SARA GRAN'S DOPE

Josephine 'Joe' Flannigan grew up in Hell's Kitchen. Her mother was what they might have called a floozy. Joe tried to raise and protect her younger sister Shelley, made money stealing and worse, and by 20 was a junkie. Now straight, but still shoplifting for cash, she keeps a scrapbook tracking the modelling career of the sister she rarely sees, and keeps clean of junk. Then she's offered a job searching for a missing Barnard co-ed, who's been lured into the world of dope by a slick pimp. Her search takes her back into the lap of temptation, and back into a world where nothing is the way it seems. She may be tough, but she may not be quite as tough as she needs to be.

It's New York City in the early 1950s, and Sara Gran's 2006 novel pulsates with the stacatto beat of the sleazy underworld and the sometimes sleazier straight world as well. The book is structured like Dante's Inferno, a descent into ever more vicious circles of a sort of hell, but at the same time it's a hell that offers some freedoms from the hypocrises and shackles of the bright world outside those circles. Dope reads like a cross between the William Burroughs prose of Junky and the pulp crime novels of Jim Thompson, Cornell Woolrich and maybe most of all David Goodis, with its emphasis on disfunctional family values.

Gran gets the tone both of the times and the pulp novels that themselves represented a kind of underbelly of that world we often associate with Disney, Beaver, and Mad Men. She also keeps her own tone steady, gathering speed on the downward descent, and preparing the reader for a remarkable twist at the end that literally had me going back to check and see how well prepared it had been. This doesn't seem to have published in the UK, which might explain how I missed it, but I do regret that now. A first-rate piece of neo-pulp, with enough of a modern sensibility behind it to be knowing comment, but not so much as to be ironic. I love it.

Dope by Sara Gran

Berkeley Books, $14.00, ISBN 9780425214367

JACK KEROUAC, THE HAUNTED LIFE, AND BIRTHDAYS

Yesterday was Jack Kerouac's birthday, and mine, which makes his easy to remember. He would have been 92, had he not drunk himself to death at the age of 47. Last week I went on BBC Radio 4's Front Row, to discuss with host John Wilson Kerouac's newly-published novella The Haunted Life, written in 1944 and long thought lost in a taxicab, which was published that day by Penguin. Personally, I would have set the 12^th for the publication date, but maybe that's why I'm not in marketing. You can access the discussion via IPlayer here; we begin about 23 minutes into the programme, just after Johnny Cash. The discussion is good, but time was limited, so I thought I'd add a few things here.

First some background to the book. The MS was sold at auction in 2002. Reading between the lines in the introduction by Todd Tietchen, a professor at Umass-Lowell, one can assume that the MS was left behind by Kerouac in Allen Ginsberg's Columbia dorm room, and put up for sale after Ginsberg's death by his partner Peter Orlovsky or his heirs, after the On The Road scroll sold to Jim Irsay for nearly $2.5 million. It's not his first 'lost' MS to be published recently; in 2011 another, slightly earlier novella, The Sea Is My Brother, was issued as an e-book.

1944 was the year he met Ginsberg, the year of the killing of David Kammerer by Lucien Carr (see the film Kill Your Darlings, which I also discussed with John on Front Row), and Kerouac's jailing as an accessory; he married his first wife, in essence, to make bail. The run-up to those events is interesting. Kerouac was already a year older than many freshmen when he entered Columbia; he had done a post-graduate year of high school at Horace Mann to get his grades up. He broke his leg playing freshman football, and when he came back his sophomore year, he couldn't get along with coach Lou Little. In 1942 he left Columbia to join the Merchant Marine; completing only one voyage to Greenland before quitting. A few months later, his ship was sunk by the Germans, with many of his shipmates lost. In 1943 he joined the Navy, but lasted less than two weeks before being discharged on psychiatric grounds. He was described as 'restless, apathetic, seclusive', and the shrinks described his 'auditory hallucinations, ideas of reference and suicide, and a rambling grandiose philosophical manner'.

Which is a pretty good description of The Haunted Life. It's very much a piece of juvenelia, which seems surprising when you consider Kerouac was already 22 when he wrote it, and had at least second-hand experience of war. You can see loss in the shadows behind this book; he is already writing about friends dead in the war. But both of these lost novellas may be seen as rehearsals for Kerouac's first published novel, which became The Town And The City—a working out of the characters and situations, and, as the introduction shows, of Kerouac's plan to use those people to reflect the changing of the times. It was all modeled on The Brothers Karamazov.

