by Jack Kerouac
KEROUAC: “The pathway to wisdom lies through excess” (Blake? Goethe?) This, I say, applies to all artists in their youth who shall be worth their salt. The derangement of the senses has to be undergone at least once in a lifetime or the artist has not seen the other side of his consciousness, nay his conscience, really. Neal and I were both young devotees of Rimbaud as well as the barefooted Christ, fans of On the Road should know. The mature and quiet Raphael of later years in a Vatican apartment, do we know what secret dissipations and exesses occurred in his youth at some wayside inn in Bologna? Because “Dean” and I were not construction workers but wanted to be artists, therefore we dissipated on principle. Any ethic or esthetic which forbids this bids fair to turn art into government propaganda and artists into pencilchewing bureaucrats.
HOLMES: What happened in 1949? The “false understanding”: was this New York, literary life, intellectualism, all seen by you as a verging from your real road? Was it the failures and exasperations of all that (681 Lex, Giroux, partying and pooping) that pivoted you “back into America,” and thus towards Neal, Mexico, Sax, and your true self? In other words, I see pivots in your life: uprooting from Lowell and entrance into World City with its fevers, interests, ambitions, involvements, but you are basically still the youth after first weaning. Then in 1949, the choice between Fame & Cocktail parties and all that, and the “trucks on the road.” Which, however, led to end-of-the-road Mexicos where everything became clear and blank: the last pivot turning you back, your brood has been on consciousness ever since, because the road ended after all, and the outer world has only distracted and momentarily interested you since; when you went down into yourself in Sax you came back forever different; no major pivot really since then; only losses and exasperations and Melville’s unfolding of the onion day after day, but the onion is yourself at last. What of these pivots?
KEROUAC: In 1949 I saw that a writer can become a sort of society figure as long as he observes the rules more or less, can, in fact, become a criminal among the rich, that is, a criminal bullshiter. When I say “rich” (and I left “rich” in there because I like the poetic sound of “a criminal among the rich”) I mean those people who actually collect priceless objects d’art to place around their homes and would fain do so with celebrated humanbeings also. I can just see Thomas Wolfe or even Gregory Corso dipped in bronze and placed smack in the foyer of a wealthy lady’s home. Even the “poor” collect things, of course, but anyway I got scared, got a sensation of dullness hovering about, I was bored and eager to get back to my earlier studies, so I went back to what I romantically and naively called “The American Road Night” (a pose) but which I realize now was just my own goofy ideas. My own goofy ideas, Sir! Otherwise what? O shit, I just wasnt having any fun (in the lionized scene). Essentially I’m a narrative reporter and had to go resume the coverage of my story which at the time was Dean and the western gang, that’s all.
HOLMES: Visions of Cody— “. . . this lifelong monolog which is begun in my mind”: and it WAS begun then in 1951, seems to me. You cast off home, Joan, literary hopes, etc., went down into yourself, “who is the dark youth going there, sketching, sketching.” Because you HAD given up something, and your work truly begins then, your best work, your own acceptance of your own particular consciousness. What happened to cause it? No abstraction please: Vet Hosp.? end of marriage? some crisis of emotions (Joan vs. Memere?) stands behind V.O.C., triggering it. You’ve made a choice which made you yourself. The next works you did (V.O.C. and Sax) are maybe the best of all. Some interior balance was at its most certain and most precarious, and even when you write some about that year later in Traveler a little of the astonishing verbal depth (you never went deeper, soared higher) touches the account. Am I nuts?
KEROUAC: Yes in the Vet hospital. I had time to think at last without interruptión and unfolded my secret desire in writing at last:—to tell exactly what happened and not worry about style but only worry about completeness of detail and the hell with what anybody thinks. In fact I didnt dream any of it would ever be published except in the madhouse. I stood in front of a bakery window in the cold winter one night scribbling furiously everything I saw, down to the last coconut cake cherry. People thought I was . . . what? (No order salesman would ever scribble so much and so fast and look like I did.) Then I rushed into my Ma’s house and went on scribbling from memory the visions of other things I’d seen on the street that night. I knew I had it but I was ashamed that I was not going to help my mother in this mad new way of writing, which I called “sketching.” That was the beginning of spontaneous prose, October 1951.
HOLMES: Visions of Cody— “. . . back to the sense of life I had as a child uncomplainingly getting up at seven in the morn to go to school and on Saturdays joyously to go play, etc.” (“Back to the open air of the world”): where was that joy misplaced, lost, or is it just growing of which you speak here? The rainy days of boyhood unreachable from the bleak bored afternoons of manhood? Or was it certainty, warmth, immediacy, the uncorrupted eye, and finally no-split-between-the-hope-and-the-eye? The consciousness orphans us from the simple terrors and richnesses of the unconscious, and we are of two minds after that.
