Ginsberg on Jack Kerouac‘s literary influences continues from here
AG: And the other specimen that everybody dug at the time – (much of this applies to (William) Burroughs as well, incidentally, to Burroughs’s ear as well as Kerouac’s).. Nineteen forty five Burroughs gave Kerouac a copy of Journey to the End of the Night by Louis Ferdinand Céline. Has anybody here read any of that?
Student (1): Oh, that’s….
Student(2): Every word.
AG: And who has not read any Céline? Yeah. Well, what this is is the opening pages of The Journey to the End of the Night, which was Céline’s’ first book. Céline was the first person to write in French in vernacular demotic slang – super-slang. His work is difficult to translate but it’s been brilliantly translated into English fortunately by Ralph Manheim and I forgot … it’s not on here who the translator is. [to Student] We need the translator on here, Dan. You don’t have the translator’s name on this. Do you have the book?
Student (Dan): John Marks.
AG: John Marks, yeah. M-A-R-K-S. Influenced both prose by Burroughs and Keroauc:
“So, It all began just like that. I hadn’t said anything. I hadn’t said a word. It was Arthur Ganate who started me off. Arthur, who was studying medicine the same as me, a pal of mine. What happened was that we met on the Place Clichy. After lunch. He seemed to want to talk to me. So I listened. “Don’t let’s stay out here, ” he said. “Let’s go inside.” So I went along in with him. “It’s grim,” he said, “out here on the terrasse. Come this way.” We noticed that there was nobody in the streets because of the heart; no traffic, nothing. And when it’s very cold there’s nobody abaout, either; why, I even remember that it was he who said to me, speaking about this, “Everybody in Paris seems to be busy but actually they only walk about all day, and the proof of it is that when the weather’s bad, when it’s too cold or too hot, they disappear; they’re all inside cafes, drinking white coffee or bocks. Isn’t that so? They talk of this being an age of rush and hurry. How d’ you make that out? Everything’s chaning they say. But it isn’t true. Nothing has really changed. They just go on being impressed by themselves and that’s all. Which isn’t new, either. A few words have changed–but not many of them, even. Two or three little ones here and there…” And very proud at having come to these important conclusions, we sat back, feeling pleased with life, and watched the ladies of the cafe. Afterwards, conversation turned on President Poincare, who that morning was going to open a show of lapdogs, and from him to Le Temps, The newspaper. where we’d read about it. “Now there’s a really great paper for you!” said Arthur, trying to get a rise out of me. “There isn’t another paper like it for defending the interests of the French race.” “And I suppose the French race needs it, seeing that it doesn’t exist!” said I promptly, to show that I knew what I was talking about. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So they go on talking. And then they get talking about the war that’s coming up. “‘See here, you set of sods!’ they say. ‘War’s declared. You’re going to board the bastards on Country Number 2 yonder and you’re going to smash them to bits! Now get on with it. There’s all the stuff you’ll need aboard. All together now. Let’s have it – as loud as you can make it: “God save Country Number 1!” You’ve got to make them hear you a long way off. There’s a medal and a coughdrop for the man who shouts the loudest! God in Heaven! And if there’s any of you who don’t want to die at sea, of course, you can go and die on land, where it takes even less time than it does here.” “You’ve just about hit it,” agreed Arthur, who’d certainly become very easy to convince. Whereupon, damn me if a regiment of soldiers didn’t come marching past the cafe where we were sitting, with the colonel in front of his horse and all, looking simply fine and as smart as you make them. I gave just one great leap of enthusiasm. “I’ll go and find out if that’s what it’s like!” I cried to Arthur, and off I went to join up, as fast as my legs would carry me. “Don’t be such a bloody fool, Ferdinand!” yelled Arthur after me, annoyed, I suppose by the effect my heroic gesture was having on the onlookers. I was rather sick that that should be the attitude he took toward it, but that didn’t stop me. I was striding along in step. “Here I am and I’ll see it through,” I said to myself. “We’ll see, you mutt, you!” I managed to get in at hm, before we turned the corner, with the regiment marching along behind the colonel and the band. That’s exactly, word for word, how it happened. We