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The Night the Man with the Watermelon Died

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The following is from Jack Kerouac’s Doctor Sax, about his youth in Lowell, Massachusetts. Here he describes a sobering scene in his typical jazzy style:

A man carrying a watermelon passed us, he wore a hat, a suit in a warm summer night; he was just on the boards of the bridge, refreshed, maybe from a long walk up slummy swilly Moody and its rantankling saloons with swinging doors, mopped his brow, or came up through Little Canada or Cheever or Aiken, rewarded by the bridge of eve and sighs of stone—the great massive charge of the ever stationary ever yearning cataracts and ghosts, this is his reward after a long dull hot dumb walk to the river thru houses—he strides on across the bridge—We stroll on behind him talking about the mysteries of life (inspired we were by moon and river), I remember I was so happy—something in the alchemy of the summernight, Ah Midsummer Night’s Dream, John a Dreams, the clink of clock on rock in river, roar—old gloor-merrimac figalitating down the mark all spread—I was happy too in the intensity of something we were talking about, something that was giving me joy.

Suddenly the man fell, we heard a great thump of his watermelon on wood planks and saw him fallen—Another man was there, also mysterious, but without watermelon, who bent to him quickly and solicitously as by assent and nod in the heavens and when I got there I saw the watermelon man staring at the waves below with shining eyes (‘Il’s meurt, he’s dying,’ my mother’s saying) and I see him breathing hard, feeble-bodied, the man holding him gravely watching him die, I’m completely terrified and yet I feel the profound pull and turn to see what he is staring at so deadly-earnest with his froth stiffness—I look down with him and there is the moon on shiny froth and rocks, there is the long eternity we have been seeking.

“You Have To Swing”

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Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)

Jack Kerouac is not best known for his poetry, but his can be fun to read, such as this short lament:

Woman

A woman is beautiful
   but
      you have to swing
      and swing and swing
      and swing like
      a handkerchief in the
                                        wind

On the Open Road

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Sam Riley and Garrett Hedlund in Walter Salles’ Movie On the Road

This month I read two classical “road novels.” The first was Jean Giono’s The Open Road (Grands Chemins) about two down-at-heel pals walking through the countryside of Southern France around 1950 looking to pick up cash from work or gambling. Conceived of around the same time was Jack Kerouac’s On the Road about two down-at-heel pals crossing the continent at high speed looking to pick up enough cash for gas to get to their destination. Curiously, neither writer was aware of the other, even though Kerouac came from a French-Canadian family.

Both books are well worth reading, especially as I feel that Kerouac and Giono would have admired each other’s work.

Jean Giono (1895-1970)

I had read the Kerouac decades earlier, but upon finishing Giono’s book, I thought I wanted to get on the road again, so I re-read On the Road. They were two very different authors. Giono was in love with the land of his birth as was Kerouac. Unfortunately, Kerouac’s love was so heavily suffused with alcohol that he only lasted to the age of 47. His later books, such as Big Sur, showed him to be headed down the road to liver failure.

Still, I love reading Kerouac’s books. He had such a vital enthusiasm for his friends and for mid-century America that, even in his experiments in bop prosody, something splendid shines through. Perhaps it was a never ending sense of youthfulness. Giono’s France is centuries old, but Kerouac’s America was bottled in bond in the years right after the Second World War.

One That Got Away

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Enroute to Mexico with Neal Cassady in On The Road, Jack Kerouac falls for a young woman he sees briefly in Michigan. Considering Kerouac’s dismal track record with women, maybe it was a good thing she didn’t join him.

