The Dancing Shearer

My mother first met my father at a wedding, and afterwards they went to a Joe Brown dance at Dunedin's town hall.

My father was at the wedding because he worked on the family of the groom's farm shearing sheep. He sheared sheep to pay to go to university. My father didn't have a really great upbringing, he was brought up by a prickly Aunt, but he was decent at school, good at sport and a great ballroom dancer.

How did someone with his background get to be a good ballroom dancer? My mother wasn't sure. Anyway, when she first met him he had three records: Mantovani (Immortal Classics / Tangos) and Belafonte. So these are my dad's records from the 1950s.

When I was a teenager in Paraparaumu it was all the rage to fill up old 1.5 litre Coke bottles with water and leave them all over your front lawn. It was supposed to stop dogs doing their business on your property. It got to the point where every single lawn in Paraparaumu had these plastic Coke bottle droppings on them (usually with dog dropping in between). There were various theories why this was supposed to work. The only one I remember was that the dogs were supposed to be frightened of their reflection in the water bottle. Of course it didn't work. In fact it is utterly ridiculous. Nevertheless, thousands of adults littered their lawns with old Coke bottles in the belief that it did work.

This is very hard to understand twenty years later. Which is a bit like me trying to understand the world's fascination with Mantovani in the 1950s. It is completely lost on me. What kind of world are we dealing with?

Tango?

Back to this guy again? Mantovani and his sodding orchestra. I've listened to this a few times now and tried to like it but I really can't find much to like.

When I sat down with my mother and her records she put them into groups, and the first group she made was the Belafonte record and the two Mantovani records.

Why? Any ideas?

P.S. - There's no more Mantovani. I promise.

Calypso

This album is wonderful. Released in 1956 it was the first LP to sell a million copies in the USA. It is very hard to be depressed and listen to this album. What a great cover.

For years I had this memory of a book I had been made to read at school. It was about a boy living on an island and he was obsessed with Harry Belafonte. For a long time I had no idea who Harry Belafonte was (even though he was sitting in my mother's record collection). One day I dragged this out, dusted it off and gave it a spin. Brilliant.

Belafonte was heavily involved in the civil rights movement in the 1960s. He was mentioned in a History textbook that I use to teach about the civil rights movement. I played the class Day-O. They were horrified (but secretly enjoyed it). Belafonte is still around annoying American presidents by telling them they shoudn't be killing people in foreign countries, they should be building houses for the poor. Hillary Clinton refuses to talk to him. I mean, what an outrageous thing to say: houses for the poor! Sounds like communism to me. Follow this link and look at his comments.

Many years after I read that book I was talking about, still at school but now a teacher, I was leaving my classroom after the day was over. It was a windy, high-cloud day, rubbish blowing through the halls and across the field, and out of the sky dropped a book. Some student had thrown it on the classroom roof and it now flapped its way to my feet. It was called The Cay and I realised as I picked it up that this was the book I had read twenty years ago at school.

At left: Harry Elefonte, with Belafonte

Immortal Classics

So hugely does this album feature in the collection that we may need to come back to it.

Mantovani Plays the Immortal Classics, Decca (1953). I see that Mantovani also released four other albums in 1953 including I suspect the less than immortal An Album of Christmas Music.

It's hard not to make fun of Mantovani. Even the fan website is defensive:

Quality Light Orchestra Music is sometimes confused, with "background music, or "easy listening" music, it surely is not.... Another Mantovani friend of mine, when someone mentions "Elevator Music," states, "Show me that elevator!"

Have you ever heard of a category of music called "Quality Light Orchestra Music"? You will be relieved to hear that there is a new biography of Mantovani out. One reviewer cryptically comments:

As years pass, we realize that art glows at different angles when and where it is examined and experienced. And generally the world is looked at differently afterwards.

Sure.

The thing is I rather like this record. I like it for two reasons.

Firstly, I love things that were once enormously popular and have now vanished off the radar. Mantovani fits the bill. The first person to sell a million stereo records, phenomenonly popular in Britain and America, one of the recording stars of his era. Now he would be unknown to everyone under fifty.

Secondly, the little sticker my mother put on the album cover says: "Please keep this record. It is very old, but it takes me back to when I first met M. and contains two of my most loved pieces of music: Handel's Largo and Schubert's Ave Maria."

