Not About Anything

I have this idea of writers in the first half of the 20th century: completing their art, packaging a copy carefully, sending it off through the mail to a publishing house (or two or ten), and waiting to be discovered by an editor (or their assistant). By the 1960s, however, publishing had become an industry (small presses aside), where literary agents became the buffer between artists and the increasingly profit-searching publishing companies who drew a stern line between "publishable" and "marketable". How many amazing pieces of literature have been lost because they weren't deemed marketable? About as many pieces of trash published yearly because they will make money.

By 1964, the tide had definitely started taking that sharp turn from creative to commercial. One young writer had spent the previous year on a U.S. military base in Puerto Rico with a lot of time on his hands and a new typewriter. He believed in his novel so much, he only sent it to one publisher. An editor at that publishing house was impressed, amazed and very encouraging…at first. But under closer examination, he believed the novel had problems. It was a treasure of rich characters, but the plot was loose, as meandering as the Mississippi River as it flows past the French Quarter. The editor wanted to know the point of the novel, but the author conceded with no reservations: it wasn't about anything. Just life, just people, just a sense of place and time.

Ultimately, that wasn't enough for the editor; the novel was not published; and five years later, the author was found dead on the Gulf Coast, a hose tied from the tailpipe leading back into the car.

The fact that this eventually had a happy ending could never erase the tragedy of any artist whose work is rejected and they feel it is a personal sign from the gods. It's a modern-day miracle the author's mother found the manuscript ten years later and relentlessly bothered anyone and everyone who could recognize her son's talent. That she got the attention of an established Southern author was borne of luck and determination along the journey to the book's publication and subsequent awarding of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature.

As much as the world now celebrates A Confederacy of Dunces and its author, John Kennedy Toole, underneath remains a dark, cautionary tale about not only the harsh realities of making the transition from art to product, but also the sometimes (often) fragile states of the artists drowning in its wake. Artists are not only now required to be brilliant and talented, but they must also have amazing traits in self-marketing and business acumen, always be agreeble to alter their work to "appeal" to a wider audience. I suspect there are many brilliant novels sitting in drawers and boxes the world over, created by artists too sensitive, too hapless, not savvy enough to navigate the rivers of commercial art.

Or perhaps they don't want to. Perhaps the drive to create, as ceaseless as it can be, is strong enough that no one ever has to see the result. Some say writing is the purging of demons; once they have been purged, nothing more need be done with the project. If other people enjoy it - fine. If it can make money - all the better.

1964 drew a curtain on what was then known as the "literary establishment", probably the last era where the "writing life" was considered an admirable profession not only supported by a glamorous social network but also attached with some type of superior cachet. By the 1980s, hip lit was often nothing more than brief, staccato observation and blunt prose - worlds away from Toole's filigree of personality and description. It's tempting to believe had Toole lived today, he would have simply self-published on Amazon.com. The world seems to have curiously reversed itself, where anyone can first publish, but they immediately still have to have gifts of promotion, networking and relentless self-esteem to get an audience. Ironically, Toole was just the sort of person who would have liked nothing better than to spend his nights creating and his days marketing - he would have been a 21st century literary superstar.

No One Behind the Wheel

On the road downward, an artist would be smart to pick up younger friends along the way…not necessarily the free spirits hitchhiking, but the ones who spend their weekends in car lots, inspecting the shiny new convertibles, knowing how good they'll look compared to the guy in his beat 50's wreck with all that mileage and all that baggage.

By 1964, Allen Ginsberg, recently lifechanged while padding around India, easily made friends with the hippies and the'd hold him high on their shoulders as they marched throughout the decade; William Burroughs, in another ten years, would make acolytes of the punks and they'd sit at his feet. Jack Kerouac did none of this. In 1964, booze-n-weed Jack despised the young acid tripping generation - the ones who'd hang an American flag on the wall as art, or worse - as a sofa cover. Jack would be damned sure to fold that American flag neatly and reverently. His former travel buddy, Neal Cassady, touched base one last time, driving the bus that helped usher in the 1960's (this is not metaphor; Neal was the one driving Ken Kesey's dayglo road trip bus, Further, as it made its way cross country on-the-road style.)

Kesey to Kerouac: your place in history is assured.
Kerouac: i know.

According to his letters, Kerouac wouldn't be a film with former friends Ginsberg and Gregory Corso because they were now "political fanatics". Jack wanted his writing to bring him back to a time and place where more conservative morals were respected. His former colleagues and their writing were a "betrayal of any truly 'beat' credo." and at their age, Jack saw them all as "frustrated hysterical provocateurs". Kerouac's back-to-basics autobiographical work did indeed go back to his childhood (Visions of Gerard - Gerard being his dead brother), and the critics were not kind to this elegy. Desolation Angels, although pieced together some years before, was still in the process of being "discovered" and would be released the following year.

During the summer of 1964, Jack went to live with his mother in once quiet St. Petersburg, FL. (Kerouac biographer Dennis McNally perpetuates the myth that the city was the "world's largest open-air mausoleum") Jack worried about his new address becoming public ("a 70-year old mother's house is not a PAD for krissakes!"), but still wrote that 1964 St. Petersburg life was all "baseball games, bars, pool games, beach parties…wild dances…" By Thanksgiving, he'd also be visiting St. Petersburg jail after urinating in the street.

Jack and his mother spent the days excelling at being functioning alcoholics, their states of mind further tested when Jack's sister died suddenly, giving Jack even more to ruminate about days rushing by, writing John Clellon Holmes about the "red-neoned funeral parlor" at the end of everyone's road. Photos of Jack from 1964 show the 42 year old looking some 15 years older. Kerouac couldn't last much longer like this - and he didn't - becoming yet another artist who drank themselves into an early grave. (His former muse, Neal Cassady, had already been a victim of the times a year and a half before Jack's final whiskey.) Was he a man out of time, unable to come to grips with a new generation who still carried dog-eared paperbacks of On the Road in their back pockets? Or had he run out of different versions of his life story in order to feel more relevant in a year of blunt hyperreal fiction like Hubert Selby Jr's Last Exit to Brooklyn?

His last years were spent with young hangers-on bilking him out of drink money and cheating at poolgames behind his back. Any one of these younger generation could have been the spark to bring him out of his post-hasbeen funk and into a newer understanding in a decade where the world was going wild. Instead, he bailed out without appointing a designated driver.