Heaven’s Angel, Wailing
I’m a big fan of the Beat Generation, and of Jack Kerouac in particular. Today is the 99th anniversary of his birth (and my own son’s 8th birthday). As such, I’d like to share this essay I wrote back in grad school about Kerouac. It’s called “Heaven’s Angel, Wailing.” Enjoy.
Heaven’s Angel, Wailing
Like a lost text found again, the audio recordings of Jack Kerouac give those who listen a new perspective on the man often referred to as the spokesman of the Beat Generation. In recordings made solo, with talk show host Steve Allen, or with a variety of accomplished jazz musicians, Kerouac speaks his words with the conviction of the author. We hear the joy, the suffering, the exuberance, and, most of all, we hear the beat.
Through these recordings, we hear the beat in the poems included on the album Poetry for the Beat Generation, and also in the excerpts from Kerouac’s novels On the Road and Visions of Cody on that album and The Subterraneans on Readings by Jack Kerouac on the Beat Generation. In addition to the rhythm of the language, we hear more of the French-Canadian patois that Kerouac grew up speaking. It is easy to point out passages in the writings where Kerouac’s first language takes precedent; hearing him speak his first language enhances the experience of reading a writer whose first language was not English. This heritage is reflected in his word choice and structure as well as in his inflection and cadence. Finally, on Blues and Haikus, we get the true sense of improvisation Kerouac so treasured. His work with jazz musicians highlights his love of the musical form and showcases how he used it in his writing.
While others have recorded their own interpretations of Kerouac’s work, none have captured the same purity as the author himself did. Not every reader has heard Kerouac reading his work. It wasn’t until 1990 that the three albums he recorded were brought together in the CD box set The Jack Kerouac Collection. These readers are missing a vital part of the writer’s work. It is possible to have a fulfilling experience without Kerouac’s audio recording, but it is impossible to have a complete experience.
Kerouac’s ideas about rhythm and measure in writing weren’t necessarily unique as ideas in themselves. In his “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” Kerouac attributes many of the basic tenets of rhythmic poetics to William Carlos Williams, writing, “‘ Measured pauses which are the essentials of our own speech’—‘divisions of the sounds we hear’—‘time and how to note it down’” (Charters 57). Like Allen Ginsberg, Kerouac took from Williams the idea of breath in poetry. Unlike Ginsberg, Kerouac went beyond poetry and used these ideas in prose. The only way to truly hear the breath in much of Kerouac’s writing is to hear him read it. When one reads the famous lines from Desolation Angels about the Beat Generation, it’s easy to pause for each comma:
“It’s the beat generation, it’s béat, it’s the beat to keep, it’s the beat of the heart, it’s being beat and down in the world and like oldtime lowdown and in ancient civilizations the slave boatmen rowing galleys to a beat and servants spinning pottery to a beat” (137).
There are commas separating the “it’s” clauses before the sentence starts to run on. Kerouac recorded this section for the album Readings by Jack Kerouac on the Beat Generation and when listening to it, we get more of the rhythm. In the three minute-long track, we hear Kerouac pausing more than the writing would indicate, particularly as the section progresses. Perhaps more importantly, we hear the rising sounds that in another author’s work would signal a comma or a full stop, whereas Kerouac has omitted those. He splits “béat” into two syllables—be-at—and puts the inflection not on the stressed “e” but on the second half of the word. This pronunciation not only adds variety to the sentence, but serves to remind readers and listeners of one of the origins of the appellation “beat.” In 1958, during an interview with Mike Wallace, Kerouac said, “You know, Jesus said to see the Kingdom of Heaven you must lose yourself…something like that” (Hayes 5). Through this recording, we are reminded that “beat” is an attitude; in Biblical terms, a “beatitude.”
Further into Readings by Jack Kerouac on the Beat Generation, we hear more differences between what has become the canonical text and the draft versions from which Kerouac read. We know he’s reading from manuscript pages because we can hear when he shuffles his pages. We realize it is a different version when we listen closely. An “it’s” in the text becomes “now,” the textual phrase “near-standing Negro connoisseur” omits the racial modifier in the reading, and characters get renamed: the textual “Sliv” is “Bernie” on the audio and the book’s “Cody,” one of the many stand-in names for Neal Cassady, is “Dean” in the recording. In other words, one can assume that the manuscript pages Kerouac read from were most likely written about the same time as On the Road, in which the Cassady-based character is called Dean Moriarty.