He never is able to hang such grand plans on his story. Instead his main character, Peter Martin, is mostly there to show his and Kerouac's influences, very much a Stephen Daedalus figure. He is a would-be writer, with a hugely romantic idea of what being a writer means. Mostly this is expressed through lists and descriptions of those he admires, like William Saroyan or the now-forgotten Albert Halper. Martin, like Kerouac he is also an athlete—not a football player but a runner (although he smokes incessantly, obviously not in training). He is a dreamer, but it is his brother who has already left Galloway (the stand in for Lowell) and gone to see to world; it is a friend who has the dreams of enlisting and/or traveling.

This is something that indicates the conflict between the tough persona of Kerouac the French-Canadian jock from Lowell, trying to please his reactionary and hard father, and Kerouac the sensitive poet with the adoring mother. You can see it in his naval enlistment photo, and it's always been something that's made Kerouac hard for actors to get. You don't need to look like Allen Ginsberg to play him, but with Kerouac you need the physicality along with the brooding. Jack Huston absolutely misses this in Kill Your Darlings (and he can't even throw a football); Sam Riley's far too fragile in On The Road, and John Heard gets the insecurity but not the bruised toughness, and pales before Nick Nolte's Neal Cassady in Heart Beat, which is kind of how they related in life too.

The force behind The Haunted Life, and The Town And The City, is clearly Thomas Wolfe. You can see in moments of Wolfe's breathlessness the beginnings of the stream of consciousness that would become On The Road. For all the importance of the meeting of minds between Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Carr at Columbia, none of them ever really adhered to the principals of 'The New Vision', their early manifesto. Indeed both Ginsberg and Kerouac worked their way through older models (Whitman and Wolfe) quite plainly; their creative group was driven primarily by the mix of personalities, not theoretics.

As you read the Peter Martin of The Haunted Life, you cannot help but recall the Peter Martin of The Town And The City, and remember that that novel ends with Martin putting on a leather jacket and going On The Road. He's like a working-class Holden Caufield, almost as passive to life's struggles, except he can actually take the decision to hit the road. You see a bit of Caulfield in Peter Martin, but Sal Paradise has transcended that. There's an unintentionally hilarious line in the introduction, where Tietchen comments that On The Road was the 'perfect accompaniment' to the Federal Highway Act of 1956, through which Eisenhower built the Interstate Highway system. But of course, beyond the unlikely vision of Ike reading On The Road, nothing could be further from the Kerouac experience than the hitch on the free-flowing emptiness of I-whatever. Years ago I considered just that point while hitching from Montreal to Martha's Vineyard, just as I-93 was crossing into Massachusetts and I was yearning for picturesque diner.

Kerouac's personal problem was that his first, apprentice novel would not be published finally until 1950, and On The Road would take seven more years to see print, by which time Kerouac was 35 years old, no longer a young rebel, and ill-prepared to be shot to mainstream stardom. Where Cassady moved on easily into the hippie and acid era with the Grateful Dead and Tom (not Thomas) Wolfe, Kerouac retreated, as it were, from fame into the personality of his father.

Which is why the last three pages of this novella, beautifully written, are so touching. Peter and his father have hit their point of political agreement, on the value of the working man, la pauvre peuple, the French-Canadian father's good if narrow side. Peter goes to his room, and lights his pipe (a teenaged track star) and looks out his window as 'a tender shroud was being lowered on this life'. I read 'this life' as being the comfort of the world he knows and the uncertainty of the world to which he aspires, which stretches well beyond that comfortable cocoon. 'With the darkness, and with the smell and feel of it, would come the old sounds of the suburban American summer's night...a boy's special nighttime cry and the cool swishing song of the trees: a music sweeter than anything else in the world, a music that can be seen—profusely green, leaf on leaf atremble—and a music that can be smelled, clover fresh, somehow sharp, and supremely rich.'

That is the foretaste of Kerouac at his best. Happy Birthday, Jack.

WILLIAM BURROUGHS' NAKED LUNCH: THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY APPRECIATION

NOTE: I originally wrote a piece on Naked Lunch for Headpress, then revisited the idea for London Magazine to celebrate the book's 50th anniversary, and the anniversary edition that was published then. It appeared in the October/November 2009 issue of that estimable magazine, as noted on this blog at the time, but it has not been available online, in either version, until now. What follows is the London Magazine essay, slightly revised. I find it easy to choose the four greatest American novels (The Confidence Man, Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby) but numbers five through ten seem to change and re-order constantly. But Naked Lunch is always one of those next six....

