Books: Sweet Jack Gone

KEROUAC by ANN CHARTERS 384 pages. Straight Arrow. $7.95.

VISIONS OF CODY by JACK KEROUAC 398 pages. McGraw-Hill. $8.95.

The child discovers that his favorite ballplayer can be traded to a rival team and play just as well. The adult learns that politicians do not have to fool all the people all the time; some of the time is usually sufficient. Now, as if the world were not disillusioning enough, we find out in Ann Charters’ forthcoming biography that Jack Kerouac did not drive.

Kerouac, the author of On the Road, the Jack that journalism built into the king of the Beat Generation and the Zen terror of the transcontinental blacktop, sat passively in the passenger’s seat and watched his life, reflected in the American landscape, go by like so many flaking Burma Shave signs. “I’m doomed to these universal watchfulnesses,” he wrote, though not as effortlessly as Kerouac readers were once led to believe. Author Charters dispels the popular misconception that On the Road leaped spontaneously out of Kerouac’s head and onto the 120-ft. roll of teletype paper he had rigged to his typewriter. He worked on it in one form or another from 1951 until it was finally published in 1957.

Nonstop. Like Thomas Wolfe and other American romanticists, Kerouac found his main preoccupation as a writer in his own responses to himself. He celebrated the open road, the moment intensified by Benzedrine and marijuana and writing nonstop off the top of his head. But Kerouac lived mainly in his memories. “Nostalgia dominated Jack’s soul,” said his friend and most eloquent eulogist Allen Ginsberg, who also saw Kerouac as “the last of the great American Christian drinkers.” It was alcohol that contributed to the abdominal hemorrhaging that killed him three years ago at the age of 47.

Kerouac also appeared to have lacerated himself with honesty, as if his truth were a scourge that could bring him closer to the state of beatitude—the word from which he said the term “beat” had been derived. That view is confirmed by Mrs. Charters in her sympathetic and levelheaded biography.

But as far back as 1959, two years after On the Road came out, Kerouac attempted to correct his wild-man public image. At college seminars and in the pages of Playboy, he traced the roots of his beatness to his fiercely independent ancestors in Brittany. He followed them to French Canada and later to New Hampshire, where his grandfather would shake his lantern at lightning and dare God to strike him down. But it was Lowell, Mass., where he was born and raised, that enraptured Kerouac. It was the whole lost prewar world of Friday-night beers, Saturday ball games, dips in the brook, Krazy Kat, horror movies and 1930’s popular culture. There was also football. Kerouac was a talented running back, in high school and at Columbia, where he dropped the game in favor of the literary life.

Kerouac always retained a trace of his immigrant forebears’ fascination for the size and vitality of America. He was respectful where the nation’s symbols were concerned. Once, when Ginsberg playfully draped him in a flag, Kerouac carefully removed and folded it. Yet he remained totally wrapped up in himself. In his last printed words, published in a syndicated article the day before he died on Oct. 21, 1969, he denounced both the political establishment and radical youth, and proclaimed himself a lonely “Bippie-in-the-Middle.”

This is a difficult place to be, especially for Kerouac. His vision of America and craving for community was split between the ordered Eastern town of his youth and the wild emptiness of the West that loomed through the windshield. It is the national condition, guaranteed to contribute to persistent discontent and the continuous appearance of romantic rebellion, singularly or in groups like the beats.

Although he had the rugged good looks and the compact build of such Depression movie heroes as Dane Clark and John Garfield. there was something vaguely spinsterish about Kerouac. He was married three times, but his marriages were almost as fleeting as the destinations of his travels. Time and again he would return to live with his mother, who rarely let him forget that it had been her job in a shoe factory that bought him his writing time.

In his novels, which never earned much money, Kerouac found his principal consolation. His fiction is practically all autobiographical: The Town and the City, an idealization of Lowell, Mass.; Vanity of Duluoz. the years at Columbia with William Burroughs, Ginsberg, et al.; On the Road, the celebrated cross-country adventures; The Subterraneans, beat life in San Francisco; The Dharma Bums, beat life plus Zen Buddhism; Big Sur, the inability to handle fame and alcohol; and Satori In Paris, a search for ancestral past in Brittany.

Manhood. There are other books, but even when read in sequence as the legend that Kerouac envisioned they do not add up to his ideal of the Great American Novel, “explaining every thing to everybody.” How could it? Kerouac’s appeal, particularly in On the Road, is in the way he stylizes the facts of his life into fantasies of sustained joy and enthusiasm. The raw technique is apparent in Visions of Cody, a little-known work that has just been republished. Cody is another road novel that Biographer Charters says was written as an early version of On the Road. Experimental, sprawling, choked with endless conversations—some transcribed from actual tape—Visions is his attempt to find his own voice and form as a writer.

The hero (in the old-fashioned sense) is Cody Pomeray, the Dean Moriarty in On the Road. In real life he was Neal Cassady, a homeless Denver juvenile delinquent who became not only the man behind the wheel in Kerouac’s life but the embodiment of Kerouac’s deepest dreams of freedom and lost American manhood. Cassady was not only a nonstop driver but a ceaseless talker. Like a car radio, he could go on and on, spinning wild stories in a sort of verbal bebop: “See? Here’s what I’m saying, for example, I say, no man, ‘can’t get it down,’ you know, and even as I say it it sounds awful, then also it sounds like struggling to get it down . . .”

During the ’60s, Cassady caromed naturally from the Beat Generation into the acid culture. He joined Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters and was last seen heading into Mexico, where in 1968 he dropped dead next to a railroad track after a spree fueled by a fatal blend of drugs and alcohol. Thus ended Kerouac’s final vision: he and his friend Cassady growing old together, living with their families on the same street in some quiet backwater. Very touching, and very American. James Fenimore Cooper fantasies the last Mohicans, Kerouac dreams up Neal Cassady as the last cowboy. · R. Z. Sheppard