In the 1990 liner notes for Poetry for the Beat Generation, critic Gilbert Millstein quotes a letter Kerouac wrote to an unnamed friend. In the letter, Kerouac writes that he “was carrying a huge suitcase full of untyped manuscripts of prose and poetry. …I reached into my suitcase as if blindfolded and picked something out…” Bringing untyped versions of the works would account for the differences between what is heard on the records and what was eventually published. Differences in word choices were part of Kerouac’s upbringing as he had to choose between English and French. Kerouac, born Jean-Louis Kérouac to French-Canadian parents, didn’t speak English as his first language. In 1967, he described some of his youth to Radio Canada interviewer Fernand Seguin:
“I didn’t speak English until … until I was six years old. We spoke French in the shack… in the house. Also, it was a neighborhood, all French, Beaulieu Street and Boisvert Street, and … and the club, it was all old Frenchmen who played cards” (Maher 267-8).
With so much of that other language surrounding him in his earliest days, it is not surprising that French influences can be seen in Kerouac’s English-written work. He eventually gives the character representing himself a French name, Duluoz, and often wrote of his childhood in the French-Canadian neighborhoods of Lowell, Massachusetts. One can find multiple uses of the diminutive “ti Jean” in Kerouac’s poetry and prose, most often used by characters representing Kerouac’s mother or older family members. Visions of Gerard, a novel focused on the life of Kerouac’s older brother Gerard who died young, is rife with French phrases. Thankfully, Kerouac is kind enough to provide translations for his English-speaking audience: “‘Blanc d’or rouge noir pi toute—White of gold red black and everything—’ is the translation” (Visions of Gerard 3).
The poem, “On Waking from a Dream of Robert Fournier” had two versions: the French version Kerouac called a “Long Poem In Canuckian Child Patoi Probably Medieval” and the English, “And this is an English Blues” (Pomes All Sizes 26-27). Recordings of Kerouac reading his poetry and prose in French are rare, but on the album Kicks Joy Darkness we hear him reading sections of “MacDougal Street Blues” in which he reads the lines “Jean-Louis, /Go Home, Man. / ... / So tho I am wise / I have to wait like / anyotherfool” and listening to the inflection places on the words. To hear Kerouac speak in his native tongue, one must turn to YouTube and partake of the variety of French-language interviews, including the aforementioned Seguin interview. We see him seemingly more relaxed than in his English-language interviews. He appears more comfortable and able to laugh at his own expense than when dealing with American interviewers. One must wonder if he did record any of his work in French and what happened to those recordings if he did.
A knowledge of the rhythm of language and being a native Romance language speaker may not have been as important in Kerouac’s writing without the addition of the influence of jazz music or “bop.” When listening to Kerouac’s recorded works, the jazz connection gains even larger precedent. Two albums, Poetry for the Beat Generation and Blues and Haikus—were made with specific notions about jazz music. The first paired Kerouac with talk show host and pianist Steve Allen, the second joined Kerouac with saxophonists Al Cohn and Zoot Sims. “We just decided to let him read his poetry and Steve just played backup piano,” producer Bob Thiele said. “Everything was one take. Everything today takes months, but it was all one take back then” (Jack Kerouac 5). Like Kerouac’s writing, the session with Allen was experimental with no real hope of success. This experiment turned out to be an invaluable resource that helped propel Kerouac further into the mainstream. Allen’s piano is subtle and never overtakes the author’s readings. Instead, it gives the reading the first airs of what would become a beatnik cliché: a poet in a coffeehouse surrounded by rapt listeners in black turtlenecks and berets, soft jazz playing in the background, and poems meant to be read aloud. Granted, this was not the audience Allen was used to having, and Kerouac’s performance bore only minor resemblance to the now commonplace coffeehouse poetry reading. “It seemed appropriate for Kerouac. He did not give a dramatic reading at all. I was the performer, he wasn’t. He simply read. No dramatics, no histrionics,” according to Allen (Jack Kerouac 5). David Perry summed up the vibrancy of the recording for his piece in The Jack Kerouac Collection liner notes: “This record being the spontaneous recording experiment it was, there are also some odd little moments, like the laughs that dot ‘Deadbelly’ and end the aptly-titled ‘Goofing at the Table’” (5).