KEROUAC: The moments of joy in childhood? Sounds like a question in Readers Digest. I’ve felt joy since, on whiskey, off whiskey, who cares? The universe pours moments of joy all around:—exaltation comes and goes like tics, among sorrows, O among sorrows.
HOLMES: Were you reading Joyce before or during Dr Sax? Dumb questions of influence are a drag, but seem unavoidable in this book. Here all the levels of consciousness mix and mell and fuse; here the child’s sense of place, the surreality of imaginings and the absolute reality of the wrinkly tar, all wash together, with elaborate verbal funning, horrors of your own out of pulp mags and Draculas, the precise far-off voices of family talks, the weird satires of Count Condu etc., all exist similtaneously, and I must ask about Joyce’s shadow on this book. (On re-reading, by the by, this seems one of the surest, deepest books you’ve done: the keys are here, and do you realize the reliance on one-syllable adjectives that gives the prose itself a hard, graphic ba-ba-ba-doom beat that is incredible?) Was this the beginning of spontaneous-prose (and I want no esthetic explanations of that, you know what I mean)?
KEROUAC: I was not influenced by Joyce in Doctor Sax but actually by Proust, whom I’d just been avidly studying with Neal in Frisco. The detailed recollections etc. but I was prepared to swing them out fast. I wrote the entire book in Bill Burroughs’ bathroom, no other place was private, therefore all the references to urine, by the way, which Malcolm Cowley wondered about. The vision of the Snake and the Flood occurred one mysterious October night when my windows were rattling in Ozone Park 1948:—I saw the Snake’s big mountainhead in the deeps leering up at me, Jesus you shoulda seen my eyes wide open as I sat on the edge of the bed. Sax, of course, is The Shadow who is also myself because I used to play the shadow, and Dracula and all come from old movies. Old Bull Baloon is W. C. Fields who used to actually play poker with my father backstage on the B. F. Keith’s circuit. The mixing and melling really comes from Melville’s Confidence Man mysterious mellings, and from general education in melling, from Spenser, Walpurgisnacht, Kafka and all the rest, and yes, from the levels in Finnegans Wake and levels everywhere, my dear. Specifically, though, the last mad parts that jump and dance and make faces were influenced (the very afternoon before) by my seeing the movie of Alice in Wonderland, the color one of about 1950.
HOLMES: Dr Sax— “I understood mysticism at once”: how old were you then? Tell me more about this understanding? Care to give me a line or two to add to this, that you might have put in then, except you had other things to do?
KEROUAC: When the nuns told me the thunder was a ball, I was eight. They said a white ball appeared in their window as they sat knitting in the convent. (It was probably what mountain fire lookouts call “St. Elmo’s Dance,” a peculiarity of lightning.) This simple, almost sorrowful mysticism
is very common among the matter-of-fact Medieval French Canadians who preserved such things for centuries in Quebec while France went “encyclopedic” and “rational” and “enlightened” and “pragmatic” and finally “existentialist,” hor hor hor. (Incidentally the Quebecois also preserved Medieval French pronunciation.)
HOLMES: Did your Catholicism loosen to secret doubts with Gerard’s death, or thoughts about it afterwards? You seem to imply something like this in Sax. Tell me about your dealings with faith? (mwee he he he he ha ha!)
KEROUAC: My Catholicism began with Gerard’s death, after all I was only four. All this past winter I’ve been praying to the Virgin Mary but lately the Supreme Court has begun to scare me. Nevertheless I still “wink” at Her when I pass. I think she nodded at me last October. I know there are all kinds of explanations about superstition and clinging to early training, but what is there so un-superstitious about the explanations of psychologists who dont even know that what they’re saying is only a new kind of superstition? “Smith did not face the realities of life.” Smith did not face the realities of what? And the “realities”? Not even Einstein, Lucretius, Gotama, Molière, Shakespeare or who you’ll have . . . the realities? In their own superstitious way they never heard of the word used like that. Did you ever see how completely “irrational” people sometimes live lives of sweet gentleness and peace somehow? It’s because of grace. “The people of Denver,” complained a mining engineer around 1850 or so, “are too happy to know what they’ve got here.” They were in a state of grace. My faith is this:—grace is when you’re as you were, like in the Army, “As you were!”, and not as you might be. The pragmatic Pavlovian dialectical materialist psychologists of this world are all standing at attention while a lot of the people of the world are at ease, because of grace, which is free, see. Free from Heaven. Thus my faith.
