Jack Kerouac is kind of annoying

ON THE ROAD...with Mom

This book may come as a real shock to those whom have a preconcieved notion about what the "Beats" were all about, and it may also be a shock for those more familiar with the jubilant ecstatic life affirmations of On The Road or even The Dharma Bums.

In this book Jack goes on the road (with Mom), has sex with a fourteen year old mexican prostitute, meets up with a Neal (Cody) whom is a far fly from his On the Road days and is tied down with a wife + three kids and a job, meets Salidore Dali + William Carlos WIlliams + Carl Sandburg, gets his book published, is constantly compulsively depressed, has a paradigmatic consciousness flip after a huge dose of opium, meets up with junkie Burroughs in Tangiers (whom is lovelorn over Ginsburg), and kicks Buddhism down a notch for a more hardcore return to Christianity.

As others have noted, this book follows directly after the Dharma Bums and that book should be read first. What follows is Jack's experiences on the mountain which, contrary to his expectations in Dharma Bums, is almost like a nightmare prison sentence.

After he leaves the mountain, we enter into the first half of the book (his return to California), which is a bit ponderous and slow (but never boring). We are treated to a tortureous description of his day of betting at a race track with Neal and Corso.

The book picks up speed bigtime when he goes back on the road and then travels internationally.

His prose is brilliant and poetic and his observations remarkable and I think this book is brilliant; but it is also tremendously sad, deeply frusterated and lost, spiritually drained and destitute, and there is little ecstacy to be had. By the end of the book, and with the return of his compulsive obsession with Christianity, one can really sense the beginning of his psychosis and alcoholism and mommy obsession which would spell his death by age fourty seven.

I'm not sure to whom this book should be recommended- for I'm not sure whom would care about this descent of an icon for joy. It should definetly be read by those whom have read On the Road and the Dharma Bums, but also by those whom think that the counter cultural movements were all done by joy seeking thrill addicts without a care in the world. After reading this book, it would seem that caring is something that was not is short supply amongst these bands of fellow travelers on the way.

Also, those whom felt that the beats were all leftist radicals, anarchists and communists would be very suprised to read in this book that Jack almost seems like a rightist in many regards. He reads a book on the atrocities of communism on the mountain, he constantly is remarking about totalitarian regimes (in particular- Russia), brings up Mao (at a time when some on the left felt he may have been a hero and the crimes against "reactionaries" hadn't yet come into light) and Castro (while others went off to visit Cuba jack said "I'm not concerned with the Cuban Revolution, I'm concerned with the American Revolution.") and even Zapata is discussed in negative diatribes. He was also a fan of Ike. He spends far more time bitching about leftist than he does about rightists. He also has some special scorn put aside for the common hipster, the mass of "beats" whom came after.

Very moving, sad, beautiful, profound, funny, poetic- a treasure from a real man at the start of his turn into a caricature by the mass media. By the end, when he drags his mother to california and he doesn't have hardly a nickel, he truely does seem like a little boy lost, crushed still by the death of his brother Gerard and his father whom he found, crushed by all the love lost, by all the dreams evaporated.

Evey place he goes, he believes that happiness may lie at the next stop- but once he gets there, there is only sadness once again. At first he wants to return to the mountain on which he'd felt so trapped, but by the end of the book, he just wants to return to the womb.

This was an absolute acid trip of a book. My feelings toward it oscillated between feeling like the sentences came from a genius and feeling like the sentences fell from actual random sentence generator

It is hard to rate this book using the stars method and I went back and forth between 3 and 4, but ultimately settled on 3. If you like Kerouac for the reasons that I do: contemporaneous prose and poetry, a historical period piece of 1940s and 1950s counterculture, alternative "beat" lifestyle chronicles, elements of Buddhist thought and Kerouac's own Catholic mysticism in "philosophical" meditations, then you will probably like this book, and I did like it. But like Kerouac's chronicles in Desolation Angels, it comes with highs and lows.

Some of the book is beautiful and touching, as Kerouac might say "inifinitely tender," but some of it is rambling and without structure or meaning (even more than other Kerouac books). I think that Kerouac's best book is the Dharma Bums followed by on the Road. I haven't read all of his books, but I am making my way through them. Desolation Angels feels like an immensely key link in Kerouac's work to understand the changes in him, his life, and his writing that takes us from the Dharma Bums and On the Road eventually to Big Sur and the alcoholic tragedy that is Satori in Paris.

