'M GONE: KEROUAC'S BIG SUR

When I mentioned pulling a Kerouac book from the shelf the other day it was no coincidence I mentioned Big Sur first. Written during 1961 it charts the period shortly after the publication of On The Road and how Jack's new found fame accelerated his descent into drunken madness and paranoia with brutal honesty. It’s his last truly great work and very close to my favourite.

So imagine my delight to discover this week has seen the opening of One Fast Move Or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur in selected US cinemas. The film uses readings of Kerouac’s text, interviews with some of those featured in the book (Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Carolyn Cassady, Joyce Johnson and Michael McClure) and new music and contributions from the likes of Tom Waits and Patti Smith.

No news on UK availability yet, but here’s the trailer:


www.kerouacfilms.com

JACK KEROUAC - 21st OCTOBER 1969

"I wrote the book because we're all gonna die".

Today marks the 40th anniversary of the death of Jack Kerouac.

Raise your glass, stick some Charlie Parker on the turntable, pull Big Sur, The Dharma Bums, On The Road, Desolation Angels or The Subterraneans from the shelf and pay tribute.

Or just watch this. "Go roll your bones".

KEROUAC AT BAT by ISAAC GEWIRTZ

Jack Kerouac enthusiasts will be raising their glasses to the publication of Kerouac at Bat: Fantasy Sports and the King of the Beats by Isaac Gewirtz.

Readers of his biographies will know as a child Jack devised an elaborate world of fantasy sports games (primarily horse racing and baseball); not only inventing the games, with sticks and marbles, but creating tournaments, players, coaches, trainers, betting tips, then recording all the results, stats and news in painstaking detail on scorecards and in his own newspapers.

If the horse racing game was relatively simple and dropped by the age of sixteen, the baseball game was so baffling in its complexity as Jack wrestled to reflect every conceivable outcome of play, that he continued it right through his adult life; a fact he chose to keep from his beat buddies. Think how different On The Road might have been. “Hey Dean, instead of heading to that gloomy Mexican whorehouse, how about we play marbles?” “Wow! Yes Sal! Yes! Yes! Yes! That is of course what we must do. Think of the kicks we’ll have”.

Gewirtz’s book reproduces a mere 5% of the surviving collection of this curious, solitary occupation that reflects not only Jack’s imagination and thirst for recording events but how serious and obsessive he was with writing from an early age. Later he would meticulously log his daily word count and agonize if he hadn’t written enough, and even here as an adolescent he’d fill endless pages with neat penciled handwriting, before moving to the dense blocks of typed text seen in the scroll version of Road.

A curio for the collection but a welcome one.

Kerouac at Bat: Fantasy Sports and the King of the Beats by Isaac Gewirtz is published by the New York Public Library (www.nypl.org)

ONE STELLA TOO MANY FOR JACK KEROUAC?

Truman Capote once famously bitched about On The Road saying “That’s not writing – that’s typing”. But it’s Jack Kerouac’s mother’s writing that’s been in the news this week, and it turns out she definitely wasn’t writing.

I’ll cut the convoluted saga to the bone. Being a big mummy’s boy, Jack, despite being married to his third wife Stella Sampas, left everything in his will to his mother Gabrielle. Jack died in 1969. When Gabrielle died in 1973 she left everything to Stella. The Sampas family, now headed by John Sampas (Stella died in 1990) has done a roaring trade flogging Jack’s work and reaping the royalties ever since. However, this week after a monumental legal case started by Jack’s unwanted and neglected daughter Jan in 1994, a county court in Florida has ruled Gabrielle’s signature on her will is a forgery. Dun-dun-durrr.

This is too late for Jan Kerouac who died in 1996, but maybe not for Jack’s nephew, Paul Blake Jr. – currently living in a mobile home without a toilet in Arizona - who Jack wrote the day before he died with this memorable passage:

“I've turned over my entire estate, real, personal, and mixed, to Memere, and if she dies before me, it is then turned to you, and if I die thereafter, it all goes to you.... I just wanted to leave my "estate? (which is what it really is) to someone directly connected with the last remaining drop of my direct blood line, which is, me, sister Carolyn, your Mom, and not to leave a dingblasted fucking goddam thing to my wife's one hundred Greek relatives. I also plan to divorce, or have her marriage to me, annulled. Just telling you the facts of how it is”.

Someone sporting a fuck-off told-you-so grin is Gerald Nicosia, author of the most detailed Kerouac biography so far, Memory Babe. Nicosia has been raving like a man possessed against John Sampas for years about skullduggery at play and how shabbily Sampas has treated Jack’s estate; particularly the way he hawked individual items: Jack’s raincoat and other personal items were sold to Johnny Depp, and the original On The Road scroll manuscript for $2.43 million to Jim Irsay, owner of the Indianapolis Colts who are a football team apparently; not a Midwestern stud farm as I thought. (Personally I’m glad Irsay bought the scroll as he has generously toured it around the globe so I got to see it; something I never dreamed would happen). Those are the eye catching deals but according to Nicosia plenty other items have found their way into the hands of dealers that could only have originated from Sampas. Quite what Nicosia has to gain from all this is subject of much debate but one of his grievances is the archive should be kept together in a library as an important public archive and not broken up and scattered across the globe to wealthy collectors. (It now does live in the New York Public Library but is still executed by Sampas).

Nicosia has made few friends and plenty of enemies in his tireless and aggressive campaign but he’ll feel suitably vindicated as he watches slices of humble pie going down from those who dismissed him as an irritating asshole and Jan Kerouac as a liar out for the family silver by claiming the will was faked. John Sampas, who has kept his head down in comparison, was once quoted as saying “Gerald Nicosia's poisoned hand will never touch the Kerouac archive. His touch is the touch of death”. Interesting choice of words there John. So, whose poisoned hand was it that faked Gabrielle Kerouac’s will to steal the estate of Jack Kerouac?

www.geraldnicosia.com
www.cosmicbaseball.com