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.