When I was 17, in the summer of 1968, I brought a copy of Naked Lunch home from the library. Mrs. Doyle, the librarian, who had been watching over my reading ever since she snuck me my first library card when I was only four, had no negative reaction; after all, she'd put the book on the shelves. But my father, perhaps remembering the book's obscenity trial only a few years before, or more likely reading the Grove Press cover blurbs (ignoring Norman Mailer’s praising Williams Burroughs as “perhaps the only American writer possessed of genius”) and worried perhaps about my motivations, took it back the very next morning.

Imagine my surprise when I arrived at university just a couple of months later and Naked Lunch was the first book I was assigned to study in John Hackett's freshman English class. That assignment put an end, once and for all, to any idea I had of studying religion, or even worse, political science. I was hooked.

Hooked being the operative word for the kaleidoscopic parade of addictions on display in Naked Lunch. Burroughs was writing about the way human need creates the conditions for humans to be controlled, and I, along with my generation, was starting to feel the cultural imperative to rebel against control. Read the essay “Testimony Concerning a Sickness” which introduces the novel. Addictions, to Burroughs, were like viruses; they took over your body's metabolism and changed it, so it couldn't function normally without them. 'Language is a virus,' he said, and language was just another thing he refused to allow to control him. Thus Naked Lunch proceeds almost at random, its cut-ups disdaining elements of control like plot, or logic, but it drives its points home directly, with image and with language that reflects both pulp fiction and pornography, language that works to get a reaction from the reader.

Reading Naked Lunch was like studying a combat map of the Sixties' culture war battle zones. Although it was almost a decade old, the writing was fresh, hallucinatory. I’d already read the Beat heroes, starting, oddly enough, with Gregory Corso, whose appeal was more to romantic adolescents than to revolutionaries. But Corso, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac symbolised rebellion to a younger generation looking for freedom but also dependent on their new parental figures to show them the way. It was part of being a baby-boomer, this expectation of having things done for you while you changed the world. But where most of the Beats were wild and loud, the bad neighbours who needed to turn down their be-bop music at four in the morning, Burroughs was more the quiet guy walking down the street staring at his feet, maybe mumbling to himself. But, and this was an important lesson to learn, despite not being wild, not being loud, Burroughs was farther out than anyone. Ginsburg’s hero, Walt Whitman, said “I contain multitudes.” Hidden inside the grey suit uniform of middle America, Burroughs’ said 'of course you do, you have to'.

I sought out his first novel Junkie, published under the pseudonym William Lee. It's a pure pulp first person tale of addiction written in tight prose, Naked Lunch before it flipped out. My friend Michael Goldfarb told me when he was young he fantasized about Bill scoring scag at the same Automat he used to visit with his parents. I envisioned Bill waiting for his man, eying Joseph Cornell in a corner table surreptitiously checking out the counter girl. Michael and I were both middle class college boys and could identify with Burroughs’ life story. It enhanced his mystique. Born in St. Louis, attended Harvard: he could have been TS Eliot. But after Harvard he wandered to New York and hooked up with the Beats, discovering crime, drugs, and the sleaziest side of the gay underworld. Even better, family money supported him. It came from his grandfather’s cut of the Burroughs' adding machine fortune—some tales had his granddad actually inventing the thing—and he even called his last collection of essays The Adding Machine, along the lines of 'when the legend becomes fact, print the legend'. Now the Burroughs Co. is gone, merged into the giant Unisys, a monolith corporation straight out of one of Burroughs’ Nova Express novels.

Well ahead of the hippies, in the Fifties, Burroughs left the cities and went back to the land, growing dope in Texas with Joan Vollmer. He married her as if to defy the controlling conventions of his own sexuality. They lit out for Mexico one step ahead of the police. The story of his failed attempt to play William Tell with her is well known, but her death was the pivotal event of his life. In the introduction to his novel Queer (written just after Junkie but not published until 1985) he said 'I live with the constant threat of possession and a constant need to escape from control. The death of Joan brought me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice but to write my way out.'

Control again. He jumped Mexican bail and wound up in Tangiers. He wrote notes and stories, and in Paris, with Ginsburg, Brion Gysin, and Harold Norse cutting and pasting and editing, produced Naked Lunch. Norse, whose died only recently (I wrote his obituary for The Independent, you can link to that here), produced his own cut-up novel, Beat Hotel, but it wasn't published until 1973, and then only in German. There's nothing addictive about it; Norse, a poet, lacked the pulp edges of the writer of Junkie, lacked the tormented vision of control.

