glorycloud's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Toronto Star review of Kerouac's Book of Sketches Toronto Star review of Kerouac's Book of Sketches KEROUAC AND HIS SKETCHES Book of Sketches: Jack Kerouac's effort to put his hand to "an enormous paean," that of his posthumous, 1972 novel Visions of Cody, allowed him to "unite my vision of America with words spilled out in the modern spontaneous method." Kerouac's seemingly effortless way of doing this was by "sketching." Kerouac's newest posthumous work, Book of Sketches, is also an "enormous paean" to America. In it, Kerouac's experimental writing method is taken to its extreme. It is, in effect, Visions of Cody's little brother; each sketch serves as a stitch that binds together the tapestry of Kerouac's fully-realized and perfected spontaneous prose. The notebooks are small and unassuming; "nickel notebooks" that Kerouac kept perpetually poking from the breast pocket of his flannel shirt. Page after page of the notebooks are cramped with Kerouac's furious, headlong handwriting as if hurrying to capture the moment, the spontaneous moment, of what is unreeling before his eyes. At first glance the words, once deciphered, carve beauty and empathy from a post-World War II nation. The scattershot imagery straddles small-town provincialism, frank sexuality, existential philosophy, loss and regain of religion, and the curse and blessing of family and friends. In April of 1952, fresh from the three-week typing that would later become his most famous and successful novel On the Road, Kerouac was anxious to experiment further with a new writing method � he called it "sketching." Kerouac described it precisely: "A sketch is a prose description of a scene before the eyes. Ideally, for a BOOK OF SKETCHES, one small page (of notebook size) about 100 words, so as not to ramble too much, and give an arbitrary form." Kerouac's use of these sketches, perhaps initially tentative and trite, eventually evolved into book-length form spreading over a span of 15 notebooks, which are archived in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. In 1959, Kerouac typed these notebooks into a typescript. Meticulous to retain its original form and design, Kerouac reproduced the Book of Sketches notebook pages verbatim. No changes were made, even when if it would have been wise to do so. One section reveals an angry Kerouac working in California as a railroad brakeman, "covered with soot and mad as hell." He lashes out on the very country he has been praising all along: "Gad I hate / America with a passionate intensity." Kerouac prophesizes a time when America will not meet its end by an atom bomb, but only because "America itself is a bomb bound to go off from within." (Kerouac later apologized for such sentiments from his 1959 vantage point as a famous, if not infamous, published author.) To his earlier frame of beat mind into context, Kerouac had departed North Carolina, the state where his older sister Caroline Blake resided. Having recently left Mexico, where he lived for a while with William Burroughs, Kerouac's first stop was to his sister's house where she, her husband and their mother, Gabrielle, chided him for his joblessness and seemingly worthless travels. Attempting to appease them, he took up work in a Rocky Mount textile mill. Predictably, he quit shortly thereafter. It was difficult for Kerouac to assert the artistry he saw so clearly in himself. Two failed marriages, an aborted scholarship at Columbia, a denigrating medical discharge from the United States Navy and a failed 1950 first published novel (The Town and the City), hardly justified the immense time and effort he had committed to perfecting his prose style. Even his literary compatriot Allen Ginsberg had reacted negatively to Kerouac's writing; in particular his earlier incarnation of On the Road (which was actually the experimental novel, Visions of Cody) and, in general, Kerouac's new spontaneous prose styling. Lashing out, Kerouac wrote to Ginsbert: "I will certainly never find peace till I wash my hands completely of the dirty brush and stain of New York and everything you and the city stand for ... and everybody knows it." The problem was that "everybody" didn't know it. Not least his The Town and the City editor Robert Giroux, who saw little to no marketable value in sketching, nor Neal Cassady, who was growing tired of Kerouac's sulking and self-soathing, or even Carl Solomon � who had initially optioned the early incarnation of On the Road as an Ace paperback, but was turned off by its incarnation of poetic snapshot jottings, calling it a "thoroughly incoherent mess." Determined, Kerouac placed himself in like-minded company; he compared himself with James Joyce, Theodore Dreiser and Ernest Hemingway, all of whom faced challenges in the face of their writing styles or questionable content. Kerouac expected editors to adhere to the same approach to reading manuscripts that he did it with such difficult texts as Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano and Marcus Goodrich's Delilah. Each required the reader to understand the writer's "intellect," "passion" and "mystery." Convinced of the validity of his writing method, Kerouac began a new series of notebooks. Ultimately, he would gather them together and title the collection Book of Sketches. While finishing a draft of Doctor Sax, Kerouac put the notebook pages into a seabag and left North Carolina freed from the surly glances of his sister Nin: "It's the thought of Nin / that makes this trip so / sad � my sister didn't / love me, I didn't know / it �" Book of Sketches illustrates some of the aspects of his travels west from North Carolina and back again. Observing from the lidded eyes of maturity, Kerouac's world is filtered through the "gray America of my childhood dreams." It is in this tinged light that the minutia of American life is described: lists of cities and towns traveled through, sketches of an airplane trip from St. Louis to New York City, flying above a "glacier of fiery mad vapor extending in the air sea." Kerouac reports the sounds heard in the Big Easonburg woods of North Carolina; he incorporates scat-singing and Canadian French. There are also seemingly misogynistic bullets shot at American women, sooty train yards, empty Gallo wine bottles, a 360-degree description of his sister's Rocky Mt. home, and "Haunted Ugly Angels of Mortality." There are also snippets of artistic objectives (to write "3 a year like Shakespeare") and the three states of consciousness Kerouac had begun to constantly find himself in: DRUNK: Know I can handle it (overconfidence) HIGH: Fear I can't handle it (underconfidence) SOBER: Know I can handle it with reservations (normal confidence) Book of Sketches is every bit as confessional, candid, openhearted and honest as its predecessors. More important, it perhaps comes closest to Kerouac's truest intentions as a writer. The pages also confirm what was beforehand secondary gossip in Kerouac documentaries: "This drinking is my alternative to suicide & all that's left." In sum, Book of Sketches is an insurmountable prose poem that should reassess the Kerouac canon immeasurably. Paul Maher Jr. is the editor of Empty Phantoms: Collected Interviews with Jack Kerouac (Thunder Mouth's Press). 11:56 a.m. - 2006-04-16 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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