As self described by Kerouac, at the end of Desolation Angels, he is sick of his old lifestlye and the movement that he became so closely associated with: the wanderings, the drunken poets and writers, living "beat", and wants tranquility, solitude, and to be with his mother and family. You can feel this in the pages and structures of the book as well. He spends much of the book writing about a drunken week long bender in San Francisco and only a few short pages at the end to his time in Morocco, France, and England. By the time he gets to the far more interesting parts of his story, he is sick and tired of travel and new experiences and it is as if he cannot bring himself to write more about his time abroad than the bare minimum.

Kerouac's journey from the mountain top of Desolation Peak to San Francisco, his time in Mexico, brief stints in New York, Morocco, France, and England are all immensely entertaining as well as at the end his cross-country road trip with his mother, as well as the inclusion of more Ginsberg in this novel, who takes the sort of role that Cody Pomeray or Gary Snyder of On the Road and the Dharma Bums took. But the first 60 pages (seriously, you might want to skip the first 60 pages) on Desolation Peak and much of the drunken time in San Francisco is I think sadly emblematic of Kerouac's later life: lost, without meaning, mentally unwell and unstable, disillusioned by Buddhism, and his descent into alcoholism that ultimately took his creative drive, wonder at life, and would be the cause of his death.

Jack Kerouac is a genius. And this book is just another clear, outstanding proof of that.
I found it incredibly challenging to get to grips with it at the beginning. The language, the pace, the rhythm of the book is something I had never encountered before, and therefore, could not expect. I forced myself to keep going, because even though it was hard and it made my head ache and my mind go into other unwinding circles, I knew I had to keep going. So I re-read some pages, went back again to certain parts and I gradually and instinctively shaped my thoughts to the author's. I always believe reading somebody's work is challenging because we are essentially entering their mind, which naturally works differently to our own. The struggle is greater when what we are faced with is as unique and exceptional as Jack Kerouac's work. He is effortlessly capable to picture not just events and feelings and thoughts, but atmospheres, the spontaneity of how those atmospheres are created thanks to some friends, wine, words and just pure circumstance. Oh, it is crazy and surreal and so distant to what I can ever imagine myself living to the point that it is much clearer than what I actually know about life.
I loved the sincerity. And I don't usually use the word "love" to express any kind of opinion on books or art I particularly enjoy. But it is safe to say I did "love" Jack Kerouac's sincerity because it made me feel full and empty at the same time and there is no better way of explaining it than using this pretentious paradox.

What I will remember of this book are probably a few words like "wake up", "bliss" and "void" and "torture", "hunger"... "desolation" and "angels". And what beautiful words to remember! This is what I'll think as I approach other books and other minds, knowing they will never be quite the same after reading Jack Kerouac's dry, overwhelmed and pitiless soul.

A troubled, tender soul searching desperately for peace in desolation

I, like many others, found Desolation Angels after reading On The Road.
If you're expecting this to be an off-shoot of On The Road, you'd be wrong.
This book is a journey into the mind of Kerouac. Some call him genius, some madman, but I don't think you can truly define him in any one catagory.
This book is no easy task. It takes a lot of thinking and a lot of patience to get through, but it's well worth the effort in the end.

this whole book was kerouac oscillating between the high of "once i attain the buddha nature (detachment and simultaneous perfect harmony with all things) it's over for y'all" and the low of being overwhelmed by the horror of holding that connection (as in crying over a bug dying in a coat of fresh paint) and yeah i owe him an apology i loved this. much better than on the road, just as fast but there was something a more crystallised at the center of this. and not to be me but i do think it was the buddhism/realisation of the fact that everything is temporary but goes around forever and ever and what the hell do you do when you love life this much and also you used to be catholic and have the great looming sense you're doing it all wrong

