Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #372990 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-04
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.17" h x 4.84" w x 6.10" l, .64 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

Books in Canada
Allen Ginsberg isn’t the most reliable critic when it comes to evaluating the work of his friends-not just because of understandable personal loyalty, but also because of a tendency to retrospectively view everything that the Beat Generation wrote or said as all a part of the same carefully calculated and concentrated attempt to transform American literature, as opposed to the accumulated successes and failures of what Jack Kerouac once described as “just a bunch of guys trying to get laid.” In a letter from 1952, for example, Kerouac’s Visions of Cody is lamented as “a holy mess-it’s great all right, but he did everything he could to fuck it up with a lot of meaningless bullshit I think, page after page of surrealist free association that don’t make sense to anybody except someone who has blown Jack. Twenty years later, however, in his essay “The Visions of the Great Rememberer”, Visions of Cody is revered by Ginsberg as “a work of primitive genius that stands next to Douanier Rousseau, and sits well beside Tom Wolfe’s Time and [the] River (which Thos. Mann from his European Eminence said was the great prose of America) & sits beside Tolstoi for its prayers.” From meaningless bullshit to a Tolstoyesque minor masterpiece: literary history is written by those who win the public relations war.
Whatever the ultimate aesthetic worth of Kerouac’s sentences-a question that has to be asked eventually, regardless of their undeniable uniqueness-give Ginsberg credit for at least recognizing their essential source. From “Kerouac” (1971): “Most prose writers aren’t even aware that the sentence they write has a sound, are not even concerned with sound in prose . . . Kerouac was the first writer I met who heard his own sentences as if they were musical, rhythmical constructions, and who could follow the sequence of sentences that make up the paragraph as if he were listening to a little jazz riff.” Kerouac was keenly aware, in other words, of style, and of his own style in particular.
Defining literary style is almost as difficult as defining soul, but Llewelyn Powys, a mostly forgotten British poet of the early 20th century, probably did the job as well as anyone when he claimed that “style is the ultimate expression of the author’s unique spiritual consciousness. This spiritual consciousness has been arrived at through various influences. Ancestry has bequeathed to it a certain fundamental disposition, environment has thickened this congenital inclination, and chance temperament of each individual has flashed it into life out of nowhere.” Flaubert-about as un-Beat a writer as can be imagined-put it more succinctly: “The style is the man.” To understand Jack Kerouac’s style, we need to understand Jack Kerouac the man.
Some commentators have made much of Kerouac’s Catholicism as a requisite aspect of his mature prose style, particularly the act of confession as a sort of oral embodiment of his theory of spontaneous prose-“allowing [the] sub-conscious to admit in [its] own uninhibited . . . language what conscious art would censor” (from “Belief and Technique in Modern Prose”). Kerouac, however, was more of a Catholic (that is, he hadn’t embraced Buddhism yet) when he wrote the Hemingway- and Saroyan-derivative juvenilia of his youth (and, later, his heavily Thomas Wolfe-influenced first novel, The Town and the City) than he was when his mature, “confessional” style blossomed. The first major building block in the development of Kerouac’s fully developed prose style wasn’t a religion or a philosophy or even a book, but the letters he received from a former Denver juvenile delinquent and future San Quentin inmate.

“I got the idea for the spontaneous style of On the Road from seeing how good old Neal Cassady wrote his letters to me, all first person, fast, mad, confessional, completely serious, all detailed . . . Cassady also began his early youthful writing with attempts at slow, painstaking, and-all-that-crap craft business, but got sick of it like I did, seeing it wasn’t getting out his guts and heart the way it felt like coming out. But I got the flash from his style.”

The day after Kerouac received a particularly inspiring Cassady letter (the so-called “Joan Anderson letter” of December 23, 1950), crammed full of “poolhall musings, your excruciating details about streets, appointment times, hotel rooms, bar locations, window measurements, smells, heights of trees,” he vowed in a return letter: “[I] have come to believe, like you, [that] bullshit is bullshit . . . Neal, I hereby renounce all fiction [italics mine] . . . I hope I will become more interesting and less literary as I go along and proceed to the actual truth of my life.” The rushing, compelling immediacy of Cassady’s “un-literary” prose becomes, for Kerouac, the catalyst to his very literary metamorphoses, the transformation from a competent, careful, craft-conscious “fiction” writer into a fully committed confessor who has “nothing to offer but the words that spring from my heart and mind in this enormous story.”
Approximately six months later, Kerouac abandoned the inaugural, conventional draft of On the Road he’d begun in 1948 and started an entirely new version of what became the published text of 1957. “A complete departure from Town & City,” as he described it to Cassady, “and in fact from previous American Lit,” it would be written all in one continuous paragraph of about 120,000 words, using all of the original names, places, and events. It was almost immediately rejected by Harcourt, Brace, the publisher of The Town and the City, because, Kerouac told Cassady, “Harcourt expected me to write AGAIN like Town & City and this thing [is] so new and unusual and controversial and censorable (with hipsters, weed, fags, etc.) they won’t accept.” Angry but unbowed-he insisted, “On the Road is a very great book, but I may have to end up daring publishers to publish it . . . and if [publishers] insist on cutting it up to make the ‘story’ more intelligible I’ll refuse”-Kerouac continued not so much rewriting the manuscript as redefining and refining his new style, in the process transforming the earlier material from “just a horizontal study of travels on the road” to “a vertical, metaphysical study” of Cassady (now the hero of the book).
Along with crucial concurrent experiments with jazz and drugs (primarily marijuana and amphetamines), extremely congenial models and aids in the gradual loosening up of a previously overly linear and too-patient prose style, the final, central influence on Kerouac’s “finally-at-last-found style and hope” transpired over a Chinese dinner near the Columbia campus in the course of a conversation with an old friend and architectural student, Ed White, who recalled: “I think I was actually using a sketch pad then, 1951, and just suggested that he [Kerouac] could do the same with notes. I think he thought about it. I don’t think he said much about it, but then began carrying his little notebooks around, filling them up.”
Sketching with words, much as a visual artist would with line and shade, became for Keroauc the final piece in the construction of his spontaneous prose methodology. Writing to Ginsberg, Kerouac explained how

