Jack Kerouac Centennial year this year. We thought to continue with this transcript from Allen, from the early days at Naropa, July 1977, Allen on Jack Kerouac – He talks on and reads from, to begin with, a perhaps lesser-known work of Kerouac’s, Vanity of Duluoz
following a brief snatch of music
AG: for Paul… what’s your name Paul?.
PB: Brouilette
AG: (Paul) (Brouilette) B-R-0-U-I-L-E-T-T-E is a Kerouac specialist, bibliographer, of French-Canadian origin, from Lowell, Massachusetts. So if you have any specialized questions you can ask him (because he knows that field better than I do, probably). And between us, we’re working up a bibliography for the “40’s ‘50’s (well we’ve got the ‘40’s),‘50s, 60s,‘70s. – which is quite a lot of reading – and I’ll try and cover each decade (because it’s a chronological story). I want to continue however with the gists of Visions.. of Vanity of Dulouz, which we’re having trouble getting a copy of, so I’ll read in and out of it. On page 86 (you can take notes in case you ever want to get to check back). I think it’s out of print, so I’m told, totally out of print?
Student (PB): Well, the paperback..
AG: .. even in England.. by whom…?
Student (PB) Quartet Books, (1973)
AG: Page 86 of the original hard cover, Coward McCann, 1968 – a sort of visionary description by Kerouac of something corelating with what the upstairs guru is talking about these Tuesdays and Friday nights if any of you are listening to Ösel Tendzin‘s lectures, he’s been talking about…talking about first noble truth, truth and suffering or dissatisfaction or some slight emptiness or gap or beauty that must die, or “Joy,whose hands is ever at his lips/ Bidding adieu (with) aching pleasure nigh” (Keats’ “Ode on Melancholy”) – “She dwells with Beauty -/Beauty that must die/ And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips/Bidding adieu, and aching Pleasure nigh” – “Aching pleasure” – so “aching pleasure”, the first Noble Truth – even in bliss there’s suffering – “aching pleasure (ain’t it the truth! – anyone who’s been in bed with more than one person at a time will tell ya! – even if you get your wildest daydream orgy going it’ll(be)lots of trouble). So, the morning after, or at the very moment, anyway, the exposition upstairs of the Buddhist universe involves a sense of gap, that even at the moment of greatest pleasure, there’s a certain empty center or space or gap of which one becomes conscious and through which one becomes conscious of the moment, maybe some perturbation or disturbance which leads one to think .. the contention last night (or on Tuesday)upstairs was that the animal world was too full of suffering for anyone to take time out enough to realize the basic difficulty and dissatisfaction to begin with. So there was so much suffering in the animal world, it was too speedy, you didn’t have a chance to stop and think. The advantage of the human world is that you can stop and think. So here’s Kerouac stopping and thinking:
“One night my cousin Blanche came to the house and sat in the kitchen talking to Ma among the packing boxes. I sat on the porch outside and leaned way back with feet on the rail and gazed at the stars, the Milky Way, the whole works clear. I stared and stared until they stared back at me. Where the hell was I and what was all this?
I went into the parlor and sat down in my father’s old deep easy chair and fell into the wildest daydream of my life. This is important and this is the key to the story, wifey dear.
