Book of Sketches - Jack Kerouac [1]
These poems just breathe and flow, and when Jack plays the Blues, which he often does, his blues are truly sad — they are sadness without humor, without the joking and backslapping that come from good times. They are the real unfunny truth. Like when his older brother Gerard died. This is one of the saddest poems ever written.
I learned a lot from Jack, and I can say all this not being a writer. At the age of fourteen he was the first radical I ever heard of. When I first became aware that he wrote his novel The Subterraneans in one long stretch, unrevised straight out of his head in three days, and that he had a “steel trap” memory — it was the combination of these two very important factors that inspired a new way of painting for me. From then on I combined memory, speed, and spontaneity to create most of my work. I relied on the Kerouacian notion of “the unrevised method of creation,” and it became the key to a pure uncontrollable mastery of chaos.
As a reader, you would think Kerouac was talking, not writing. Yet it was precisely everyday speech that he was able to conjure up. He, like Jackson Pollock, found a way to take something all of us see and use every day and turn it into Art. This new language of Jack Kerouac was the one we had always been speaking. You just had to know what you were talking about before you spoke.
Jack’s concept of writing was also very art-inspired — he drew on André Masson’s Automatic Painting and Charlie Parker’s informed improvisations to carve out his unique style and destination. He called upon Leonardo da Vinci’s method of observation in his studies of flowers, storms, anatomy, and physiognomy. Jack is to literature what Charlie Parker was to music or Jackson Pollock was to painting. It’s that simple. Proust should be invoked here, too. He must have been one of Kerouac’s favorite writers because he used him to describe Miles Davis’s phrasing in order to enhance a cultural value that had not yet been perceived — he spoke of Miles’s playing “eloquent phrases, just like Marcel Proust.”
To look at Edward Hopper’s paintings of the late 1920s and early 1930s is to see the destitute ambience of New York City and its existential paradox — it is a place at once industrious and at the same time empty, lonely, and unanswered. These qualities are found in some of Kerouac’s poetical sketches — gas stations, old barges, oil tankers, silhouettes of a positive industry set against dark empty exteriors that have been forgotten and misplaced: Indian land or an old gold mine, towns at one time prosperous now distinctly gone, reflecting an America that no one wanted to admit was still there.
Jack himself had a cubist take on Hopper — not unlike Joseph Stella’s faceted Brooklyn Bridge — cubist in the sense that the fragmentation is not of imagery but of time and space. The elements of chronology in these sketches are here of no importance. In fact, Jack has made a note, “Not Necessarily Chronological,” this being on his mind — in a larger sense referring to all the poems in the Book of Sketches, but also referring to the sequence of words within each poem. That’s what gives a “sketch” its edge, the fractured, almost “cut-up” feel that the descriptions carry. They seem to be running straight at you and then split up unexpectedly into multiple directions simultaneously, ending on a resolved note somehow related and yet striking out in a new direction.
Unlike Hopper, though, Kerouac did not long for the past — he did not reminisce for the sake of nostalgia — or transpose the European masters’ sensibility. Rather, in the 1950s he broke free and prophetically dreamed a future world of young people wearing Levi’s and being cut loose from all the crumbling conventions. Jack saw into the future, he lived in the future. That is exactly what happened in the 1960s to society, but by then Jack was too old and self-abused to have any pleasure from the world he predicted.
As the sketches tell us, anything that Jack saw was important. Anything