Robert Giroux - R.I.P

I pause to note the passing of a giant in the field of literature -- editor and publisher, Robert Giroux. The list of authors provided in the New York Times obituary to which I have linked is a list of authors all of whom I have read over the years, and all of whom I can heartily recommend.

Strangely enough, only yesterday morning I came across an entry in Jack Kerouac's Buddhist notebooks, collected as Some of the Dharma, that Knopf had just rejected On the Road (referred to here by Kerouac's working title The Beat Generation) :

JAN.11'55---I just found out that BEAT GENERATION was rejected by Knopf. As to writing stories that the publishers approve of, it would no longer be free writing. I write the Dharma freely and unsystematically for the purpose of teaching others and keeping myself mindful of the teaching.

Giroux also rejected On the Road, while working at Harcourt, Brace; one that got away.

But, please -- read the Times obit and note the authors listed whose careers Giroux facilitated and whose books Giroux promoted. Take a look at any of them with whom you're not familiar; there's not a clunker on the list.

Readings: Last Thoughts on The Road

In her introduction to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road: the Original Scroll, entitled Rewriting America – Kerouac’s Nation of “Underground Monsters”, author Penny Vlagopoulos notes that, “Kerouac felt too deeply the gaps between what life was supposed to be and how people actually lived it.” And, “Kerouac felt a profound sense of loneliness; this stemmed partly from a spiritual understanding of human suffering that was so embedded in his Catholic upbringing, and partly from his artist’s interiority, which heightened the sense of his difference even as it produced solidarity between him and people who were “mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved.”

It must always be remembered, in reading Kerouac, that—as he said of the character, Dean Moriarty [Neal Cassady]—“He was BEAT—the root, the soul of Beatific.” On the Road, beneath the surface level of drugs, sex, and endless “kicks”, is a spiritual work.

The “road” in On the Road, is perhaps not exactly the road taken by Christian in The Pilgrim’s Progress, or the road taken by the pilgrims of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; but it is, in a very real way, related to both. Or, perhaps, On the Road is better understood as the record of a quest; if not for the Grail, then for life Itself—life in the Now.

All of this is most evident in the passages below. At the end of Kerouac’s stint behind the wheel, concerning which I posted below, the whole mad crew ends up, blasted on weed, in a Mexican whorehouse. Kerouac here confesses that,

I was trying to break loose [from “another gal…who clung to my neck like a leech”] to get at a 16 year old colored girl who sat gloomily inspecting her navel through an opening in her flimsy dress” [p.387]

As he continues to observe, At one point the mother of the little colored girl—not colored but dark—came in to hold a brief and mournful convocation with her daughter. When I saw that I was too ashamed to try for the one I really wanted. [p.388]

Kerouac’s meditation on the girl ends with this:

I couldn’t take my eyes off the little dark girl…and the way, like a Queen, she walked around and was even reduced by the sullen bartender to menial tasks such as bringing us drinks. Of all the girls in there she needed the money most; maybe her mother had come to get money from her for her little infant sisters and brothers. It never, never occurred to me to just approach her and give her some money. I have a feeling she would have taken it with a degree of scorn and scorn from the likes of her made me flinch. …Strange that Neal and Frank also failed to approach her; her unimpeachable dignity was the thing that made her poor in a wild old whorehouse, and think of that. At one point I saw Neal leaning like a statue toward her, ready to fly, and befuddlement cross his face as she glanced coolly and imperiously his way and he stopped rubbing his belly and gaped and finally bowed his head. For she was the queen.

This is the key: …her unimpeachable dignity was the thing that made her poor in a wild old whorehouse, and think of that.

And think of that, indeed. Think of it in terms of Kerouac’s deeply ingrained Christian sentiment. This dark girl, whom he loves--in the midst of what can only be understood as a hellish scene--without being able to approach, is worthy of such respect and devotion because she is able to be in the whorehouse without being of the whorehouse.

May I, through the gloom of my personal whorehouse, be granted the grace to see--as did Kerouac--that beautiful child as an exemplar.