went on marching for a long time. There were streets then there were still more streets, with civilians and their wives cheering us as we passed, and throwing flowers to us from the cafe tables, by the stations and from the steps of crowded churches. What a lot of patriots there were! And then, after a bit, there began to be fewer patriots…. Rain came down, and there were fewer and fewer of them, and then finally no one cheered at all, not another cheer along the road. Were we all by ourselves then? A column of men, in fours behind each other? The music stopped. Then I said to myself, as I saw how things were going, “It’s not such fun, after all. I doubt if it’s worth it.” And I was going to go back. But it was too late! They’d shut the gate behind us, quietly; the civilians had. We were caught, like rats in a trap. So he finds himself in the French Army in World War I in those opening pages. And then in the next chapter he’s on the battlefield. Once one’s in it, one’s in it up to the neck. They put us on horseback and then, after two months of that, they put us back on foot. Perhaps because it cost too much. Anyway, one morning the colonel was looking for his horse; his orderly had gone off with it, no one knew where, somewhere no doubt where bullets sang less merrily than in the middle of the road. Because that’s exactly where we finished up, the colonel and I, plumb in the middle of the road, with me holding the forms on which he wrote out orders. Far away up the road, as far as you could see, there were two black dots, in the middle of it, like us -only they were two Germans, very busy shooting. They’d been doing that for a good quarter of an hour. The colonel perhaps knew why those two fellows were firing and the Germans maybe knew it too; but as for me, quite frankly, I didn’t at all. However far back I remembered, the Germans had nothing against me. I had always been quite friendly and polite to them. I knew the Germans a bit, I’d even been to school with them as a kid, near Hanover. I’d talked their language. They were then a lot of noisy little idiots, with the pale and furtive eyes of wolves; we all used to go and neck the girls in the woods near by, where we’d also shoot with bows or with the little pistols you could get for four marks. We used to drink sweet beer. But that was one thing and now letting fly at each other, without even coming over to talk first, and right in the middle of the road, was another, – not the same thing at all. It was altogether too damn different. The war, in fact, was everything that one didn’t understand. It couldn’t go on. Had something extraordinary then come over these people? Something which I didn’t feel at all? I must have failed to notice it. At any rate, my feelings towards them had not changed. In spite of everything, I felt I wanted to understand their brutal behaviour; but even more I wanted, I terribly wanted, to go away, it all suddenly seemed so much the result of a tremendous mistake. “In this sort of business there’s nothign for it; the only thing to do is to shove out of it.” That’s what I said to myself. After all…. Over our heads, an inch or half an inch away, one after the other those long tentative steel strings which bullets make when they want to kill you came twanging in the warm air of summer. Never have I felt so futile as among all those bullets in that sunshine. A vast, a universal ramp. I wasn’t more than twenty at the time. In the distance were deserted farmhouses and open and empty churches, as if the peasants every one of them had left these hamlets for the day, to go to some gathering at the other end of the canton and had left in our keeping all they possessed, – their countryside, their carts with upturned shafts, their fields and patches, the road, the trees and even the cows, a dog on its chain, everything. So that we should not be disturbed and could do what we wanted while they were away. It seemed a kindly thought on their part. “All the same,” said I to myself, “if only they hadn’t gone off, if only there were somebody about around here, we surely shouldn’t be behaving so badly – so disgracefully! We wouldn’t have dared with them here. Only there’s no one to see us. We’re by ourselves like newly married folk doing dirty things when every one’s left.” And I thought too (behind a tree) that I should love to have the biggest Jingo of the lot here with me, to explain what he would do when a bullet him slap in the pants..”
to be continued
Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately twenty-nine minutes in and concluding at approximately thirty-seven-and-three-quarter minutes in