It is not writing, it is typing. This famous put down has haunted me forever, spoiling my enjoyment of the flawed, but still wonderful, Jack Kerouac. The fact that it was tossed off by the lisping sycophant, Truman Capote, only makes it worse.
But, I have to admit there is a grain of truth to the put-down. I just finished "Desolation Angels" and it pains me to say that the writing does not really stand up to scrutiny. It reads like a shapeless, half-hearted chronicle of a man's disenchantment with the world and his creations. I can find no art, no beauty, in it. But, in the final analysis, it is not really writing that we are looking at when we view Kerouac's ruined life and oeuvre. It is his attempt, in my view, to find redemption, nobility, spirituality, something beyond the mean and barren materialism he saw all around. At times this quest seemed simple hedonism; unthinking, glib and adolescent. But to me, underneath it all there was a seriousness and desperation. The drugs, drinking and debauchery were all pathetic attempts at self-medication for Kerouac. For the transcendence he was after is impossible in this world. His response to this disappointment was to numb himself.
Bop Prosody? Spontaneous Prose? I don't buy it. Charlie Parker studied, worked, practiced endlessly to perfect his musicianship. The long, high-velocity lines improvised in real time were only possible because of craft and technical mastery. So how can this be applied to literature? For Jack, it apparently meant, just write without a filter; first thought, best thought. Dispense with grammar and literary artifice. But is this really a literary equivalent to bop improvisation? Isn't it more the case that one needs to master language somehow to be able to blow freely a la Yardbird? And isn't this actually impossible given the difference between verbal concept and a musical sound? The latter exists as a pure entity without conceptual content (without denotation and connotation in the ordinary sense; ok, a musical note could be said to denote a sound wave oscillating at a certain frequency and amplitude; this would be a "scientific" explanation of its denotation; the connotation on the other hand is murky.). But verbal concepts are inescapably tied to meaning; and the manipulation of meaning is part of what a creative writer does or should do. Merely spewing the contents of your immediate perception does not permit this artistry.
It' a little sad to see Jack acknowledging Capote's put down in Desolation Angels:" ..But so won't no Truman Capote think he's only a typewriter" (p. 346 Desolation Angels). This fractured prose, far from reflecting spontaneous composition, just comes off as illiterate and crude.
Here is Jack commenting on another poet in Desolation Angels
"...I hear and don't want to hear more, because in it I hear the craft of his carefully arranged thoughts and not the uncontrollable involuntary thoughts themselves, dig.."
(p. 210, Desolation Angels).
But maybe these thoughts are uninteresting, incoherent, and redundant. And whether these uncontrolled thoughts could ever bear the stamp of logic, inspiration, and emotive resonance that marked Bird's horn is not likely. In the end I think Jack's idea rests on a flawed understanding of language and consciousness. We apply language as a tool to organize experience; the tool is itself structured and there is no direct flow from sense experience through the mind to linguistic expression, much less written or literary expression.But this is a large topic for another post.
In the end, it doesn't matter: I will always love Kerouac.
Labels: Beats, Improvisation, Kerouac, Language, Literature