“I began sketching everything in sight, so that On the Road took its turn from conventional narrative survey of road trips etc. into a big multi-dimensional conscious and subconscious character invocation of Neal in his whirlwinds. Sketching . . . activates [everything] in front of you in myriad profusion, you just have to purify your mind and let it pour the words (which effortless angels of the vision fly when you stand in front of reality) and write with 100% personal honesty . . . and slap it all down shameless, willynilly, rapidly. It’s the only way to write.”

And now, with the publication of Book of Sketches, non-scholars have easy access to the notebooks that Kerouac carried around with him from the summer of 1952 until the end of 1954. Unfortunately, without the sort of background outlined above-providing the chronological context of the sketches and explicating their role in the evolution of Kerouac’s style-Book of Sketches is, as a purely reading experience, less than absorbing, even for dedicated Kerouacians. In place of such a background, we get, instead, a very short introduction by visual artist George Condo whose comments range from the staggeringly banal (“Read this Book of Sketches and you’ll be amazed at what a genius Jack Kerouac was”), to the simply erroneous (“These poems just breathe and flow”-the frontispiece to the entire collection, reproduced in Kerouac’s own hand, reads: ‘Book of Sketches: Proving that sketches ain’t verse But Only What Is’), to the frankly bizarre (“Only Jack and Vincent Van Gogh told the inner truth”). Penguin’s marketing strategy seems to have been to ignore both what Book of Sketches actually is (linguistic sketches) and what their value is (historical and scholarly) in favour of what they want them to be (previously unpublished poems) and hope that no one notices.
Kerouac’s finest work often oscillates between the appeal and the limitations of the freest of free jazz-intoxicating freedom alternating with bewildering frenzy-and he is, above all else, a linguistic liberator, allowing-and, at his best, compelling-his readers to get off their asses at the back of the club and pick up their own instruments and join him up on stage to play their own minds, bodies, souls, lives. Understood this way, Book of Sketches is best viewed as a kind of bootleg tape of a future master musician still learning his art form. When Kerouac sketches “Cold fog winds blowing/from the wreathed hills/of houses, I can see/the blazing fog shagging/over from old Potato Patch/in a cold whipped blue,” it’s only interesting if you’ve already got all the albums and are curious about how the artist got where he did and where he came from when he did it. The penultimate paragraph from Tristessa, on the other hand-“I’ll go light candles to the Madonna, I’ll paint the Madonna, and eat ice cream, benny and bread-‘Dope and saltpork,’ as Bhikku Booboo said-I’ll go to the South of Sicily in the winter, and paint memories of Arles-I’ll buy a piano and Mozart me that-I’ll write long sad tales about the people in the legend of my life-This part is my part of the movie, let’s hear yours”-is, in essence, an injunction to remember the songs that one has heard over the preceding 124 pages only so as to forget them in order to write one’s own. Keroauc’s best readers do.
Ray Robertson (Books in Canada)

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Somewhere between diary, verbal sketchbook and play-by-play account of whatever passed before his eyes, this collection of poems transcribed from notebooks Kerouac kept in his pocket between 1952 and 1954 turns out to rank with his most interesting work. From clipped descriptions of America's underbelly ("a pile of junk, —& the/ girders of the viaduct have / great black bolt heads/ like knobs of a / sweating steel black/ city") to vague hipster prophesying ("The next great con-/ flict will be between/ Hip & Christ"), Whitmanesque embraces of his fellow man ("...I have cared/ for ye dutchmen"), love notes to famous beatnik friends ("O Allen Sad Allen Ah / Mystery") and sad, self-deprecating prayers ("Drink is good for/ love — good for/ music — let it/ be good for writing"), Kerouac hits all the notes for which he and his fellow beats are known. While not everything here is golden, the immediacy and unpretentiousness of this off-the-cuff writing makes it an intimate glimpse into the consciousness of a man who simply couldn't stop observing. A short, aggrandizing introduction by painter George Condo sets the tone. (Apr.)
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From Booklist
Kerouac admirers know of the legendary writer's habit of carrying a small notebook in his shirt pocket to jot down his impressions. But it is not common knowledge that this peripatetic observer typed up the contents of the journals he filled from mid-1952 through 1954 to create a manuscript he titled Book of Sketches. This collection of in-the-moment jottings, the literary equivalent of rapidly executed drawings, is now published for the first time. Whitmanesque in his embrace of life, painterly in his details, and enthralled by the texture of language, Kerouac describes the "longroar of sea," hitchhiking in North Carolina, and finding himself naked among trees in Mexico, suffering "the terrible benzedrine / depression after big / night of drinking." He remembers "childhood dreams," wishes for a woman, marvels over the unexpected beauty of a Denver barbershop, and frets over "TV stupidities" and "Americans / who only think in / terms of paranoia & oil." Restless, receptive, and hungry for divinity, Kerouac continues to feed our collective imagination in yet another treasure from his precious archives. Donna Seaman
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