Fiction Daily

Today, a last post on Jack Kerouac before I break to finish reading ‘Big Sur.’ Instead of looking at that book, I wanted to spend a few words on another, often overlooked, confessional, ‘Lonesome Traveler.’

‘Traveler’ captures the endearing sentimentality that colors Kerouac’s works, a prose that’s tempered — and saved — by Kerouac’s agitated soul that’s always searching for meaning, for experience, and for a place to call home.

The book starts with his classic ‘Author’s Introduction’ — a resume of his life as a “madman bum and angel.”

Though it’s labeled a novel, the stories are pure Kerouac. The Railroad Earth captures the lonely moments waiting for work, where he was a brakeman, and the meaningful details of his simple monkish life at that time.

Alone on a Mountaintop reveals what happened on Desolation Peak, an experience in many ways like his Big Sur stay, where the peace and solitude — instead of refreshing him, drove him mad.

Big Trip to Europe is his tale of going to France to track down something of his French-Canadian heritage. It is a great companion to Satori in Paris, a later book.

TOMORROW: FIGURATIVELY SPEAKING FRIDAY

Everything about my understanding of Jack Kerouac changed when I heard him reading his work.

It was the three-disk set, the Jack Kerouac Collection, purchased sometime in the 1990s. I had little spare money and so the boxed set was a hardship, but having three CDs of Kerouac himself reading was an epiphany.

The discs are “Poetry for the Beat Generation,” Kerouac and Steve Allen; “Blues and Haikus,” with Al Cohn and Zoot Sims; and “Readings by Jack Kerouac on the Beat Generation.”

Each disc has its own flavor, but unfortunately, you can also hear him become sloppier and more intoxicated, especially with Steve Allen.

Most of the time, however, the readings are transcendent. San Francisco Street Scene is unmatched for evoking the poetry of an ordinary morning, echoing Thoreau’s “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” when he says,

There was a little alley in San Fransisco back of the Southern Pacific station and Third and Townsend in redbrick of drowsy lazy afternoons with everybody at work in offices in the air you feel the impending rush of their commuter frenzy as soon they’ll be charging en mass from Market and Sansome buildings of foot and in buses and all well-dressed thru working man Frisco of Walkup ?? truck drivers and even the poor grime-bemarked Third Street … so hopeless and long left East … and now all they do is stand there spitting in the broken glass sometimes fifty in one afternoon against one wall at Third and Howard.

Hearing Kerouac read his own work awoke me to the sublime sonority of his voice and his phrasing. There is music in his words. When reading, he lingers on the “o” sounds, making them long and resonant with deep sadness; other times, he races through vowels on his way to consonants and every three or four words there is a melody, if you can hear it.

Now, when I read Kerouac’s prose, I hear that marvelous voice of his wrapping itself around paragraphs and phrases.

So it is reading “Big Sur” again this week. I can taste the music of phrases like these:

It’s all marvelous — and at first it’s so amazing to be able to enjoy dreamy afternoon meadows of heather up the other end of the canyon and just by walking less than a halfmile you can suddenly also enjoy wild gloomy sea coast, or if you’re sick of either of these just sit by the creed in a gladey spot and dream over snags….

If you hear Kerouac read, his voice is forever in mind, breathing song and life into every word.

It’s Monday and Fiction Daily pays tribute today to the work of John J Dorfner, a friend of the Beat writers and scholars.

In the sea of books about Jack Kerouac and the Beat writers … by known researchers like Ann Charters, Gerald Nicosia and other scholars, you’ll find two modest contributions under these titles: Visions of Rocky Mount, and Visions of Lowell.

Yet these are critically important volumes, as Mr. Dorfner did the footwork others overlooked. He pinned down elements of Jack Kerouac’s life that would have otherwise been lost.

He searched for the house in Rocky Mount where Kerouac lived with his sister, Caroline, and husband, Blake, and found it. No previous biographer bothered to track down such a detail, yet for readers of Kerouac, this detail contains a world of meaning.

It was in Rocky Mount, in Big Easonburg Woods, that Kerouac spent days and weeks in quiet reflection, still at last after his time in New York city and on the road.

For Kerouac was deeply complex, and just as he enjoyed the road’s upheaval and movement, stirring ideas along the way, he also fed on solitude, nature and reflection. He was, like so many writers, profoundly introverted.

It was this pursuit of quiet meditation that also led Kerouac to the top of Desolation Peak in Washington State, as well as to friend Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s cottage at Big Sur, where he fell apart after the success of “On the Road.”

If you’ve not yet read Big Sur, it is a moving look at the private life of a writer struggling with his own success, which nevertheless destroyed something precious and innocent.

In Rocky Mount, Kerouac was highly creative, penning Some of the Dharma and many letters. He worked at his brother-in-law’s television shop at 1311 Raleigh Road, in Rocky Mount.

Mr. Dorfner spent considerable time finding the house and talking with people who knew Kerouac in those days. Remember, this was 1956, a year before “On the Road” was published and the Beat phenomena began. He was to them just “Nin’s brother.”

The future of the Kerouac-Blake house on West Mount Drive in Rocky Mount is up in the air these days, as it’s simply been used as a rental cottage for many years. It should be protected and marked as historically significant.

Not only is Mr. Dorfner an unselfish literary sleuth, but he’s also quite a nice person to speak with. He corresponded with Allen Ginsberg and even hosted Neal Cassady’s son John Allen at his home in Raleigh, N.C.

His books about Kerouac’s time in Lowell and Rocky Mount are self-published, but they do quite well in sales, though it’s a labor of love, he says.

I highly recommend visiting his sites to read more about Kerouac’s time in Rocky Mount:

http://members.aol.com/KerouacNC/

and

Visions of Rocky Mount: WRAL
2008-06-02 19:19:03 GMT

In the photo above, you can see the back of the house on West Mount Drive in Rocky Mount, N.C. where Jack Kerouac spent several months in early 1956.

He lived there with his sister, Caroline, or Nin, and her husband, Paul Blake.

It’s only through the dedication of John J Dorfner of Raleigh, N.C., that we know about this house. In the early 1980s, after moving to the state with his wife, he became obsessed with knowing more about Kerouac’s time in Rocky Mount.

Understand, nowhere did any biographer mention the possible location of the house. That’s why when I made a similar search about the same time, I came up empty handed.

I was working at my first newspaper job in 1986 and heard from another writer that Kerouac had spent time in Rocky Mount. I figured it was a rumor really, and thought little of it. Then, I read a column by another reporter, Cindy Trew, who wrote about tracking down the house in “Big Easonburg Woods.” I was very touched by her column; she was a fine writer.

So I trekked to Braswell Memorial Library, looked through the North Carolina collection. Nothing. I drove around in Little Easonburg, which is just west of town on Sunset Avenue. Nothing.

Then in the late 1990s, curious again, I went to Braswell Library.

By this time, Mr. Dorfner had published his slim, but dense, volume, Kerouac: Visions of Rocky Mount.

There were photos inside and I drove along West Mount Drive until I found the house. It is pictured above.

AHEAD: How John Dorfner found the Blake-Kerouac House and saved it from obscurity, for now, at least

2008-05-29 11:46:59 GMT