— "Sunday morning, I empty of my little tricks to make life more livable. An empty orphan sitting nowhere, sick and crying. Like dying I saw all the years flash by, all the efforts my father had made to make living something to be interested about but only ending in death, blank death in the glare of automobile day, automobile cemeteries, whole parking lots of cemeteries everywhere. I saw the glum faces of my mother, of Irwin, of Julien, of Ruth, all trying to make it go on believing without hope. [...] I remembered the enormous despair of when I was 24 sitting in my mother's house all day while she worked in the shoe factory, in fact sitting in my father's death chair, staring like a bust of Goethe at nothing. Getting up once in a while to plunk sonatas on the piano, sonatas of my own spontaneous invention, then falling on the bed crying. Looking out the window at the glare of automobiles on Crossbay Boulevard. Bending my head over my first novel, too sick to go on. Wondering about Goldsmith and Johnson how they burped sorrow by their firesides in a life that was too long. That's what my father told me the night before he died, 'Life is too long.'"

I have struggled with this book in the past. The beginning always seemed to overwhelmingly self-pitying as to put me off. I walked away from it twice in the past. It put me off this time, too.

However.

Coming back to Kerouac now, at this point in my own life, I felt a strange dissociative closeness to Kerouac. I found a deep pity for someone who didn’t manage to figure out what so many others have throughout history: peace and purpose.

His own demons come to the forefront in Desolation Angels and we, along with him, have to reckon with the fact that with all of his doing he couldn’t figure out the simple act of being.

In a sense, he’s trapped by his own fears of age and death, dependent on the idea that life must be one sustained moment of deep understanding.

It makes so much sense now why his life went the way it did. He was trying to find the definitive guide to show him how to exist without that sustained bliss of knowledge. He ignored the warnings and signposts that perpetual youth is only a dream.

And he was left with the sense of desolation.

Desolation Angels contains everything that you've come to expect from Kerouac, from the stream-of-consciousness jazz-like rhythm of his beatnik writing to the way that he chronicles the lives of himself and his friends in 1950s America.

The book begins with a pensive Kerouac atop a mountain, Jack's record of a long, lonely summer spent fire-watching. After this period of desolation, he returns to the bright lights of the big cities to meet up with his friends, many of whom were high-profile literary figures even at the time.

Expect to see plenty of familiar faces disguised behind new names, like Allen Ginsberg as Irwin Garden, William Burroughs as Bull Hubbard, Neal Cassady as Cody Pomeray, Gregory Corso as Raphael Urso, Peter Orlovski as Simon Darlovsky and Gary Snyder as Jarry Wagner. William Carlos Williams even makes an appearance as 'Dr. Williams'.

Kerouac's style can be difficult to concentrate on for a long period of time, but it was just right for me to read on the bus on my daily commute. The book is split in to two sections, and these two sections are split further in to dozens of short chapters. Actually, this approach compliments Kerouac's storytelling well, as the pauses help to make the novel feel more like a conversation.

As with most of Kerouac's writing, this was difficult to categorise - in the end, I had to plump for both 'fiction' and 'non-fiction'. While his books are, essentially, non-fiction, occasional additions and the changing of the names is enough to qualify the work as semi-autobiographical. Frequent readers will notice that the aliases that he uses sometimes change from novel to novel - Cody Pomeray, for example, was Dean Moriarty in On the Road. Apparently, this is because of the objections of some of his publishers.

While Desolation Angels starts off slowly, it helps to convey the sense of loneliness and isolation that Kerouac was feeling while he whiled away the days on top of a mountainside. Just keep on reading - he soon comes down, and the introspective version of Kerouac that we see at the start of the novel quickly readjusts himself to life amongst his old friends. Let the drunken shenanigans commence.

Oh, and keep an eye out for Simon Darlovsky - he'll probably try to penetrate you.

Forget On The Road- this is Kerouac at his best. Combining the spiritual philosophies of the Dharma Bums, the road and parties and seeking of On The Road and the desolation and isolation of the human spirit in the abyss of nature of Big Sur. To me, this is Jack's most accessible and balanced writing, not only for the content, but also for his lyrical prose being at its finest. Genius!

Fleeting Timelessness

'Because all these serious faces’ll drive you mad, the only meaning is without meaning– Music blends with the heartbeat universe and we forget the brain beat.'

