Books Scenes Along the Road

JACK KEROUAC'S been dead a while now. When he died in October '69, the Beat Generation was long gone; it had grown up, or broken down. Allen Ginsberg had taken up tripping with Timothy Leary, and had made, with Leary, his journey to the East. William Burroughs, Harvard '36, author of Naked Lunch (for which Kerouac coined the title), had moved abroad. Neal Cassady, an incidental Beat writer better known as Dean Moriarty (the hero-madman in Kerouac's On the Road ), and the subject of a 600-page character study by Kerouac, Visions of Cody, had gone off to join Ken Kesey (whom Kerouac disliked), and then had beat Kerouac to the grave. Jack spent his last eight years in St. Petersburg, Florida, living what he called "a kind of monastic life that has enabled me to write as much as I did." Shortly before his death he told a friend, "The Communists jumped on my movement and turned it into a Beat insurrection. They wanted a youth movement to exploit." He had recently sold an article to a Sunday newspaper magazine-supplement titled "After Me the Deluge." A month before he died he told an interviewer. "I'm not a beatnik, I'm a Catholic." He then pointed out a portrait of Pope Paul: "You know who painted that? Me."

Scenes Along the Road, dedicated to the memory of Jack Kerouac, is a book of photographs of the men who were at the center of the Beat movement, close to Kerouac before he or they became "famous writers, more or less" and before the generation drifted apart. They are the ones Kerouac was talking about when, in On the Road, he wrote

... they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a common place thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"

Scenes Along the Road is another, late chapter of the record of that life for the "Desolation Angels," a chapter of snapshots and drugstore prints to go along with the volumes of words. There is a picture of Allen Ginsberg while he was still at Columbia, a spare, clean-cut, serious, youthful New York intellectual in horn-rimmed glasses. There are two pictures of Neal Cassady taken in 1946 just before he left New York for Denver after his first visit with Kerouac and Ginsberg; they're the same pictures that Kerouac describes in On the Road:

Carlo and I saw him off at the 34th Street Greyhound station. Upstairs they had a place where you could make pictures for a quarter... Dean made a profile shot and looked coyly-around... Dean was wearing a real Western business suit for his trip back to Denver... blue with pencil stripes, vest and all-eleven dollars on Third Avenue...

Ann Charters assembled the photographs (most of which are from the collection of Allen Ginsberg), the quotations, and the captions in Scenes: the book is published in a limited edition of 2000. (The Harvard Coop Bookstore has a small pile of copies available.) It's divided into three sections; the first focuses on Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Herbert Huncke, John Clellon Holmes, and Gregory Corso while they were living in New York just after World War II.

In the second section the scene shifts to San Francisco and to a larger group of writers, including the young San Francisco poet Gary Snyder. It was Snyder whom Kerouac used as the model for his main character, "Japhy Ryder," in The Dharma Bums, a novel that takes place in the early days of the West Coast Beats. "Japhy Ryder" is a poet and Orientalist who lives in a hut in a Berkeley backyard and who spends much of his time sitting on the grass mats on the floor of his hut studying Oriental texts, and sipping tea. There are three pictures of Gary Snyder in Scenes Along the Road. One shows him sitting cross-legged in his Berkeley hut with a bowl of tea cupped in his hands; another shows him when he's robed and sandaled, standing at the garden outside the hut. The caption under the picture is taken from Ginsberg's writing, dated September 9, 1955: "... a bearded interesting Berkeley cat name of Snyder, I met him yesterday (via Rextoyh suggestion) who is studying oriental and leaving in a few months on some privately put up funds to go be a Zen monk (a real one). He's a head, peyotlist, laconist, but warmhearted, nice looking with a little beard, thin, blond, rides a bicycle in Berkeley in red corduroy and levis and hungup on Indians... Interesting person."

The third section shows some scenes in Mexico, Tangier, and Europe, the trips abroad before Kerouac and Ginsberg returned to the United States to be famous after the publication of Howl. On the Road Evergreen Review No. 2, and The New American Poetry. The last picture in this final section, a picture of a sullen Kerouac in Tangier, has a caption below it that is prophetic: "At that time I sincerely believed that the only decent activity in the world was to pray for everyone, in solitude... At that very moment, the manuscript of On the Road was being linotyped for imminent publication and I was already sick of the whole subject."

Four days after Kerouac's death, Allen Ginsberg, just back from the funeral in Lowell, Massachusetts (Kerouac's hometown), spoke at a "National Teach-In on World Government," held at his and Jack's old school, Columbia. The "Teach-In" featured, among others, Herman Kahn, David Dellinger, and Allard Lowenstein. Ginsberg, in the Beat tradition of ignoring the world other people are talking about for his own vision of it, sang some very long Buddhist chants to the assembly, read from Kerouac's Mexico City Blues, and then from an elegiac poem on his friend's death, one that he had just been working on during his subway ride up to Columbia. That poem is one of three by Ginsberg that are reprinted, as postscripts, to Scenes Along the Road. The poem he read from is called "Memory Gardens":
covered with yellow leaves in morning rain

Quel Deluge he threw up his hands

and wrote the Universe don't exist and died to prove it.

... the heavy car sways on tracks uptown to Columbia Jack no more'll step off at Penn Station

anonymous erranded, eat sandwich and drink beer near New Yorker Hotel or walk under the shadow of Empire State....

Kerouac's death brought forth the last Beat poem.