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Jack
Kerouac. Book of Sketches 1952-1957. Penguin Poets, 2006.
$18
Review
by Tom Pynn
I think I speak for most men living when I say
that our
and that this glorious
assurance is not only our living hope, but our dream to be accomplished.
--Thomas Wolfe, from You Can’t Go Home Again, “Credo”
.
. . I greet you with open arms, I accept
your frailties, I offer you my frailties, let us
gather and run the gamut of rich human existence.
--Jack Kerouac, Credo”, from Atop an Underwood
While
the above statements may strike some of us as naïvely romantic, they
nonetheless indicate a running theme in the development of an American literary
voice that begins in earnest with the work of Walt Whitman. The search not only for an authentic American
literary idiom, but also for the fulfillment of
of his
compositional uniqueness is found in his early writings collected by Paul
Marion and titled Atop an Underwood:Early
Stories and Other Writings. What Allen Ginsberg would eventually refer to
as Kerouac’s spontaneous bop prosody and
by Beat critic Ann Douglas as Kerouac’s
poetics of intimacy, is described by Kerouac himself in “Credo” as
writing based in sincerity, warmth, love, truth, and “living for life’s sake.”
In a letter to Neal Cassady dated October 9, 1951, Kerouac links his
compositional style with jazz for the first time when he writes that he has
arrived at “my finally-at-last-found style & hope; since writing that [his
re-writing of On the Road] I’ve come up ith even greater complicated sentences & VISIONS!—So
from now on just call me Lee Konitz.” Kerouac’s
poetics of intimacy, however, did not arise in a vacuum, but was in direct
response to the vicissitudes of his time.
Post-war
and the
emergence of a middle-management economic class heralded an alienation from
other, neighbor, and land respectively.
Popular
novelist Sloan Wilson portrayed this new American crisis in identity in The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (1955)
while Henry Bugbee gave this crisis a philosophical
voice in his underground classic An Inward Morning (1958), and C. Wright
Mills exposed these trends in his sociological studies White Collar (1951) and The
Power Elite (1956). Some of these themes also
appeared in the
melodramatic films of Douglas Sirk. For the younger generation, Allen Ginsberg
famously unmasked
“Moloch-minded”
The
release of Kerouac’s Book of Sketches
gives us the opportunity to glimpse a significant element in the development of
Kerouac’s famous spontaneous poetics.
Sketching was for Kerouac a writerly way of getting to the things
themselves. The subtitle of Book of Sketches is (Proving that
sketches ain’t verse) But Only What Is. The drive by Modernist artists to present things phenomenologically,
as they appear to consciousness without mediation by technique, was an
influence on Kerouac but not as much as William Carlos Williams’ famous dictum,
“No ideas but in things” and his new found interest in Buddhism. The notebooks
he later put together as Book of Sketches
were begun in 1952 at the same time he took up his intensive study of Buddhism,
and were concluded in 1957, the year On
the Road was published and when he
formally ended his study of Buddhism. (He would, however, publish The Dharma Bums in 1958, a novel heavily
dependent upon The Diamond Sutra for its structure and thematic impetus and Desolation Angels, the first part of
which also bears heavy traces of Kerouac’s interest in Buddhism, in 1961.)
His
intensive study of Buddhism led him to an interest in East Asian poetics,
especially the Buddhist poetics of Han
Shan upon meeting Gary Snyder in 1955. In the
notebooks he kept documenting his Buddhist studies, published
as Some of the Dharma, Kerouac links the
emphasis in Buddhism on mind as a liberating fusion of understanding
and
compassion with the intimate process of sketching: “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.” The return
to things would necessarily involve, for Kerouac, the awareness that words are
empty in and of themselves—a point he grasped early on in his Buddhist
studies—and that the process of using words had to be co-emergent with the
appearance of things themselves.
In Book of Sketches, Kerouac offers a
poetic account of sketching:
Unbroken word sketches
of
the subconscious pictures
of
sections of the
memory
life of an
imbecile
genius resting
in
the madhouse of his
mind—The
word
flow
must not be disturbed,
or
picture forgotten for
words’sakes, nor the
pictures
stretched beyond
their
bookmovie strength
except
parenthetically.
Several
important elements of Kerouac’s practice of sketching are alluded to in this
poem. Sketching is “vision,” a
“surveying”
of things
as they appear to the body/mind’s eye(s).
Thus, sketching is of a scene before either the body’s eyes—
“Before my eyes I see”—and the inner eye of memory. The latter is
what Kerouac calls tic sketches: “tics are flashes of memory or daydream.” In
another poem on the book he writes, “A ‘tic’ is a sudden thought / that
inflames & immediately / disappears.”
The
spontaneity of “the word flow” suggests that sketching shares a resemblance to
Kerouac’s other stylistic innovations: spontaneous poetics and wild form. In a letter to John Clellon Holmes dated
“Wild form, man, wild form. Wild form’s the only
form holds what I have to say –my mind is exploding to say
something about
every image and every memory in.”
The
anchor of the sketch is the scene. For
Kerouac, a scene is an unfolding event which is glimpsed either from the
body’s eyes
or the mind’s eye in memory.
Tiers of mountains supra-
massing
now—The Event!
The
writer’s attentiveness to the event is not the kind of consciousness that
substitutes ideas for things, but is an
operative
intentionality that allows the writer to let things be as they are in the same
time-space as one is apprehending things. Scene and sketch arise together.
Apperception, or what a Buddhist might term co-dependent arising, is a mainstay
not only of Buddhist aesthetics, but also of East Asian aesthetics generally. A wonderful example of Kerouac’s mastery of
East Asian aesthetics that recalls the childlike immediacy of Haiku:
The pale gold grass of
afternoon,
the cakes of
alfalfa,
the hairheads
of
green sage in the
brown
ploughed field, the
poles
on the rim—
Snow on the mtns!—
Sketching
scenes in the mode of intimacy allows Kerouac to convey his ecstatic vision of
“Snow on the mtns!” Such
sketching also
helps Kerouac develop a poetics that is open to the landscape of
While Book of Sketches adds to the repository
of Kerouac’s other published poetry, a noteworthy event in itself, it also
adds to our
understanding of the various themes crucial to Kerouac’s work specifically, and
Beat literature generally. Chief among
these themes is
“God I
hate /
“Stay with the Machine,
Boys, don’t need to run
Away or shift to other
Cogs, you’re just as well
Off on this one—we offer
YOU SECURITY TILL THE
GRAVE.”
It’s
important to point out that Kerouac’s characterization of
If there is one thing that the long
overdue publication of Book of Sketches
offers us today, it’s the hopefulness in the possibility of freedom
shortcomings, what
a Buddhist practices as critical self-inquiry.
As in Kerouac’s time as in ours, there are people and places in