The record was successful enough that Thiele put together the follow-up Blues and Haikus. Perry, again, captures the essence of the album when he writes “Kerouac’s looser here, seemingly more comfortable with the medium this time around. He accentuates lines. Listen to the cadence he captures—‘…the cats…step…slowly’” (Jack Kerouac 5).
Finally working with jazz musicians instead of just worshipping them brought Kerouac together with one of the inspirations for his writing. His work is flooded with references to Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, two icons of the form. Many of the hang-outs the Beat Generation populated were jazz bars. And yet, these collaborations were far from perfect. According to Perry, Cohn and Sims thought this was just another session and didn’t bother to hear the playback or even listen to Kerouac during the recording. Thiele told Perry, “When I found him [Kerouac], he was in a corner crying. And he said ‘My two favorite musicians walked out on me. They didn’t even want to hear this back’” (Jack Kerouac 6).
Like so many of the other people in his life, the relationship between Kerouac and the two musicians he recorded with turned out to be unsatisfactory. Happiness was always fleeting for Kerouac. Via these recordings, we have been granted a more complete picture of the writer, a glimpse into happy moments before the suffering of the world crushed him again. It is no wonder so many others have tried to capture those moments for themselves.
The 1997 album Kicks Joy Darkness features a variety of performers reading Kerouac’s work. Performers range from fellow Beat associates Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, to writers Hunter S. Thompson and Jim Carroll, and musicians and actors such as Johnny Depp, Richard Lewis, Steven Tyler, Juliana Hatfield, and John Cale, Each has their own take on Kerouac’s work, bringing their passion and own style to the readings. Ginsberg’s reading of “The Brooklyn Bridge Blues” was a live recording while others such as Cale’s performance of “The Moon” highlight the 1960s psychedelic music that Cale helped popularize. Beyond this one album, multiple recordings of Kerouac’s most famous work exist. On the Road has been recorded by Matt Dillon, John Ventimiglia, Frank Muller, Tom Parker, and Will Patton. The popularity of the book has spawned numerous live readings and YouTube hosts a bevy of fans recording their own takes on the novel. None of these readers, however, put the same spin on it as the author himself, particularly during his readings with Steve Allen.
The widest audience to see Kerouac read from the novel came via his appearances on The Steve Allen Show and an excerpt does appear on the Kerouac-Allen album. “…I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty” (On the Road 307) is how the book ends. In the recording, Kerouac speeds up portions, and stretches out others, but most importantly, he repeats “I think of Dean Moriarty” one more time, but elongates each syllable of the final word: Mor-eee-aarr-teee. Rather than the single use of the clause at the end of the novel, Kerouac’s reading puts even more emphasis on the memory of Dean Moriarty and that emphasis—rhythmic, influenced by his French roots, and paced out like a jazz solo—becomes a moment purely Kerouac and serves as a reminder that without hearing it, our experience of Kerouac is incomplete. These moments occur throughout the recordings Kerouac made and continue to influence readers and critics today. Kerouac biographer Ann Charters gives perhaps the best view on Kerouac’s recordings in The Jack Kerouac Collection:
“Jack Kerouac’s sound is probably the most individual thing about him, as unique as his thumbprint. Like Gertrude Stein, he wrote by ear, not eye, which is to say that on the printed page what meets your eye is not only what it seems. A writer’s language always adds up to more than the sum of its parts, but Kerouac’s sound is an extra dividend…Kerouac read by Kerouac is the quintessential Kerouac” (12).
WORKS CITED:
[kw21] Charters, Ann. The Portable Beat Reader. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1992. Print
Hayes, Kevin J. Conversations with Jack Kerouac. Jackson, Mississippi: University of Mississippi Press, 2005. Print.
The Jack Kerouac Collection. CD. Rhino Word Beat: Rhino Records, 1990.
Kerouac, Jack. Book of Blues. New York, NY: Penguin Group USA, 1995. Print.
---. Desolation Angels. New York, NY: Riverhead Books, 1995. Print.
---. On the Road. New York, NY: Penguin Group USA, 1976. Print.
---. Pomes All Sizes. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1992. Print.
---. Visions of Gerard. New York, NY: Penguin Group USA, 1991. Print.
Maher, Paul Jr. Empty Phantoms. New York, NY: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005. Print.
Various artists. Kicks Joy Darkness. CD. Rykodisc, 1997.