HOLMES: Why is the color BROWN the color of your boyhood? It reoccurs throughout Sax, and is the color of the 30’s too, and books, and shadows, and your mother’s bathrobe, and a dozen other things. Does it hold loss, twilight, severance from warmth, and all that the river swept away? And the mysterious and heavy weight of books?
KEROUAC: Yes. Chairs were brown, many houses and tenements were painted brown, and my mother’s bathrobe was brown when I was an infant in her arms, the river was brown in spring, even our kitchen table was brown mahogany, the radio too with its big brown paper speaker, all, all brown—The 1930’s were brown because also not yet all that antiseptic white of today—also streetlamps were brown compared to some of the eerie blue white ones of today which obscure the stars of night. But dark laughter will come again, O Sherwood Anderson of the brown Ohia. . . . Whiteness and antiseptic light of today is also as tho we were all being grilled by brainwash police.
HOLMES: What was the Castle in actuality? Was there a Castle, or just an old shit-littered house? Or is it all an imagining? How was it metamorphosed in your mind? And SAX HIMSELF? God, Fields, Pa, the first muttering, interesting, enigmatic person you shambled after?
KEROUAC: There was a big spooky stone mansion next door to where I was born on Lupine Road on the Centreville Hill. The idea of Sax is that the Great World Snake of Evil, or, Satan, shall be released by the dark forces of the Great World Castle which is located on the hill of my birth. This meant that I considered my birth and all birth as evil. The Arabs say “Rejoice at a funeral, weep at a birth of a newborn” or to that effect. Also notice where I say near the end of Doctor Sax “The neck of the world was free.” This was because I had a boil on my neck once, at 16, my mother finally squeezed it out after three days of packs and compresses, she gave a yell as it leaped out at her like a snake. Small wonder I’m convinced that flesh is corrupt as well as corruptible, awful disgusting in fact, and that at 24 after my father’s death I kept singing the Gershwins’ “Why Was I Born?” (to which my poor mother objected, you see). Maybe I shoulda been a doctor.
HOLMES: Hateful query now: Sax can be read as a masturbatory guilt fantasy (World Snake: penis. Seminal doves. The horror of WHITE (sperm) which runs through the book. Sax himself: midnight, skulking, muttering Sex. And the universe disposes of its own Evil when Aztec-Lawrence Bird of Heaven castrates the threatening Snake, the worm in the Apple of the World, wrenching Jackie out of innocence into puberty’s dark, double reality, sin became real (though at the end the rose is entwined in the hair—By God). What is this fantastic wrestle with Evil, Knowledge, etc. to you NOW? Certainly, it’s no mere spoof, despite its trappings, but rather as if you fought through fear and guilt of Catholicism to acceptance of the befuddled, complex loneliness of pre-adult life. Is this all errant, PR crap on my part?
KEROUAC: The sperm is it, Satan. We always think of Snakes Spitting Venom. The Bird of Paradise takes care of all this by carrying it away, as will happen. As will happen in the Golden Eternity. And Catholicism has every good reason in the world to look upon life with guilt and even fear, as you would if you were watching Nero’s games or just a bullfight or an ordinary Congolese or even Zurich street riot. Now I’ve got a migraine.
HOLMES: Now relax a while; put on Pontificating Hat: Your statement, “I don’t know, and I don’t care, and it doesn’t make any difference” has been more misunderstood than anything you’ve said, always interpreted as a social-anti-credo, a disavowment, a know-nothingism. Though I think it says exactly what it means, can you add to it, comment on it, put it in its proper context?
KEROUAC: It’s just what you say to yourself when you cant figure it out any more, nothing, anything, and you have to give it up and make breakfast and carry on somehow, like everybody else in the world. It’s the despairing cry of a philosopher giving up, dont you all see that? Because . . . so what difference would it make if I, J. K., did know and did care to know and it did make a difference. —Alan Watts was jealous of this line, it enraged him at first. It’s pure Zen. It means “Well zen I dont know.” And I don’t know. I dont know why I killed that roaring mouse. —“Know-nothingism” is an expression which is used among specialists at Harvard and Princeton: if you dont know what Leuconostoc mesenterioides means, maybe you’re a big smart knower who knows what C to the sixth power and H to the fifth power, cubed, plus C-COOH, comes to, but I know something too:—Cooh you too. Thoreau went to Harvard.