'It’s me that’s changed and done all this and come and gone and complained and hurt and joyed and yelled, not the Void.'



n  Le cygne noir (1895) - William Degouve de Nuncquesn


n  In a nutshell, what truly put this autofiction work by Kerouac on a whole different level for me:n

1) The demanding, perilous and tireless confrontation with the self and the images of the self. Images originating both in the main character on the one hand and his relatives and friends on the other hand.


2) The fundamental scepticism as regards any form of essential value. Which supposes a strong certitude, or a form of faith.

'Sad understanding is what compassion means–I resign from the attempt to be happy. It's all discrimination anyway, you value this and devalue that and go up and down but if you were like the void you'd only stare into space and in that space though you'd see stiffnecked people in their favorite various displaytory furs [...] you'd still be staring into space for form is emptiness and emptiness is form'

See Wittgenstein: “If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.”

This book retraces an intimate fight against nihilism.

'Like dying I saw all the years flash by, all the efforts my father had made to make living something to be interested about but only ending in death, blank death in the glare of automobile day, automobile cemeteries, whole parking lots of cemeteries everywhere.'


'One look at the officials in the American Consulate where we went for dreary paper routines was enough to make you realize what was wrong with American “diplomacy” throughout the Fellaheen world:—stiff officious squares with contempt even for their own Americans who happened not to wear neckties, as tho a necktie or whatever it stands for meant anything to the hungry Berbers who came into Tangiers every Saturday morning on meek asses, like Christ, carrying baskets of pitiful fruit or dates, and returned at dusk in silhouetted parades along the hill by the railroad track. The railroad track where barefooted prophets still walked and taught the Koran to children along the way. Why didnt the American consul ever walk into the urchin hall where Mohammed Mayé sat smoking? or squat in behind empty buildings with old Arabs who talked with their hands? or any thing? Instead it’s all private limousines, hotel restaurants, parties in the suburbs, an endless phoney rejection in the name of “democracy” of all that’s pith and moment of every land.'


'At night at my desk in the shack I see the reflection of myself in the black window, a rugged faced man in a dirty ragged shirt, need-a-shave, frowny, lipped, eyed, haired, nosed, eared, handed, necked, adamsappled, eyebrowed, a reflection just with all behind it the void of 7000000000000 light years of infinite darkness riddled by arbitrary limited-idea light, and yet there's a twinkle in my eye and I sing bawdy songs about the moon in the alleys of Dublin, about vodka hoy hoy, and then said Mexico sundown-over-rocks songs about amor, corazón, and tequila - My desk is littered with papers, beautiful to look at thru half closed eyes the delicate milky litter of papers piled, like some old dream of a picture of papers, like papers piled on a desk in a cartoon, like a realistic scene from an old Russian film, and the oil lamp shadowing some in half - And looking at my face closer in the tin mirror, I see the blue eyes and sun red face and red lips and weekly beard and think: 'Courage it takes to live and face all this iron impasse of die-you-dool? Nah, when all is said and done it doesn't matter.' '

2bis) Kerouac looks for a more genuinely personal way of life, looking for his place, not a posture, but a part in life, looking for a place to call his own, values to call his own:

'It was a little sad. Bull would be too tired to go out so Irwin and Simon would call up to me from the garden just like little kids calling at your childhood window, “Jack-Kee!” which would bring tears to my eyes almost and force me to go down and join them. “Why are you so withdrawn all of a sudden!” cried Simon. I couldnt explain it without telling them they bored me as well as everything else, a strange thing to have to say to people you’ve spent years with, all the lacrimae rerum of sweet association across the hopeless world dark, so dont say anything.'


'My money came and it was time to go but there’s poor Irwin at midnight calling up to me from the garden “Come on down Jack-Kee, there’s a big bunch of hipsters and chicks from Paris in Bull’s room.” And just like in New York or Frisco or anywhere there they are all hunching around in marijuana smoke, talking, the cool girls with long thin legs in slacks, the men with goatees, all an enormous drag after all and at the time (1957) not even started yet officially with the name of “Beat Generation.” To think that I had so much to do with it, too, in fact at that very moment the manuscript of Road was being linotyped for imminent publication and I was already sick of the whole subject. Nothing can be more dreary than “coolness” (not Irwin’s cool, or Bull’s or Simon’s, which is natural quietness) but postured, actually secretly rigid coolness that covers up the fact that the character is unable to convey anything of force or interest, a kind of sociological coolness soon to become a fad up into the mass of middleclass youth for awhile. There’s even a kind of insultingness, probably unintentional, like when I said to the Paris girl just fresh she said from visiting a Persian Shah for Tiger hunt “Did you actually shoot the tiger yourself?” she gave me a cold look as tho I’d just tried to kiss her at the window of a Drama School. Or tried to trip the Huntress. Or something. But all I could do was sit on the edge of the bed in despair like Lazarus listening to their awful “likes” and “like you know” and “wow crazy” and “a wig, man” “a real gas”—All this was about to sprout out all over America even down to High School level and be attributed in part to my doing! But Irwin paid no attention to all that and just wanted to know what they were thinking anyway.'