When I was a kid my mother had a tape of something like the London Pops Orchestra playing classical tunes. It had, predicatbly, a version of Pachelbel's Canon on it. It was an "interpretation" of that piece and it ended with a french horn. The thing is I never knew until I was a lot older that it was an interpretation and I got rather attached to that french horn. Even now when I hear versions of Canon I am always listening for the surging horn at the end, and always disappointed when it doesn't happen. My point is, with some songs it doesn't matter if the first version you hear of something is a supposedly "inferior" - it will become the version that matters most for you.

Not the one in the hat

Guess which one is Mum.

This might be my favourite photo of my mother. She looks very "contemporary" although this photo must be from the early 1960s. Of course it was the early 1960s in the far south of New Zealand so we should subtract at least a decade in terms of fashion. Looking at family photos from this period you get the strong feeling that living in Otago in the 1960s was not quite the same as living in America in the 1960s.

It was at this time that my mother was building her record collection with my father. What a strange, eclectic collection it is. It both proves and disproves the theory that if you wait long enough everything comes back into fashion.

Mum's Records

Awhile ago my mother gave me all her records. Some of them have little stickers on them. They say prosaic things like: "Return to W." and far more personal things such as "play at funeral". The first note is in case I get hit by a bus tomorrow and somebody going through my stuff knows not to biff the record. The second note, well, it's sort of obvious.

One day I took the record collection and a notebook to my mother's house and asked her to talk about each record as it came up. I thought it might be a bit of her history that I didn't know about. It's an odd record collection, and I wanted to know what fitted it all together. We spent an afternoon together. I suppose it's a kind of musical biography of my mother.

Eleanor

As I got older I got cockier. I started to think that I knew stuff. Turns out I didn't know anything. I've taken my lessons this year from Eleanor. She turned one today.

Lessons:

1. Even though I'm a misanthropist with a pessimistic view of human nature I learned that one of the first things we find out how to do after we're born is smile and laugh.
2. We take things for granted about being human. You have to learn how to do everything. You have to learn that you exist, that your hands are your hands, that you can move them, that you can do things with them. Every single one of us walking around, so sure of ourselves, so confident in our gestures and expressions, began not even knowing that we existed.
3. And I learned what unconditional love is.

Happy birthday, Eleanor.

Kids that steal books are cool kids

ONE


He complained to his friends that his only readers were the kids who stole his books from stores.

(p.286)

I went to the library yesterday to get books by Kerouac. There weren’t any on the shelf. I looked them up on the catalogue and the catalogue said that they were all kept at the desk. I went to the desk and asked for a book by Kerouac. The young girl behind the counter said “which one,” and then went and got the book I asked for. She went to a set of shelves groaning with Kerouac, picked out my book and handed it to me. “Why?” I asked. She sort of looked at me and then said: “Everybody steals them”. I was so surprised I forgot to look at the shelf of books-people-want-to-steal and see what other knick-able authors I should be reading.

Kerouac was right. His only readers were kids who stole his books (and former kids reliving their youth). Critics, well, they rarely liked Kerouac it would seem.

John Ciardi took him apart in Saturday Review, Robert Brustein went after him in ‘The Cult of Unthink’ in Horizon, John Updike parodied his style in a short story for the New Yorker, Truman Capote attacked him on David Susskind’s TV program by saying that what Kerouac did wasn’t writing at all, ‘it’s typing’.

(p.287)

Which seems mean, but then Kerouac’s books weren’t written for Bobby Bumstein, and John Uptight, and Fakeman, and you wonder why Kerouac let himself be hurt by them in pointless interviews and silly lectures.

Weschler shouted ‘We have to fight for peace’ (eternal quote) and Jack looked at him in exasperation, said ‘What? Don’t you realise that doesn’t make sense?’ or something like that; then sat down silent but with Weschler’s hat on his head. Weschler got mad and angrily demanded his hat back; as if Jack were a barbarian just like he dreamed, taking his hat!

Hunter College debate, 6 November, 1958 (p.275)

Kerouac was shy and anxious and got drunk to protect himself before interviews. Critics in newspapers hammered him. Former poetic acquaintances mocked his poems in newspapers.

People who are disparaging about your creative efforts are especially hurtful. They can be hurtful by returning your work unmarked without comment, and they can be hurtful by returning it heavily annotated and by never ceasing in their diatribe of feedback. It is a hard, hard thing to maintain friendship and be a critic, and you should always have the right to refuse to read your friend’s books, squibs or half-baked ideas.

