THERE ARE very few authors in whom personality triumphs over style; Jack Kerouac is one of them. It isn’t, as with Victor Hugo, a matter of our aesthetic objections being overborne by brute strength: Kerouac conquers in a saintly way, by sheer goddam niceness. This character Jack Duluoz is one of the nicest cats you could ever meet, with his puppy-dog innocence tempered by moments of old-dog guilt, his enthusiasm for life not yet soured by the bad world.
Kerouac, perhaps frightened that we may be bored by the hipster sanctity, tries to paste on a bit of dangerous leanness, but it’s not good. The old prelapsarian Adam beams out, literally incapable of harming a mouse and (when his pilgrimage brings him to London) blessing our filthy wicked city for its love of cats. Real cats that is, like with fur.
Desolation Angels calls itself a novel, but it is only that in a very Pickwickian sense. Nothing much happens except taking the road, listening to jazz, calling on old friends, laying some chick in the wholesomest way possible, going to somebody’s pad for a beer and poetry. And the characters are real people wearing pseudonyms like dark glasses: Duluoz is Kerouac himself; Irwin Garden is Allen Ginsberg; Bull Hubbard is Bill Burroughs. The pretence that this is art should be laughed away gently: give the boy a ball of majoun to chew and send him off to read his nice Zen book. The thunderous portent of the title is only some cat sitting in on the drums. What this is is a record of the good quiet life, a pot session after a hearty breakfast, seeing a bit of the world man, doing no harm to nobody.
But one wonders sometimes if this niceness is not perhaps a kind of art. A beautiful glow turns Ginsberg into a great poet, not a hairy rhymester selling his Vaseline bars as fake holy relics. Burroughs becomes an all-American folk-hero, swinging and swaggering down the Calle Larache, rebuking his companions for walking too slow: ‘Lard assed hipsters, ain’t no good for nothing!’ Kerouac’s achievement has been to relate a kind of religiosity to the immediate small glamours of jazz, pot, and pop art. The Beat movement is being debased by its unkempt fringe – unwashed youths who think Zen is a cough-sweet – but it remains a genuine city-cult that can, over cheap wine and harmless drugs, mention God and Christ working out his karma and the ground of All Being without sanctimony or embarrassment.
And the Kerouac way of writing, though frequently deplorable, is occasionally to be seen as an analogue of the jazz solo, aleatoric, punctuable only with dashes like breath, capable of describing the banal (eating a cheap Chinese meal, catching a Greyhound bus) without tedium. Beat newspapers, like the East Village Other, employ the panting rhythms deftly: Kerouac has created a limited but viable idiom. In his apocalyptic moments Big Daddy – as when he is on Desolation Peak, waiting like Zarathustra to descend to the plain – mashes up a prose-poetry out of Whitman and Wolfe and Dylan Thomas. It goes down well enough, since this saintly man is not trying to show off: it is the way he wants to write, not the way he thinks he ought to. And he has, after all, a vision.
The vision, for this Catholic Canuck, resolves itself into the big American one. San Francisco may look west to the East but the wide God’s land is the one the Beats want to wander: Zen on the move. In his European travels Kerouac yearns towards mother, cereals for breakfast, the pine trees outside the window. His philosophy is homespun American, and not bad either.
But then comes the exotic dressing which give Kerouac his flavour. ‘Eternity, and the Here-and-Now, are the same thing.’ Evil is negation; keep your palate clean for life, all of which (jazz, kif, Zen, poetry, Jell-O) is good. I rather dig this man.
Guardian, 22 May 1966
Review of Desolation Angels by Jack Kerouac
(London: André Deutsch, 1966)