The ripple effect was immediate. Mailer’s Why Are We In Vietnam?, one of his two or three best novels, drew heavily on Naked Lunch, blending it with Faulkner's The Bear into a searing take on the addictions of pre-Sixties America. Meanwhile Burroughs was extending his cut-up techniques, going farther into the realm of Philip K Dick paranoia in his Nova Express trilogy. Rock bands named themselves after props in his novels, Steely Dan, Soft Machine. David Cronenburg understood what Burroughs was about when he tried valiantly to film Naked Lunch, trying with limited success to find an objective correlative for what Burroughs saw, to translate his hallucinations into celluloid reality. Less successfully, what was Trainspotting if not the outer trappings of Burroughs moved to Edinburgh and reduced to mundane Scots dialect? Forty years later, writers could still be copying his prose and calling it avant garde.

Eliot fled Missouri because it wasn’t respectable enough, became a bank clerk in England. Burroughs left Missouri to abandon respectability, then, having discarded it, trampled it, inverted it, perverted it, gave up the bohemian haunts of Tangiers, Paris, London, and New York to return to Lawrence, Kansas, a town whose claim to fame is its pillaging by Quantrill’s guerillas during the Civil War. Did Thomas Wolfe say you can't go home again? Lawrence was the hated mirror image of Missouri, a final finger flung in the face of his respectable tradition. Shooting Joan didn’t lessen his fascination with guns. In the 1980s Burroughs began painting, exhibiting works of “shotgun” art, created by blasting buckets of paint onto the canvas with buckshot, Jackson Pollack meets Travis Bickle. Interviewers would show up expecting mystic rap and be driven to distraction by his laconic drawling reticence. With-it celebrities, millionaire actors and rock stars, Sean Penn and Dennis Hopper and Kurt Cobain, came to pay tribute to his far-out genius. Bill put on his suit and showed them his guns. (Hopper, at least, got it: that's his portrait of Burroughs on the right). Burroughs had returned to his roots physically. Emotionally, he had never left them. He always was Bill Lee, his alter-ego narrator of Junkie, clinically aware of the effects of the many abuses to which he subjected his system. Like Hopper, he could stand back and observe his addictions even while serving them. Unlike Hopper, he could write them into his books. He never gave up drink or drugs, though he did clean up his heroin addiction. He outlived Cobain, with whom he cut an album in 1992, and outlived almost all the major, younger figures of the Beat Generation.

The enduring image of the Beat movement will be Kerouac and Cassady in their T shirts and Levis. The advertisers won’t let that die. Burroughs never fit that image, even though his sober, business-suited figure itself should be as iconic, in its ironic way. Burroughs' writing was the most dangerous of all the Beats, and the most original. We can all sit at home now and use computers to rearrange paragraphs the way Burroughs did with scissors and glue. Interzone has its own web space on the internet. Heroin hasn’t gone away, though it had to move over for crack. I still prize my Sixties Grove Press edition of Naked Lunch, the most subversive of all the Beat works, the feel of it, that sense of being rebellious by being a consumer of the right stuff. Ironic isn't it? I haven't actually held that book in years. Fifty years since it was published? Forty since I read it? In the age of Google and Wikipedia, I wrote this essay from memory, nothing more.

JACK O'CONNELL'S BOX NINE: A Forgotten Friday Entry

I'm revisiting Box Nine specifically because O'Connell is in Britain to promote his latest novel, The Resurrectionist, but more generally because it is hard to believe that a novel which won the then prestigious $50,000 Mysterious Press First Crime Novel Prize, and which has been followed by four books full of both invention and erudition, should even spring to mind as being overlooked today. But Box Nine appears to be out of print in America, and although The Resurrectionist may be his best book yet, it has not received anything like the attention it deserves.

Box Nine, like all O’Connell’s novels, is set in Quinsigamond, which is based geographically on Worcester, Massachusetts (where O'Connell lives) but is a futuristic fantasy of a mill town crossed with the Blade Runner LA of cyberpunk novels. In Box Nine there’s a new drug around town, called Lingo, which gets you speaking in tongues but also drives you to fiercer rage than the worst crank you ever saw. The high is great, but the price is high.

Connections to Vonnegut’s Ice-Nine are obvious, and also to Naked Lunch, which first posited language as a viral infection, and addiction. Language, in one way or another, has been at the heart of all O'Connell's work. When Box Nine first appeared, I noted O’Connell’s most relevant influences appeared to be the early Thomas Pynchon, concerned with issues of entropy, the early Don DeLillo, apparently concerned with early Pynchon, Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch (and the Borges who inspired Cortazar) and of course Blade Runner, and its source material, Philip Dick's Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?