HOLMES: You’ve said that each book is a “piece of the whole,” but how does each book come to you? Does a segment of The Experience coalesce in your imagination, seem to have “poetic” form or shape? Or does a single image come to you, perhaps an event at the center of the action, around which you group everything else that happened and seems to be germane? More or less as Faulkner once described the germination of Sound and Fury as the single image of a girl, shimmied up a tree, peeking in an upstairs window, her muddy drawers being observed by her little brother lower on the tree. He went on to discover what led up to, and away from, this single image. Comment on that in terms of your arbitrary cutting of the Legend into suitable lengths.
KEROUAC: Yes, the urge to write, the very tic that sprung pencil out for Doctor Sax germinated right smack from that “wrinkly tar” dream, just as Faulkner’s tree-girl image gave him a thrill to write his way into The Sound and the Fury, but I’d already pre-written and mediated the “plot” long before so I just rolled it right off in three weeks. However, I have to cut the “Duluoz Legend” into suitable chronological lengths—I just couldnt pour the whole thing into one mould, if I did it would be a big round ball instead of figures. I suppose Lipschitz thought of this, one final big round ball sitting on a pedestal. But no, he divided his ball. Would Mozart blam all the 86 keys of the piano at once with his 86 fingers? or divide his ball into suitable symphonies, concerti, sonatas, serenatas, masses, dances, oratorios . . .
HOLMES: What about spontaneous prose, “the book-movie” etc.? Tell me the whys of it, and when it came to you. I don’t need a JUSTIFICATION of it as a method; but Í’d like an EXPLANATION of why and how you arrived at it as your way; and when; I remember the an
al, Giroux, one-sentence-an-hour, Melville-of-the-Pierres, FIRST attempt at On the Road, that so boggled you (nights in Glennon’s reading enormous, complex, exfoliating sentences of pot-perception), and that finally led to you sitting down (in Chelsea with a roll of paper) to just BLOW the book; it seems the breakthru happens (as it does in Zen) out of that strive, anxiety, concentration on the koan, until finally a what-the-hell, not-for-me exasperation pushed you over the top into satori-prose, and simply putting-down-what-was-there in continual, unbroken onrush. Is true? Tell me the moody history of your style. (And rooftops of Mexico at the bottom of your self and the world, that turned you to poetry. Plus the goad of bop, words commensurate to the onrush of your mind; syllables to fit the elisions & veers of consciousness; how you found the bone—indeed, what the hell happened in Mexico, or was it there? I’m confused.)
KEROUAC: Bookmovies . . . I kept staring at the screen in movies but staring at the white electrical particles instead of the story, then I’d wake up and see there were actual events and noise going on with everybody in the audience avidly interested like children in a madhouse, in what was “going on.” Out of this profound insight into the art of the cinema, I decided to invent movies that would be complete movies but in words on a page, not just a scenario. They would be complete movies about the completeness of everything, with parentheses even. People would be able to look at my page and become the camera themselves and even see unphotographable moviettes within the movie. This is my most ambitious invention and is only the first step to the complete movie of the future when people will actually be able to see the movie going on in another man’s mind, with headsets connected to encephalographic equipments, and instead of saying “Think I’ll read some Faulkner” you’ll say “Oh hum, think I’ll tune in some Faulkner” and adjust the Faulkner Telepath Tape and adjust your headphone nodules and just lie back and see and feel substantially what you see and feel in your own dreams, with variations. Tuning in on cretins will be especialy tasty at this time. There will be no more geniuses. Only Telepath Set repairmen. —Spontaneous prose explanation is in “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” all there, except the courage to really go ahead and do it came to me while I was listening to Lee Konitz take on “I Remember April” from the middle of it somehow, the “pithy middle eye,” and ripple and swim right out of it carrying it shining on his horn (all, all a long story) triumphant, the tune in his pocket, October night 1951. I swore in my notebook right there in the dim blue lights of Birdland “Blow As Deep As You Want To Blow.” . . . American writers would shrivel up and never write an honest word again if they listened to the critics who call everything silly no matter what it is—John, if critics say your work stinks it’s because they want it to stink and they can make it stink by scaring you into conformity with their comfortable little standards, standards so low that they can no longer be considered “dangerous” but set in place in their compartmental understanding—Do what they say, i.e., either die and get out of sight, or write their way—This leaves you no nub of heart—So the only way to continue is the way you’ve discovered—If you dont like what you write, start all over again, go back to the beginning—I say this with respect to narrative writing, not to research writing, of course—The mind is spontaneity and no doubt about that whatever and this is the only possible ethic for the future of man and his thinking and story writing—The rest is dishonesty, unintelligence, dullness, cant, repetitiousness, imitation of ignorance—How fast is spontaneity? Just as fast as God sends the statement, is all—No faster. And remember that a story is a poem and a poem is a story.