I took up a conversation with a gorgeous country girl wearing a low-cut cotton blouse that displayed the beautiful sun-tan on her breast tops. She was dull. She spoke of evenings in the country making popcorn on the porch. Once this would have gladdened my heart but because her heart was not glad when she said it I knew there was nothing in it but the idea of what one should do. “And what else do you do for fun?” I tried to bring up boy friends and sex. Her great dark eyes surveyed me with emptiness and a kind of chagrin that reached back generations and generations in her blood from not having done what was crying to be done—whatever it was, and everybody knows what it was. “What do you want out of life?” I wanted to take her and wring it out of her. She didn’t have the slightest idea what she wanted. She mumbled of jobs, movies, going to her grandmother’s for the summer, wishing she could go to New York and visit the Roxy, what kind of outfit she would wear—something like the one she wore last Easter, white bonnet, roses, rose pumps, and lavender gabardine coat. “What do you do on Sunday afternoons?” I asked. She sat on her porch. The boys went by on bicycles and stopped to chat. She read the funny papers, she reclined on the hammock. “What do you do on a warm summer’s night?” She sat on the porch, she watched the cars in the road. She and her mother made popcorn. “What does your father do on a summer’s night?” He works, he has an all-night shift at the boiler factory, he’s spent his whole life supporting a woman and her outpoppings and no credit or adoration. “What is he aching to do? What are we all aching to do? What do we want?” She didn’t know. She yawned. She was sleepy. It was too much. Nobody could tell. Nobody would ever tell. It was all over. She was eighteen and most lovely, and lost.

A Fragment of the Golden Eternity

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Jack Kerouac spent many years studying the Dharma of Buddhism. It shows up in many of his earlier works, particularly in his The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, from which the following excerpts are taken:

11.

If we were not all the golden eternity we wouldn’t be here. Because we are here we cant help being pure. To tell man to be pure on account of the punishing angel that punishes the bad and the rewarding angel that rewards the good would be like telling the water “Be Wet”—Never the less, all things depend on supreme reality, which is already established as the record of Karma-earned fate.

16.

The point is we’re waiting, not how comfortable we are while waiting. Paleolithic man waited by caves for the realization of why he was there, and hunted; modern men wait in beautiful homes and try to forget death and birth. We’re waiting for the realization that this is the golden eternity.

22.

Stare deep into the world before you as if it were the void: innumerable holy ghosts, buddhies, and savior gods there hide, smiling. All the atoms emitting light inside wavehood, there is no personal separation of any of it. A hummingbird can come into a house and a hawk will not: so rest and be assured. While looking for the light, you may suddenly be devoured by the darkness and find the true light.

I am not sure that Kerouac’s Buddhism is the genuine article, but in a way it doesn’t matter. His questing had its value and brushes against the truth at a wide number of places.

Mister Care Wack Dreams About Girls

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New York Bathing Beauties Circa 1960

I am enjoying a collection of the miscellaneous writings by Jack Kerouac during his 63 days atop Desolation Peak in Washington State’s Northern Cascades. I have particularly enjoyed the chapters he wrote for a projected (but never completed) novel called Ozone Park in the “Duluoz Legend” series of slightly fictionalized autobiography. Here is a quote from a deleted chapter from a work that Kerouac (called Mister Care Wack by a hobo friend named Slim) abandoned.

O Kerouac, you poor fool, wandering the streets of night in search of romance in the golden nothingness of existence! Foolish as men are, they’re never more foolish than when they’re 21 years old and actually think that they do exist to be loved somehow either by a personal God who bends over them like a Guardian Angel with those wings of a loving destiny (mayhap I still believe that) or by a woman and women He sends to soul-soothe their sad predestined hugeness of being (“I am Jack Kerouac, there’s something about me that never happened before, she will notice it”) and so they sit at the windows of night smoking Frank Sinatra cigarettes, vain as veritable d’Annunzios, beautiful as the sea, mistaken as lost angels, lovable as God, misunderstood as secret saints, yearny as young girls, masculine as rocks and immovable as self-faith. And this is the reason why they eventually do get loved, but not for the reason they imagine to be foremost, their melancholy which they take to be the penalty is really the reward and is gained. A woman sees a man wrapped in self-torture, and when he smiles there’s already no need for smiles and come-ons.

Thoughts of a lonely young man stuck on a mountaintop.