'And now, after the experience on top of the mountain where I was alone for two months without being questioned or looked at by any single human being I began a complete turnabout in my feelings about life—I now wanted a reproduction of that absolute peace in the world of society but secretly greedy too for some of the pleasures of society (such as shows, sex, comforts, fine foods & drink), no such things on a mountain—I knew now that my life was a search for peace as an artist, but not only as an artist—As a man of contemplations rather than too many actions, in the old Tao Chinese sense of “Do Nothing” (Wu Wei) which is a way of life in itself more beautiful than any, a kind of cloistral fervor in the midst of mad ranting action-seekers of this or any other “modern” world—'


'I'm 34, regular looking, but in my jeans and eerie outfits people are scared to look at me because I really look like an escaped mental patient with enough physical strength and innate dog-sense to manage outside of an institution to feed myself and go from place to place in a world growing gradually narrower in its views about eccentricity every day. Walking thru towns in the middle of America I got stared at weirdly. I was bound to live my own way. The expression 'nonconformity' was something I'd vaguely heard about somewhere (Adler? Eric Fromm?). But I was determined to be glad! Dostoevsky said 'Give man his Utopia and he will deliberately destroy it with a grin' and I was determined with the same grin to disprove Dostoevsky!' '[...] since it’s impossible for everybody to be artists, to recommend my way of life as a philosophy suitable for everyone else—In this respect I’m an oddball, like Rembrandt—Rembrandt could paint the busy burghers as they posed after lunch, but at midnight while they slept to rest for another day’s work, Old Rembrandt was up in his study putting on light touches of darkness to his canvases—The burghers didnt expect Rembrandt to be anything else but an artist and therefore they didnt go knocking on his door at midnight and ask: “Why do you live like this, Rembrandt? Why are you alone tonight? What are you dreaming about?” So they didnt expect Rembrandt to turn around and say to them: “You must live like I do, in the philosophy of solitude, there’s no other way.”'


'And also dont think of me as a simple character—A lecher, a ship-jumper, a loafer, a conner of older women, even of queers, an idiot, nay a drunken baby Indian when drinking—Got socked everywhere and never socked back (except when young tough football player)—In fact, I dont even know what I was—Some kind of fevered being different as a snowflake. (Now talking like Simon, who comes up ahead.) In any case, a wondrous mess of contradictions (good enough, said Whitman) but more fit for Holy Russia of 19th Century than for this modern America of crew cuts and sullen faces in Pontiacs—'


'God how right Hemingway was when he said there was no remedy for life—and to think that negative little paper shuffling prissies should write condescending obituaries about a man who told the truth, nay who drew breath in pain to tell a tale like that!… No remedy but in my mind I raise a fist to High Heaven promising that I shall bull whip the first bastard who makes fun of human hopelessness anyway—I know it’s ridiculous to pray to my father that hunk of dung in a grave yet I pray to him anyway, what else shall I do? sneer? shuffle paper on a desk and burp with rationality? Ah thank God for all the Rationalists the worms and vermin got. Thank God for all the hate mongering political pamphleteers with no left or right to yell about in the Grave of Space. I say that we shall all be reborn with The Only One, that we will not be ourselves any more but simply the Companion of The Only One, and that’s what makes me go on, and my mother too. She has her rosary in the bus, dont deny her that, that’s her way of stating the fact. If there cant be love among men let there be love at least between men and God. Human courage is an opiate but opiates are human too. If God is an opiate so am I. Therefore eat me. Eat the night, the long desolate America between Sanford and Shlamford and Blamford and Crapford, eat the hematodes that hang parasitically from dreary southern trees, eat the blood in the ground, the dead Indians, the dead pioneers, the dead Fords and Pontiacs, the dead Mississippis, the dead arms of forlorn hopelessness washing underneath—Who are men, that they can insult men? Who are these people who wear pants and dresses and sneer? What am I talking about? I’m talking about human helplessness and unbelievable loneliness in the darkness of birth and death and asking “What is there to laugh about in that?” “How can you be clever in a meatgrinder?” “Who makes fun of misery?” There’s my mother a hunk of flesh that didnt ask to be born, sleeping restlessly, dreaming hopefully, beside her son who also didnt ask to be born, thinking desperately, praying hopelessly, in a bouncing earthly vehicle going from nowhere to nowhere, all in the night, worst of all for that matter all in noonday glare of bestial Gulf Coast roads—Where is the rock that will sustain us? Why are we here? What kind of crazy college would feature a seminar where people talk about hopelessness, forever?'


