Tristessa. What a beautiful name - you can't say it aloud wwithout feeling a sense of wonder, a sense of peace, a feeling that things are slowing down in the most perfect of ways. Yet this book (not sure it's a novel as it's not even a hundred pages yet not sure still it's a book as it's more like a film, a faded, dream sodden broken breaking film) is far from wonderous, far from peaceful and if pain is perfection then it's perfect indeed. Tristessa is what it's called and Tristessa is the name of the woman around whom Jack Kerouac bases this shattered piece of brilliance.
So what happens? What's the narrative? I could tell you (briefly) but it's not important. It would be like describing the meal of hungry man when what is really at stake is the unbelievable hunger.
I have to confess that where Jack Kerouac is concerned I'm somewhat narrow-minded. I adore every single word, dictionary-wise and made-up, he ever wrote. Yeah I see that perhaps, particularly in Tristessa more than any other of his works, that he was a voyeur, that he observed the poor and the pained, the destitute and the intoxicated through the eyes of an author rather than the eyes of a buddha helper compassionate man. There are times in Tristessa when I just cringed - this fallen drug-addled angel that just needed medicine and help but Jack just sulks when he thinks she won't let him make love to her. He should take her to the hospital yet he takes her to a bar and glares as she takes in the eyes of others. He wonders at her blood on his coat and thinks nothing of the fact she just walks away other than the fact he wants her in his bed.
Ask The Dust by John Fante is the archetypal novel of the struggling artist who is so wrapped up in his own wonder that he treats others like mere props upon a stage. Tristessa runs it close. In the former there is irony - in Tristessa there is just sadness.
Jack Kerouac, mate. You wrote the most honest stuff I ever read - paranoid, selfish, brutal, magnificent. You made up your own words and you broke yourself to pieces in the process.
As I read Tristessa I just wanted to sneak in and take Jack out of that mad Mexico drug madness freakdom and take him to a park and see the sky and feel breath and open up to the true unchaotic wonder. Tristessa saddened me beyond belief. That doesn't mean you shouldn't read it. It's a snapshot documentary time in the life of a man who in my own weird world will always be more real than the next step. And it will always be to books such as this that I will turn when I am entirely lost. At three bottles of wine for a tenner at the corner shop that is likely to be fairly often...
Get it from Amazon here...
Showing posts with label Beats. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Beats. Show all posts
Tuesday, 16 October 2012
Thursday, 19 April 2012
A Review of The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac
Although The Dharma Bums was published in 1958, the semi-fictionalised events it describes all occurred prior to the publication of On The Road a year earlier. On The Road was itself written in 1951 taking years to find a publisher. The interesting thing therefore about The Dharma Bums is that it describes Jack Kerouac (Ray Smith in the novel) before the fame of On The Road struck. And it literally did strike both with a suddenness and a force from which he would never truly recover.
The Dharma Bums is very much a novel about someone searching for a foothold in life, a way of being, of expressing yourself that is both true and honest but does not entirely lead to alienation from society. Jack Kerouac, in many of his novels, although this one in particular, is constantly battling with his yearning for spirituality and peace against the reckless nature that would ultimately lead to his death in 1969 at the age of 47.
Although narrated by Ray Smith (Jack Kerouac), the central character of the novel is Japhy Ryder (poet Gary Snyder). Japhy represents all that Ray strives to be - a woodsman, a mountain-climber, entrenched in Buddhism, a revered poet - and he still gets all the girls! Ray is forever following, literally, in Japhy's footsteps but he is never quite able to emulate him. Even when they make their beautifully described attempt to climb Matterhorn, Ray stops a hundred feet short whilst Japhy dances around on the peak.
When Ray is not with Japhy, he spends time hitch-hiking back to his mother and whilst there plays the part of the deep thinker, sleeping under the trees, going for long walks and trying to get his family to understand why lives the way he does. Ultimately his reasoning comes across as shallow and entirely out of context with the daily struggles of his sister and brother-in-law. Even when riding the rails or hitching lifts, Ray invariably has money in his pocket should he get tired of the travelling. And he is not always the most grateful of passengers, becoming angry on one occasion, having hitched a ride, when a mother gets baby food on his new rucksack. The whole dichotomy so familiar to so many of us is the putting into practice the spritual and humane beliefs we hold to be true. In Japhy Ryder we have someone who is able to do that more often than not. In Ray Smith we have a man who just falls short, a voyeur, a man who won't allow himself to fully let go.