As Ma and Cousin talked in the kitchen, I daydreamed that I was now going back to Columbia for my sophomore year, with home in New Haven, maybe near Yale campus, with soft light in my room and rain in the sill, mist on the pane, and go all the way in football and studies. I was going to be such sensational runner that we’d win ever game, against Dartmouth, Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Georgia U, Michigan U, Cornell, the bloody lot, and wind up in the Rose Bowl. In the Rose Bowl, worse even than Cliff Montgomery, I was going to run wild. Uncle Lu Libble for the first time in his life would throw his arms around me and weep. Even his wife would do so, The boys on the team would raise me up in Rose Bowl’s Pasadena Stadium and march me to the showers singing. On returning to Columbia campus in January, having passed chemistry, with an A, I would then idly turn my attention to winter indoor track and decide on the mile and run it in under 4 flat (that was fast in those days).So fast, indeed, that I’d be in the big meets at Madison Square Garden and beat the current great milers in final fantastic sprints bringing my time down to 3.50 flat. By this time everybody in the world is crying out Duluoz! Duluoz! But, unsatisfied, I idly go out in the Spring for the Columbia baseball team and bat homeruns clear over the Harlem river, one or two a game, including fast breaks from the bag to steal from first to seconds, from second to third, and finally in the climactic game, from third to home, zip, slide, dust, boom. Now the New York Yankees are after me. They want me to be their next Joe DiMaggio. I idly turn that down because I want Columbia to go to the Rose Bowl again in 1943 (Hah!) But then I also in mad midnight musings over a Faustian skull, after drawing circles in the earth, talking to God in the tower of the Gothic high steeple of Riverside Church, meeting Jesus on the Brooklyn Bridge, getting Sabby a part on Broadway as Hamlet (playing King Lear myself across the street ) I become the greatest writer that ever lived and write a book so golden and so purchased with magic that everybody smacks their brows on Madison Avenue. Even Professor Claire is chasing after me on his crutches on the Columbia campus. Mike Hennessey, his father’s hand in hand, comes screaming up the dorm steps to find me. All the kids of HM are singing in the field. Bravo, bravo, author, they’re yelling for me in the theater where I’ve also presented my newest idle work, a play rivaling Eugene O’Neill and Maxwell Anderson and making Strindberg spin. Finally a delegation of cigar-chewing guys come up and get me and want to know if I want to train for the world’s heavyweight boxing championship fight with Joe Louis. Okay, I train idly in the Catskills, come down on a June night , face big tall Joe as the referee gives us instructions, and then when the bell rings I rush out real fast and just pepper him real fast and so hard that he actually goes back bouncing over the ropes and into the third row and lays there knocked out
I’m the world’s heavyweight boxing camion, the greatest writer, the world’s champ miler, Rose Bowl and (pro-bound with New York Giants football non pareil) now offered every job on every paper in New York, and what else? Tennis anyone?
I woke up from this daydream suddenly realizing that all I had to do was to go back on the porch and look at the stars again, which I did, and still they just stared at me blankly.
In other words, I suddenly realized that all my ambitions, no matter how they came out, and of course as you can see from the preceding narrative, they just came out fairly ordinary, it wouldn’t matter anyway in the intervening space between human breathings and the ”sigh of the happy stars”, so to speak, to quote Thoreau again.
It just didn’t matter what I did, anytime,anywhere, with anyone; life is funny, like I said
I suddenly realized we were all crazy and had nothing to work for except the next meal and the next good sleep
O God in the Heavens, what a fumbling, hand-hanging goof world it is, that people actually think they can gain anything from either this, or that, or this, or that, and in so doing , corrupt their sacred graves in the name of sacred grave corruption
Chemistry chemistry… football schmootball…the war must have been getting in my bones.
When I looked up from that crazy reverie, at the stars, heard my mother and cousin still yakking in the kitchen about tea leaves, heard in fact my father yelling across the street in the bowling alley. I realized either I was crazy or the world was crazy; and I picked on the world
And of course I was right.”
….and of course I was right.
Well, that’s a, like an early archetype, or I guess everybody’s had that daydream or one form of it or another,and he’s given very honestly, archetypally, his own, “(idly”, as he says, – as, he actually, he did, ”idly”, become “the world’s greatest novelist”, so to speak). But having carried his archetypal fantasy to the extreme, and been mindful of it, and even playful with it, and humorous about it). So he came to a sort of strange conclusion having played out the possibility of gain for the very end. And then coming to the emptiness at the end of gain – that informs almost all of his writing and all of his life from there on – the emptiness at the end of gain – or “Rack my hand with labor of nada/ – Run (the) 100 yard dash/in Ole Ensanada -/ S what I’ll have to do to/ this gin and tonics/ Perss o monic/twab/twab” (from Mexico City Blues (217th Chorus)
Nada. – (so even the writing is finally “Rack my hand with (the) labor of Nada (nada – nothing – nice vowels – That was one of my favorite lines in Kerouac – ” “Rack my hand with labor of nada”
So actually this is the explanation or an exposition of all the daydreaming and consideration and bethought-ment and cleared thoughts that lead to that empty disillusionment which is…well, a high-school disillusionment for him, but also is like right on the nose of his later Buddhist studies and our later Buddhist studies.
Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at the start of the tape and continuing approximately twelve-and-a-half minutes in
to be continued