Readings: Through Angel Eyes

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection
to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night

I am very close to the end of On the Road: The Original Scroll and I am beginning to experience the separation anxiety, beginning to miss living in it already. The passage that follows is from the last road trip; a hell-bent dash by jalopy from Denver, all the way to Mexico City. Kerouac’s great themes, the endless road, the search for the self at the heart of existence, the quest of the missing father, are present here; as is the raw ecstasy of pure being. Kerouac muses on the nature of human existence as he drives into the heart of Mexico, having taken the wheel from the original angelheaded hipster, his exhausted friend, Neal Cassady:

The boys were sleeping and I was alone in my eternity at the wheel and the road ran straight as an arrow. Not like driving across Carolina, or Texas, or Arizona, or Illinois; but like driving across the world and into the places where we would finally learn ourselves among the worldwide fellaheen people of the world, the Indians that stretch in a belt around the world from Malaya to India to Arabia to Morocco to Mexico and over to Polynesia. For these people were unmistakably Indians and were not at all like the Pedros and Panchos of silly American lore---they were not fools, they were not clowns---they were great grave Indians and they were the source of mankind and the fathers of it. And they knew this when we passed, ostensibly self-important moneybag Americans on a lark in their land, they knew who was the father and who was the son of antique life on earth, and made no comment. For when destruction comes to the world people will still stare with the same eyes from the caves of Mexico as well as from the caves of Bali, where it all began and where Adam was suckled and taught to know. These were my growing thoughts as I drove the car…

This may not be sound anthropology, but it is kick-ass poetry, Jim.

Readings: American Samsara

Samsara is derived from "to flow together," to go or pass through states, to wander. Mostly a great revolving door between life and death and a new life reincarnated…. – Wikipedia

From On the Road: the Original Scoll by Jack Kerouac:

What is the Mississippi River?---a washed clod in the rainy night, a soft plopping from drooping Missouri banks, a dissolving, a riding of the tide down the eternal waterbed, a contribution to brown foams, a voyaging past endless vales and trees and levees, down along, down along, by Memphis, Greenville, Eudora, Vicksburg, Natchez, Port Allen, and Port Orleans and Point of the Deltas, by Potash, Venice and the Night’s Great Gulf, and out. So the stars shine warm in the Gulf of Mexico at night. From the soft and thunderous Carib comes electricity, and from the Continental Divide where rain and rivers are decided come swirls, and the little raindrop that in Dakota fell and gathered mud and roses arises resurrected from the sea and flies on back to go and bloom again in waving mells of the Mississippi’s bed, and lives again.

Go ahead, ignore the dharma--you bums.

Readings: ...And One More for the Road

After Thursday's trip to the swamp, I feel the need for an intellectual shower bath. I don't mean to discourage further discussion of my political rant, but I want also to get back to "home base," as it were.

On my Christmas gift wish list this year was On the Road: the Original Scroll, published to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Jack Kerouac's seminal novel of the Beat Generation. This edition presents the novel as it was originally typed-out, in the space of a few long days and nights, on a roll of taped-together sheets of tracing paper, 120-feet long. This new edition publishes for the first time Kerouac's manuscript, minus the good services of the editors of the version that was eventually released to the public in 1957. As spontaneity is one of the key philosophical tenets of Kerouac's artistic m.o., the Original Scroll is a book I am very keen to experience first-hand.

Unfortunately, my request was misunderstood, and I found the 50th Anniversary hardcover re-release of the edited version under the tree instead. While that is a nice book to have, I still wanted the Original Scroll--so I bought it this past week with some cash I had received for my recent birthday.

There is an introduction, written by the book's editor, Howard Cunnell, which nicely sums up what I believe to be most important in Kerouac's body of work:

Long before his readings in Buddhism Kerouac was intuitively attempting to reconcile a worldview that saw his lived experience both as one made painfully meaningless by his hard-wired knowledge of mortality and as one to be celebrated in every detail and at every moment precisely because, as he writes in Visions of Cody, we are soon "all going to die." Kerouac escapes this encircling loss in the act of writing. To say what happened. To get it down before it is lost. To make mythology from your life and from the lives of your friends. This urgency pushes Kerouac to strip his writing of "made-up" stories. Life's impermanence and the inevitability of suffering inform and motivate Kerouac's heightened sensitivity and responsiveness to the phenomenal world. What Allen Ginsberg called his "open heart" and Kerouac himself described as being "submissive to everything, open, listening" results in a body of fiction in which the representation of the magical nature of entrancing and life-affirming fleeting detail is the outstanding feature.

Kerouac was about living in the moment. He was about being awake(!).

I am also reading the novel WE by Russian author, Eugene Zamiatin. As the synopsis on the book's cover states, WE is: "Recognized as the inspiration for George Orwell's famous 1984." The synopsis goes on to state, WE tells the story of the minutely organized United State, where all citizens are not individuals but only he-Numbers and she-Numbers existing in identical glass apartments with every action regulated by the "Table of Hours." It is a community dedicated to the proposition that freedom and happiness are incompatible; that most men believe their freedom to be more than fair exchange for a high level of materialistic happiness.

It's kind of a prescient critique of the Bush administration's neocon philosophy.

These two books represent opposite poles. It is going to be interesting to read them simultaneously.