As in Jack Kerouac's life, Ray Smith veers from veneration of the bodhisattva life-style to being a drunk, replete with paranoia and obnoxious traits that isolate himself from the very people he is trying to emulate.
When I first read The Dharma Bums many years ago I was influenced hugely by the idea of living a simple life, appreciating the wonders of natural beauty that abound everywhere we look and the possibility that an existence based on peace and tolerance was possible even in the modern society of tension and commerce. Reading it again now though it is the character of Ray Smith that really stands out. For in many ways I resemble him more than perhaps any other character in any other book I have read. And that is humbling to admit, believe me.
So The Dharma Bums is a special book for me. It began, when I first read it, a train of thought that led to me writing Tollesbury Time Forever - a novel about forgiveness and hope. Now it has given me the impetus to no longer be that voyeur who gives up a hundred feet short of the summit. Jack Kerouac died at 47 - lonely, shot to pieces, full of self-admonishment, having written the most honest, beautiful books I know. I'm nearly 43. When I go it won't be having drowned in a pool of cheap red wine, guilt and what might-have-beens - it will be because I have fallen off the mountain-top dancing like a crazy fool.
Where once I tried to emulate Jack Kerouac as he tried to emulate Gary Snider, I'm now just going to be me. I just wonder how long that will last - paticularly with the three bottles of wine for a tenner deal still on at the corner shop...
The Dharma Bums is very much a novel about someone searching for a foothold in life, a way of being, of expressing yourself that is both true and honest but does not entirely lead to alienation from society. Jack Kerouac, in many of his novels, although this one in particular, is constantly battling with his yearning for spirituality and peace against the reckless nature that would ultimately lead to his death in 1969 at the age of 47.
Although narrated by Ray Smith (Jack Kerouac), the central character of the novel is Japhy Ryder (poet Gary Snyder). Japhy represents all that Ray strives to be - a woodsman, a mountain-climber, entrenched in Buddhism, a revered poet - and he still gets all the girls! Ray is forever following, literally, in Japhy's footsteps but he is never quite able to emulate him. Even when they make their beautifully described attempt to climb Matterhorn, Ray stops a hundred feet short whilst Japhy dances around on the peak.
When Ray is not with Japhy, he spends time hitch-hiking back to his mother and whilst there plays the part of the deep thinker, sleeping under the trees, going for long walks and trying to get his family to understand why lives the way he does. Ultimately his reasoning comes across as shallow and entirely out of context with the daily struggles of his sister and brother-in-law. Even when riding the rails or hitching lifts, Ray invariably has money in his pocket should he get tired of the travelling. And he is not always the most grateful of passengers, becoming angry on one occasion, having hitched a ride, when a mother gets baby food on his new rucksack. The whole dichotomy so familiar to so many of us is the putting into practice the spritual and humane beliefs we hold to be true. In Japhy Ryder we have someone who is able to do that more often than not. In Ray Smith we have a man who just falls short, a voyeur, a man who won't allow himself to fully let go.
As in Jack Kerouac's life, Ray Smith veers from veneration of the bodhisattva life-style to being a drunk, replete with paranoia and obnoxious traits that isolate himself from the very people he is trying to emulate.
When I first read The Dharma Bums many years ago I was influenced hugely by the idea of living a simple life, appreciating the wonders of natural beauty that abound everywhere we look and the possibility that an existence based on peace and tolerance was possible even in the modern society of tension and commerce. Reading it again now though it is the character of Ray Smith that really stands out. For in many ways I resemble him more than perhaps any other character in any other book I have read. And that is humbling to admit, believe me.
So The Dharma Bums is a special book for me. It began, when I first read it, a train of thought that led to me writing Tollesbury Time Forever - a novel about forgiveness and hope. Now it has given me the impetus to no longer be that voyeur who gives up a hundred feet short of the summit. Jack Kerouac died at 47 - lonely, shot to pieces, full of self-admonishment, having written the most honest, beautiful books I know. I'm nearly 43. When I go it won't be having drowned in a pool of cheap red wine, guilt and what might-have-beens - it will be because I have fallen off the mountain-top dancing like a crazy fool.
Where once I tried to emulate Jack Kerouac as he tried to emulate Gary Snider, I'm now just going to be me. I just wonder how long that will last - paticularly with the three bottles of wine for a tenner deal still on at the corner shop...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)