Various Artists
In his memoir Palm Sunday, Kurt Vonnegut tells a harrowing story about his son Mark meeting Jack Kerouac very late in Kerouac’s life: upon observing the young man’s bohemian work clothes and his duffel bag, Kerouac took him for yet another of the On the Road-inspired slumming, ranting, mooching hippies whom the writer hated more than Dr. Frankenstein hated his monster, and challenged the college boy to a fight. “But then Kerouac sat back down in his chair heavily,” Vonnegut writes, “shaking his head and saying over and over again, ‘Doesn’t understand me at all.’” The sad punch line is that Mark Vonnegut had never read Kerouac. And a sadder punch line is that though Dean Moriarty (aka Cody Pomeroy, aka Neal Cassady, the hero of On the Road and the great love of Kerouac’s life) got to ride off into immortality, his faithful road-trip buddy and fast-typing chronicler Sal Paradise (aka Jack Kerouac) died in 1969 an alcoholic and paranoid bigot who cared only for his mother, the first and last of the many interchangeable women who were embracing but silent presences throughout his fiction.
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And there is. But it’s not in the events of his books, it’s in his writing, of all places–Kerouac wanted to pair the wild energy of bop and the oceanic rhythms of drifting memory with the intellectual stimulation of literature, but also to stay true to his working-class roots by liberating literature from the intellectuals. He worked hard to do it, too, spending years jotting down everything that moved him, inventing ever more rigorous writing exercises for himself, and delving deeper into the work of writers he admired–Melville, Joyce, Thomas Wolfe, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, among others. Especially in his less commercialized works, like the long elegies Visions of Cody and Visions of Gerard and his dreamlike extended prose-poems Dr. Sax and The Town and the City, it’s remarkable how often he succeeded.
The artists are the usual suspects: original beats, rock artists who have experimented with literature, and writers who have experimented with rock. There are very few complete surprises. While this is obviously a star trip, it’s notable that many of the participants choose lesser-known pieces from Kerouac’s immense ouevre and handle them with intelligence. Not surprisingly, the most successful pieces are the ones that directly engage Kerouac’s text with an individual voice but a minimum of extraneous bohemianisms. The humble reading of an unpublished wistful childhood story by Steven Tyler (one of the real shockers) is actually a standout in this category, as is Juliana Hatfield’s playful rendering of “Silly Goofball Pomes.”