On Desolation Peak

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The Fire Watch Tower Atop Desolation Peak

In the summer of 1956, when I was 11 years old, Jack Kerouac spent 63 days manning a fire watch tower in Washington’s North Cascades, atop Desolation Peak. On the Road, which was to be the main source of his fame, followed by The Dharma Bums, were not yet published. The recently published Desolation Peak is a collection of Kerouac’s many writing projects—many of them fragmentary—while he scanned the horizon for fires during those 63 days.

Jack was desperately poor having spent all his money to get to Washington from Mill Valley. He began his job as a fire watcher with a total of 2¢.

This year I have become entranced by Kerouac. Like most of the members of my generation, I read On the Road while I was still in high school, and then stopped there. I have become newly fascinated by his work and am resolved to read all his work that I can find. That assumes I will live long enough, as Jack was a busy boy.

Below is a selection of what Kerouac called his “Desolation Pops.” In form, they resemble traditional Japanese haiku, but they do not adhere to the genre strict rules concerning the number of syllables per line. They’re still interesting. After all, English is a very different language than Japanese.

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)

(7)
A stump with sawdust
     —a place
To meditate

(11)
The clouds assume
     as I assume,
Faces of hermits

(24)
There’s nothing there
     because
I don’t care

(36)
Poor gentle flesh—
     there is
No answer

(42)
Wednesday blah
     blah blah—
My mind hurts

(55)
Rig rig rig—
     that’s the rat
On the roof

(59)
I called Hanshan            | A Zen Buddhist recluse
     in the fog—
Silence, it said

(60)
I called—Dipankara        | One of the Buddhas of the past
     instructed me
By saying nothing

(70)
Aurora borealis
     over Mount Hozumeen—
The world is eternal

Not Buk’s Cup of Tea at All

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I encountered the following paragraph in Jean-François Duval’s Bukowski and the Beats: A Commentary on the Bet Generation:

It was Jack’[Kerouac’s] matinee idol looks that irritated Hank [Bukowski]. “He was even better looking than Marlon Brando,” Joyce Johnson, one of his girlfriends, said of him. As a good-looking rodeo rider and actor, Jack was too handsome to be “real,” authentic in the Bukowskian perspective (which was ever tinged with humor). Jack was lacking in ugliness that, according to Bukowski, allows a truer contact with the reality of the world more than beauty; ugliness is a safe conduct for hell and, as such, is infinitely closer to the truth. In fact, beauty is not even real to Buk’s eyes, beauty doesn’t make sense at all. As he said to [his friend] Sean Penn, “There is no such thing as beauty … it’s kind of a mirage of generalizations.” In Buk’s opinion, Kerouac seemed like a cheap Roy Rogers whose work gets lost in a swirl of glitter and illusions where the word “wonderful” crops up every three sentences. Jack went wrong in trying to go with “heart’s songs” and the illusions attached: hope of salvation on the road, faith in an idealized America, poetically fantasized, escape into an uncertain mysticism, oscillating between Buddhism and Catholicism. This was not Buk’s cup of tea at all.

Belief and Technique for Modern Prose

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Jack Kerouac and Friend

Jack Kerouac and Friend

The following is an itemized list in its entirety of how to write modern prose like a beatnik by Jack Kerouac. It was published in The Evergreen Review, Volume 2, No. 8, in 1959. As usual, Jack varies between the profound and the mundane, all mixed up like:

  1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
  2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
  3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house [a rule often violated by Jack]
  4. Be in love with yr life
  5. Something that you feel will find its own form
  6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
  7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
  8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
  9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
  10. No time for poetry, but exactly what is
  11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
  12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
  13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
  14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
  15. Telling the story of the world in interior monolog
  16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
  17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
  18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
  19. Accept loss forever
  20. Believe in the holy contour of life
  21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
  22. Dont [sic] think of words when you stop but to see the picture better
  23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning [eh?]
  24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
  25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
  26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
  27. In Praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
  28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
  29. You’re a Genius all the time
  30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

The above is reprinted in Fred W. McDarrah’s book Kerouac & Friends: A Beat Generation Album, a not bad introduction to the movement together with photos of its main characters.

If there is a lot of unevenness in the whole beat vision, I think you can see why.