If the critics were dangerous then so were the fans.

They tended to drive their cars more recklessly when he was with them, as if he was ‘Dean Moriarty’, and not the Kerouac who hated to drive and whom I had once seen crouching on the floor of a car, in a panic, during a drunken six-hour dash from New York to Provincetown. They plied him with drinks, they created parties around him, they doubled the disorder in the hopes of catching his eye, and so never glimpsed the Kerouac who once confessed to me, ‘You know what I’m thinking when I’m in the midst of all that – the uproar, the boozing, the wildness? I’m always thinking, What am I doing here? Is this the way I’m supposed to feel?

(John Clellon Holmes, p.276)

Remember this is all 1956-1958. We are in a time that is just getting the hang of new words like “rock ’n’ roll”. The world described by Kerouac is pretty wild by today’s standards. Imagine it in the days when Elvis shocked the world by twitching his hips.

The young people who responded to the book, who read it not as ‘literature’ but as an adventure, recognized that Kerouac was on their side, the side of youth and freedom, riding with Cassady over American highways chasing after the great American adventure – freedom and open spaces, the chance to be yourself, to be free. Kerouac hadn’t offered any real alternative to the conformity of twentieth-century industrial America. He ducked the problems of the 1950s such as the Bomb, the pressures of the Organisation Man, McCarthy’s Un-American Activities Committee. He offered instead a vision of freedom, a return to a solipsistic world of childhood, to an irresponsibility so complete that no other world could ever intrude for long. If he’d started across America too late to join up with the wagon trains, the cowboys roaming the range, the I.W.W. organisers or the Dust Bowl refugees, he’d nevertheless carried on with their uncompromising search for freedom, for the chance to see if a better life couldn’t be found by moving on, for the great American dream.

(pp.264-5)

The Great American Dream sounds about as vague as the: it-means-what ever-you-want-it-to-mean, oxymoron called Pakeha Identity.


TWO


I had always believed that the myth of On the Road went something like this: Jack meets up with a crazy guy called Neal and they whiz around America; Jack types it all up in a week high on drugs; the book gets published; Jack becomes an overnight sensation.

Jack first met Neal and started doing road trips in 1946/47 and On the Road was published in 1956. The famous three week “that’s not writing it’s typing” version (1951) was not his first or last draft of a book that it took him years to write. It was the break-through draft of course, the draft where Kerouac freed himself and discovered something he would come to call spontaneous prose; the style of prose that he became (in)famous for. By the time On the Road was actually published Jack had written something like eleven unpublished books which he lugged around in a rucksack when he went on the road.

The months right before success hit Kerouac with a cobblestone right and a left hook sort of summed up those ten years. His last job before being “discovered” was sitting up in a hut on Desolation Peak for two months watching for fires in complete isolation. At that time he wrote this about himself:

Take another look at me to get the story better (now I’m getting drunk): - I’m a widow’s son, at the time she is living with relatives, penniless… 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 … I was also a notorious wino who exploded anywhere anytime he got drunk – My friends in San Francisco said I was a Zen Lunatic, at least a Drunken Lunatic, yet sat with me in moonlight fields drinking and singing … I was an Ambitious Paranoid – Nothing could stop me writing big books of prose and poetry for nothing, that is, with no hope of ever having them published.

(pp.250-1)

After his stint in isolation Kerouac headed for Mexico stopping by Neal’s house on the way, but

he became restless with what he thought was a serene family life with the children, the swimming pool, the pizza pies and the never-ending TV quiz shows and advertisements.

(p.249)

This is a surprising picture of Dean Moriarty/Neal Cassady considering what we usually think:

Kerouac presented such a compelling portrait of Neal Cassady [in On the Road] that his image fashioned the life style of a generation of young readers who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s. In the pages of On the Road, Cassady emerged as an archetypal American hero.

(p.262)

Actually this version of Neal Cassady did fashion the life style of a generation – the generation in the majority – the generation who got jobs, settled down, and watched TV.

Once in Mexico Kerouac called on his friend Allen Ginsberg to come and join him, and Allen and his entourage did, also stopping at Neal’s.

After spending the night at Neal’s, where Gregory had a nightmare about eggs and couldn’t face breakfast, the four of them, Allen, Gregory, Peter and Peter’s brother Lafcadio, went on to Los Angeles.