'A fine thing to say in this day and age! And especially with the wild life he was now leading that was going to end in tragedy in six months, as I’ll tell in a minute—A fine thing to be talking about angels in this day when common thieves smash the holy rosaries of their victims in the street … When the highest ideals on earth are based on the month and the day of some cruel bloody revolution, nay when the highest ideals are simply new reasons for murdering and despoiling people—And Angels?'

3) And this raging fight, against the very fundamental elements of reality, is fought by Kerouac with nothing but painful honesty, humanity, and humour, and writing.

'Raphael in the middle hearing nothing and seeing nothing but just looking straight ahead, like Buddha, and the driver of the Heavenly Vehicle (the full Oxcart Bullock White-as-Snow Number One Team) talking earnestly about numbers, waving with one hand, and the third person or angel listening with surprise.'


'“Random and Urso argue with me about my theory of absolute spontaneity. In the kitchen, Random takes out the Jack Daniel’s and says, “How can you get any refined or well-gestated thoughts into a spontaneous flow, as you call it? It can all end up in gibberish”. And that was no Harvard lie. But I said:
”If it’s gibberish, it’s gibberish. There’s a certain amount of control going on, like a man telling a story in a bar without interruptions or even one pause.”
– “Well, it’ll probably become a popular gimmick, but I prefer to look on my poetry as a craft.”
– “Craft is craft”
– “Yes, meaning?”
– “Meaning crafty. How can you confess your crafty soul in craft?'

It also reflects the part played by Kerouac during the writing/montage/composition of Naked Lunch.

And finally:

'Here now I’m telling about the most important person in this whole story and the best. I’ve noticed how most of my fellow writers all seem to “hate” their mothers and make big Freudian or sociological philosophies around that, in fact using it as the straight theme of their fantasies, or at least saying as much—I often wonder if they’ve ever slept till four in the afternoon and woke up to see their mother darning their socks in a sad window light, or come back from revolutionary horrors of weekends to see her mending the rips in a bloody shirt with quiet eternal bowed head over needle—And not with martyred pose of resentment, either, but actually seriously bemused over mending, the mending of torture and folly and all loss, mending the very days of your life with almost glad purposeful gravity—And when it’s cold she puts on that shawl, and mends on, and on the stove potatoes are burbling forever.'

n  Whistler's Mother (1871) - James McNeill Whistlern


Also read:

- Absurd, Transcendentalism and Nihilism:
Là-Bas
Earthly Powers
VALIS
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
Jude the Obscure
The Decay of the Angel
Essais

- Deep dive into the self:
The Book of Disquiet
L'Arrache-Cœur
La Déchéance d'un homme

- Materialism:
Contes Cruels
Exégèse Des Lieux Communs
Les Choses: Une histoire des années soixante
La Montagne morte de la vie
Le Déclin du courage
Into the Wild

- Other lives on the fringes of society:
I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft, Volume 1
I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft, Volume 2
Ham on Rye

- Drinking bouts & extravaganza:
Under the Volcano
Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises
Trainspotting

- Part from the Duluoz Legend cycle:
The Dharma Bums
On the Road: the Original Scroll
Big Sur



Ambient Soundtrack:
Soon - Yes