FIVE
Another beginning.
I was writing to the publicity guy who
does the Library of America that he had better get ready for a shit storm when
the Library of America publishes the COLLECTED POEMS OF JACK KEROUAC. There will be great squeals of disgust,
accusations of pandering, the question of standards, how could you when you
have not published… all the rest of it.
2- My first
question why did the Library only do one volume of Kerouac’s prose focused upon
ON THE ROAD THE DHARMA BUMS< THE
SUBTERRANEANS, TRISTESSA, LONESOME TRAVELER
when to be complete there is an
immediate need for all the other prose books:
BIG SUR, MAGGIE CASSIDY, SATORI IN PARIS (the most under-rated of K’s
books and the saddest) PIC (the most daring) and all the rest.
7- It is my firm
belief that ON THE ROAD is the equivalent to Melville’s MOBY DICK. ON THE ROAD is the singular American novel of
the 20th Century as is MOBY DICK of the 19th Century. Tim Hunt has begun the intellectual and
academic job of building the case though readers in every country of the world
have done the job for him in the sense that it is the one novel read in nearly
every language of the world by those who read in those individual languages who
really read. No other American novel can
make that claim.
4- So, the real
scandal of the Library of America is why have they not published Melville’s
collected poetry? Of course as Geoffrey
O’Brien--- Editor in Chief of LOA--- has told me, That book will be published but just not in our lifetimes. A reason, I would think, to live on into…
67- So, while we
wait for the remaining prose book of Kerouac from LOA we have the Collected
Poetry… and down here on East First Street that is cause for celebration.
9- After T.S.
Eliot’s opening line to The Waste Land, April is the cruelest month… and Ezra
Pound’s opening line to Hugh Selwyn
Mauberly, For three years, out of key with his time… I have quoted Jack Kerouac’s TO EDWARD DAHLBERG. Don’t use the telephone/People are never
ready to answer it./Use poetry. (Sadly
there has to be a note as to why EDWARD DAHLBERG is/was)
78- And I carried for years as a bookmark a card with
Kerouac’s WOMAN. A woman is beautiful/but/you have to
swing/and swing and swing/and swing like/a handkerchief in the/wind.
85- I turn the
page in the collected poetry: GOOFBALL
BLUES: I’m just a human being with a lot
of/shit on my heart.
6- Or:::: OLD
ANGEL MIDNIGHT:::: Friday Afternoon In
the Universe, in all directions in & out you got your men women dogs
children horses pones tics perts parts pans pools palls pails parturiences and petty
Thieveries tat turn into heavenly Buddha--- I know boy what’s I talkin about
case I made the world & when I made it I no lie & had Old Angel Midnight
for my name and concocted up a world so nothing…
39- From
Uncollected Haikus The sound of
silence/is all the instruction/you’ll get
43- Years and
years ago I remember in embarrassed naivety NOW talking with Julian Green in Paris who had
envied my being an altar boy as we sat In his elegant rue Vaneau apartment and
him in the French Academy and me a little drunk—that special academy--- and me talking about Jack Kerouac who Green
had heard of but who thought that the mixing of Buddhism with Catholicism
un-necessary and yet I thought it important enough to mention to Green, about
who Kerouac was and is still the most important American writer who happened
also to be a Catholic who believed with the necessary belief of Green’s
Idealized Italian painter who never asks
why: what’s the point, since only belief matters… and years later Green finally
told me the real truly, finally something and which scandalized the pathetic
agnostic, atheist Guardian readers where
I published this profile/interview with Green--- something Kerouac knew: when I asked Green in his 90s what he had to look
forward to, replied: Purgatory and I
know JK was seeking that in the final stupidity of his alcoholism, though …
44- The story of
man/Makes me sick/Inside,outside,/I don’t know why/Something so conditional/And
all talk/Should hurt me so./
I am hurt/I am scared/I want to
live/I want to die/I don’t know/Where to turn/in the Void/and when/to cut/Out
45- My only
problem with the LOA editon: they
disgraced the cover with a quote from the consummate fake Anne Waldman who has
made a huge living by parading about with the mere rotten flesh of Ginsberg and
Kerouac and Burroughs hanging off her skirt.
57- from MEXICO CITY BLUES: 1, A home for unmarried fathers.
2.
Well, that about does me in./I've packed my bags and time /Has come to start to
heaven.
3. Love’s multitudinous boneyard/of decay.
SIX
Another beginning . The other day for fifty cents I bought the
April 1966 mass market paperback of Jack Kerouac’s DESOLATION ANGELS published
by Bantam for 95 cents. FROM THE INTERNATIONAL
UNDERGROUND OF THE BEAT GENERATION. On
the cover stark black and white figures of six humans, centered upon a bare-chested
man and a woman seen from behind wearing only a bra, positioned on top of what
might be the Washington Square Arch...
I mention this
because there are no longer mass market paperback that are actually literary
and readable. I was forced to live in
exile that early Fall of 1966 in my parents’ exile in Menasha, Wisconsin. In the
city next to Menasha, Neenah was a large smoke shop and bookstore with many
racks of paper backs and it was likely that this book would have been
there.
All of that has
been wiped away. The Signet and Bantam
Classics, the Avon Books, books that would introduce South American literature
to a mass audience… and make no mistake about it these pocketbooks, were
published for a mass audience.
At one moment, now
long gone, some people thought that the masses wanted to read literature. That has changed and now those people, those
masses talk about liking the books that
I like to read, my books, my library and they are talking in reality about a
range of books from James Patterson to Jonathan Franzen… and if you think there
is a difference between Franzen and Patterson you are not really reading these
words… and it could be Franzen is a pen-name for James Patterson…