(p.252)

(The only reason I included that quote was because of the egg nightmare.)

There was a slow-building feeling of expectation now for this haphazard bunch of writers. Ginsberg’s Howl readings were getting more of a following; Kerouac’s On the Road was moving towards actually being published. Finally it seemed that this group of no-good bums who had been talking themselves up for a decade were going to make it. They went from Mexico, to New York, to Tangiers, to New York. Kerouac was characteristically moody and depressed. He drank; he isolated himself. Back in America Kerouac went with his mother to Berkley. It was there that his publisher sent the first box of books called On the Road.

Memere had gone to the store and Jack was completely alone in their shabby apartment. Holding the books in his hands for the first time, he looked up as ‘a golden light’ appeared in the porch door. It was Neal, dropping by with his old girl Luanne and two other friends. In Desolation Angels, Jack described the scene, a moment in his life that haunted him forever:

We all stare at one another in the golden light. Not a sound. I’m also caught redhanded (as we all grin) with a copy of Road in my hands even before I’ve looked at it for the first time! I automatically hand one to [Neal] who is after all the hero of the poor crazy sad book…

Kerouac felt guilty, almost like a thief, with the book in his hands, but he felt even worse after Cassady looked at it. ‘When [Neal] said goodbye to all of us that day he for the first time in our lives failed to look me a goodbye in the eye but looked away shifty-like – I couldn’t understand it and still don’t – I knew something was bound to be wrong and it turned out very wrong…’

(p.260)

When I first read On the Road I thought it was the beginning of an amazing story.

It was the end.

Almost all of Kerouac’s brilliance, restlessness and poetry were spent by the time On the Road was published, and much of the time until his death was spent publishing back catalogue. Before America turned its attention on him Kerouac was free; afterwards he was the best-selling author of On the Road and he was in a cage explaining what BEAT meant. Pointless. You may as well steal your opponent’s hat, you may as well laugh out loud at the man who has nightmares about eggs.


All page references are to:
Kerouac: A biography by Ann Charters
Andre Deutsch, London, 1974

Childhood

"Lowell, Massachusetts is an early nineteenth-century textile town built on the banks of the Merrimack River, thirty miles north of Boston. Settled largely by Polish, Irish, Portuguese, Greek and French immigrants, it was a resolutely working-class town, where men worked five-and-a-half days a week and walked home for lunch, while the women cleaned, cooked and reared their children in Greek Orthodoxy or Roman Catholicism. Every ethnic group formed a close-knit community. There were five French parishes alone in Lowell, a French language newspaper and school where all the lessons were in French." (p.29)

Kerouac – Angelheaded Hipster
Steve Turner, London: 1996, Bloomsbury

This multi-lingual town doesn't really fit in with my mental map of America. It sounds very tribal: "The French Canadians were called Canucks, and spoke a crude patois, joual, which led to their being scorned as outsiders. They lived in ghettos called ‘Little Canadas,’ intermarried, and regarded everyone outside the tight little community with a suspicion bordering on paranoia. Unfortunately, their narrow-mindedness and racism found their way into Kerouac’s novels, but their unity and bravery are also woven into his life and work." (pp.7-8)

Subterranean Kerouac – The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac
Ellis Amburn, New York: 1998, St. Martin’s Press

You get a sense of this tribalism when Kerouac's daughter describes meeting her father for the second time in 1967. She went to Lowell and looked in the phone book:

"I was astonished to see a whole list of Kerouacs. I'd never in my life seen my name in a directory.... I began by calling the ones spelt like mine, and before I knew it we were at the home of Doris Kerouac, amid a crowd of stocky French-Candian relatives, all excitedly speaking patois and embracing me. 'The daughter! Jean never told us he had a daughter!" Shaking their heads and gesticulating, they bore us over to Jack's house on an ocean wave of strength, morality and good will.... So these were my people, hearty people with souls of gold. I wanted to stay with them and belong."

Baby Driver

Jan Kerouac, New York, 1981

No wonder Kerouac spent his life bouncing back and forth between wanting to escape the smothering attention of his hometown and mother and hitting out on the road, and the other half of the time trying to get back home where he felt secure.

Many of Kerouac's biographers say that everything Jack wrote was biography and all of Jack's narrators were personas that he had been busy inventing since he was a kid imagining himself as an American football star. He reinvented himself, and his home town over and over again in his books. Childhood is strong stuff. Parents take care.