This may have seemed a strange mix to apply to a small city in central Massachusetts, however fantastically it is imagined, but it does work, particularly because O’Connell’s alternately manic and dreamy prose echoes not only the effects of Lingo, but his concerns with the uses and abuses of language itself. I am amazed this guy is not being taught in post-modernist English Departments all around the world.

Leonore Thomas is the drug cop investigating Lingo. Problem is, she’s a thrill-seeking speed freak gun fetishist who might be more at home on the other side of the fence. In a city torn apart by ethnic gangs, the big drug lord is Cortez (Cortex? Neil Young's Cortez the Killer? Keats' 'stout Cortez'?) and the microcosm of society O'Connell presents is more like a slide full of bacteria wiggling under a microscope. It works as a crime novel, it works as a 'mainstream' novel, it works as a cult 'slipstream' novel. The bottom line is, it works.

O’Connell is one of those writers who can bend his prose to what he’s doing. There aren’t many of them around. It's form as an extension of content—and it wasn't a surprise I discovered Robert Creeley as one of his earlier influences. I, and other reviewers, keep comparing O'Connell to so many great writers not because he's derivative, but because he's unique, the kind of writer who makes you want to compare him to those other great writers who've blown you socks off with your first hit. Sort of like Lingo. And now I try to compare his career path, and I find no one close to the same, perhaps Joseph McElroy or someone else you probably haven't heard of either, or maybe Donald Harington, most of whose books were set in his own fictional Arkansas (see my obit of him here). But he's the real deal, and Box Nine is the place to get that first hit. No Exit Press have kept him in print in the UK, and their cover for The Resurrectionist should be one that attracts the kind of 'sophisticated' general readership who perhaps might pass by the book were it billed as crime. Their cover for Box Nine was a beauty too: Dick would have loved it. At least one publisher gets it.

Box Nine No Exit Press 1998 (second edition)
ISBN 9781901982275

The Resurrectionist No Exit Press 2009
ISBN 9781842433065

WAVE: A POEM, AND THE LONDON MAGAZINE LAUNCH

If you're in London tonight, I'll be reading a poem (or two) as part of the launch of the Oct/Nov issue of London Magazine, in which my tribute to William Burroughs' Naked Lunch appears (note, you can find that essay, which I reprinted in 2011, here). It's at the Opera Gallery in New Bond Street, at 7:30pm.

One of the poems I will read will be this one, 'Wave', which takes its title from a song by Antonio Carlos Jobim. I heard the great Al Cohn play his arrangement of it one night in May 1987 at the Pizza Express in Dean Street, where I had taken the beguiling Sarah Brown, 'the girl with the million dollar eyes'. I scribbled what follows on a napkin that night, and it came out virtually fully formed, as it were, from that wave. It was published a few months later as part of a three-poem sequence called 'Solo Trio' in Infolio (Cambridge). Then in 1992 in the US in Shadowplay (Grand Isle, Vermont), and in Canada in 1993 in the Windhorse Review (Yarmouth, Nova Scotia). What you read here, what they printed, and what I will read tonight, is virtually unchanged from that Pizza Express napkin. Thank you Sarah. Thank you Al.

WAVE

The sun sets twice into the same stretch
Of water; small fish hop out of the waves &
Walk on shore. In a cafe set under the only tree in sight
The tableclothes are folded; everyone is going home.
It is the dead hour of the morning; there is nothing
That is not either ending or beginning now.
With nothing else to think of or to do I fall asleep.
In my dreams, the sun sets only once each night.
In my dreams, no fish can walk.

NAKED LUNCH APPRECIATION: LONDON MAGAZINE

You can read my take on the 50th anniversary of William Burroughs' seminal (so to speak) novel Naked Lunch in the current issue of London Magazine, as shown here. The article itself isn't online at the mag's site, but it's worth seeking out and supporting.

HAROLD NORSE: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obituary of the Beat poet Harold Norse appears in today's Independent, you can find it here. I probably should have found a better way to describe Naked Lunch, which is one of the great American novels, but I've written an essay on its 50th anniversary, and that will appear here soon.

It's difficult to trace Norse's life without making him sound like a literary Zelig, but if you look at haroldnorse.com you'll find a series of photos which suggest that he was an object of desire for generations of poets. My experience of Norse's writing was less intimate, but I recall that Penguin poets volume, which I picked up when I first visited England in 1972, and it was one of my favourites; I carried it around with me while hitching through the Highlands in a very cold January 1973--Norse indeed.