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Date:         Thu, 3 Sep 1992 08:12:35 PDT
From:         Tim Bowden <tcbowden@CLOVIS.FELTON.CA.US>
Subject:      A Kid for all seasons?

Ah, yas, Kerouac.

A wordspinner, by his own estimation, and not an idea man.
His themes were the wonderful robust vivacious innocence
of youth, insofar as there were themes.  He prefigured the
Sixties, where obligation and even cause/effect were
suspended for the duration.


His hero was child-like in exuberance, avid, aware,
rapt, rebellious, riotous, randy, and repugnant by
turns.  He was probably also a textbook manic
depressive, like Hamlet.

At one point in _On The Road_, Cody was "...three times
married, twice divorced, and living with his second wife."
The protagonist of the novel (Kerouac rarely ventured
outside actual chronicles;  his `fiction' was thinly-
veiled personal history) lived with his mother and went
rushing about the country, sometimes with the unwilling
assistance of conning or stealing funds from the women
who for some reason had signed onto this Peter Pan
game.  (A woman friend of mine years ago who I turned
onto _Road_ decided it was a `boy's book,' which is as
good a thumbnail review as I could come up with...)


And so when I take up again the volumes of the Duluoz Legend,
I recall those thrilling days of yesteryear, right enough,
and I feel silly for my self-indulgence in the light of all
this concrete reality I have sensed in my 49 years, but,
by golly, at one time there was a love of language in
writing, it did not always have to carry freight like
a blasted ore wagon, it could sing to us, it could soar,
and there's nobody who could set the word to humming like
Mr Kerouac.

Taken for all and all, he was as a wordspinner among the
best, and when comes such another?


Sidebar on _Big Sur_.  This is a simple story of Kerouac's
early alcoholic collapse in 1960 in San Francisco and down
along the coast.  There are some great moments with the
various stars of the West Coast Poets on-board, but the
spiritualism is regionally instructive, rather than a
continuity of the Zen and `serious' buddhism of _Dharma
Bums_.


That metaphysical phenomena I see daily in the flesh (if
that isn't an oxymoron) was best explained by Nathaniel
West in _Day of the Locust_.  It's basis is a search for
power by those left out in the cold by hard scrabble
reality;  they lift up their eyes for help.  In prison,
Neal Cassady (Cody) became a follower of the cult
San Francisco astrologer Gavin Arthur, and he picked
up an early book on Edgar Cayce during a parking lot
gig and became a rabid disciple of the Sleeping Prophet.

These are desperation conversions, rather than spiritual
seekings, folks, and what I see today from re-reading
Kerouac from the vantage point of some thirty years would
fit one of K's own titles, _Desolation Angels_.  He was
a mere child in the sun, without plan or program for
survival, but, oh, in the glitter of a wonder time, with
youth and magic abounding, didn't he ramble?

In the beginning was the word, and that's where we must
re-encounter Kerouac.  Not as a spokesperson for his
generation, not as an agent for a style, but as he
styled himself, a wordspinner.

I have pictures of myself in that gone world, and I wish
they bore up half so well as did the works of Kerouac.


I thank you for your indulgence, friends...




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