Fathers

"Leo Kerouac was sicker than ever and it was apparent to Jack and memere that he wouldn’t live long. He was in pain, irritable and cantankerous. Every two weeks the doctor climbed the stairs to the apartment to drain his stomach of fluids, and Jack would hear his father in the kitchen wincing and groaning, and then weeping as the doctor left. There was no more talk about Jack throwing his life away. Leo made him promise he’d always take care of memere whatever else he did, and Jack promised.

Leo Kerouac died in the spring of 1946. Jack and his mother followed his hearse to the family cemetery in Nashua, New Hampshire, where he was buried. When they returned to the still apartment in Ozone Park, memere did her spring house cleaning and went back to work at the shoe factory. As before with the death of his older brother Gerald, Jack was overcome with grief and a sense of personal loss. It seemed to him, as he forced himself to pick up the outlines for his projected novel, that death was the greatest mystery, the greatest theme for literature. Grimly he settled down to write the novel he had planned earlier in the year. He had taken Thomas Wolfe as a model, but his book was really written for his father, to prove to the memory of Leo Kerouac that Jack could write a book that would sell, that he could be a creative writer.

Jack had failed to fulfil his father’s dreams of seeing him a football champion, a success at college and a hero in the Navy. At each one of Jack’s failures, Leo Kerouac had supported him, confronting the Columbia football coach and the Navy psychiatrists as though his Ti Jack could do no wrong. But privately, at home, the arguments had raged between father and son. Jack felt that Leo had never believed in his promise as a creative writer, so he would prove himself there where everything else had gone awry." (pp.53-4)

Kerouac – A Biography by Ann Charters

Ann Charters, London: 1973, Andre Deutsch Limited.

Jack's original beginning to On the Road was about his father:


"I first met Neal not long after my father died... I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won't bother to talk about except that it had something to do with my father's death and my awful feeling that everything was dead."

On the Road

He changed it so it was about his first wife; a woman he had married to get bail after being an accessory to a murder.

"Kerouac would remember [his father] as a dynamic, jovial hustler.... 'I see now his true soul, which is like mine - life means nothing to him,' Jack once observed. In the Kerouacs' divided household, Jack sided with his mother against his father, accepting her judgement that Leo was 'a drunkard and didn't... give a shit.' " (p.12)

Subterranean Kerouac

Ellis Amburn, New York, 1998

People who vanish out of your life can becoming dominating characters. They put pressure on your personality and the way you act. Kerouac's father and Neal's father both seem to be looming presences in the background of On the Road. Even though it is Kerouac's mother who is often talked about, Kerouac's father can not be discounted as a major force in his life.

I come across this photo and wonder: What's he looking at? What's he thinking? After the shutter clicked what did he do, where did he go?

Breathless Prose

I've been reading about Jack Kerouac. I've been reading about what Jack read when he was young and impressionable.

"The Houde brothers introduced Jack to the first English language writing to inspire him, in comic books such as The Green Hornet, Operator 5, Phantom Detective and The Shadow. He particularly identified with the mysterious character of The Shadow, ‘Shrouded, unseen observer, black-cloaked and black-hatted.’….

Although it appeared with a comic book cover, each bi-weekly edition of The Shadow was a novel-length story of 60,000 words, written under the pen-name Maxwell Grant. Most of the episodes that Jack read would have been written by the prolific Walter Gibson, who was responsible for 285 Shadow comics in the 1930s.

In fact, Gibson’s descriptions of how his Shadow stories were composed sound almost exactly like Jack’s later descriptions of what he would call ‘spontaneous prose’. “By living, thinking, even dreaming the story in one continued process, ideas came faster and faster,” Gibson once said of his 30,000 words-a-week output. “Sometimes the typewriter keys would fly so fast that I wondered if the keys could keep up with them. And at the finish of the story I often had to take a few days off, as my fingertips were too sore to begin work on the next book.

This ferocious work schedule resulted in a breathless prose which was studded with colourful descriptions of fog-enshrouded cities and lingering evil, in which Jack half-recognised his own dreams and fears."

Kerouac – Angelheaded Hipster
Steve Turner, London: 1996, Bloomsbury

Breathless prose. I think that's a pretty good description of those parts of On the Road that describe parties, and bad driving and jazz. The bits that I think of as the best in Kerouac.