Around the poolhalls of Denver during World War II a strange looking boy began to be noticeable to the characters who frequented the places afternoon and night and even to the casual visitors who dropped in for a game of snookers after supper when all the tables were busy in an atmosphere of smoke and great excitement and a continual parade passed in the alley from the backdoor of one poolroom on Glenarm Street to the backdoor of another—a boy called Cody Pomeray, the son of a Larimer Street wino. Where he came from nobody knew or at first cared. Old heroes of other generations had darkened the walls of the poolhalls long before Cody got there; memorable eccentrics, great poolsharks, even killers, jazz musicians, traveling salesmen, anonymous frozen bums who came in on winter nights to sit an hour by the heat never to be seen again, among whom (and not to be remembered by anyone because there was no one there to keep a love check on the majority of the boys as they swarmed among themselves year by year with only casual but sometimes haunted recognition of faces, unless strictly local characters from around the corner) was Cody Pomeray, Sr. who in his hobo life that was usually spent stumbling around other parts of town had somehow stumbled in here and sat in the same old bench which was later to be occupied by his son in desperate meditations on life.76
That’s the opening fanfare, it zeroes in on the notion of character and heroes, and the act of keeping a love check on our heroes. What’s he doing this year? Where’s he now? or Who’s she with? When I first read that sentence I was astounded by it. It was like some great European movie director panning in from a giant overview to one detail, one character, one face. There’s a kind of noble drama pronounced in that sentence. I remember I said what a great idea, to keep a love check on all the characters like Dostoyevsky. But in whose mind is this a drama, or who’s keeping tabs, what kind of person is it that keeps tabs? Kerouac was keeping a love check on his generation. Then there’s a very strange paragraph.
Have you ever seen anyone like Cody Pomeray?—say on a street-corner on a winter night in Chicago, or better, Fargo, any mighty cold town, a young guy with a bony face that looks like it’s been pressed against iron bars to get that dogged rocky look of suffering, perseverance, finally when you look closest, happy prim self-belief, with Western sideburns and big blue flirtatious eyes of an old maid and fluttering lashes, the small and muscular kind of fellow wearing usually a leather jacket and if it’s a suit it’s with a vest so he can prop his thick busy thumbs in place and smile the smile of his grandfathers . . .
That’s an odd idea, because he’s taking this juvenile delinquent and making him a Civil War soldier. It is actually what Kerouac had in mind at that time. He was thinking of writing a novel about the Civil War. He had seen all those photos of guys in camps in the Civil War, handsome-looking fellows that you see described by Whitman, and Kerouac realized that they were no different than us. They were living people with the same spermy intelligence that everybody’s got, and the same adventures. So he decided he would put Lucien Carr and Burroughs in that scene. You know, Burroughs as some morphine-addicted Southern general, an aristocratic general from a magnolia-treed mansion. He would put in Cassady as a heroic, happy-go-lucky cavalry man with horses and charging and stealing guns and running around getting drunk with the Indians.
. . . who walks as fast as he can go on the balls of his feet, talking excitedly and gesticulating; poor pitiful kid actually just out of reform school with no money, no mother, and if you saw him dead on the sidewalk with a cop standing over him you’d walk on in a hurry, in silence.77
That’s such a pretty piece of prose poetry and also full insight, raw insight in the sense that it brings you back home to some sense of the self which is real. I liked this particular passage because it displays that quality of panoramic awareness very clearly.
And then in that vast space, the loneliness. There’s a phrase of Kerouac’s, “the bleak inhuman loneliness of human nature.” I think the loneliness is just inevitable, like the vastness of space. Kerouac wasn’t the only American prose writer who liked the word “lone” and used it a lot. The biggest loner, the one who used “lone” most beautifully before him, was Herman Melville. In Melville’s poetry, you’ll see that same lone soul associating itself with American loneliness. The central image of that for Kerouac was everybody looking for “the center of Saturday night in America,” as he put it. Even with all the excitements of Saturday, going out and getting drunk and trying to make out and get laid, we’re all going to finally be a lonely crock of shit. For Kerouac, the physical center of the loneliness is in the back alley, under a redbrick building, under a neon sign, with nobody looking at him. Kerouac centered his image of American loneliness on that redbrick wall, which is where everybody wound up, unsatisfied. All the young, wild, lonely seekers wound up vomiting against that wall after the bar closed. That was his vision.
Cody sat there, stunned with personal excitement as whole groups of them shouted across the smoke to other fellows in a tremendous general anticipation of the rapidly approaching almost unbearably important Saturday night in just a few hours, right after supper when there would be long preparations before the mirror and then a sharped-up city-wide invasion of the bars (which already at this moment had begun to roar from old afternoon drinkers who’d swallowed their bar egos long ago), thousands of young men of Denver hurrying from their homes and arrogant clack and tie-adjustments towards the brilliant center in an invasion haunted by sorrow because no guy whether he was a big drinker, big fighter or big cocksman could ever find the center of Saturday night in America, though the undone collar and the dumb stance on empty streetcorners on Sunday dawn was easy to find and in fact fifteen-year-old Cody would have best told them about it; the premonition of this oncoming night together with the dense excitement of everything around the tables in the shadowy hall nevertheless failing to hide certain hints of heartbreaking loss that filtered in with chinks of daylight from the street (October in the poolhall) and penetrated all their souls with the stricken memory not only of wild windblowing coalsmoke and leaves across town, and football games somewhere, but of their wives and women right now, with feminine purposes, with that ravenous womany glee trotting around town buying boxes of soap, Jell-o, floorwax, Dutch Cleanser and all that kind and placing these on the bottom of their wagons, then working up to apples at the fruitstand, containers of milk, toilet paper, half crushable items like that, finally chops, steak, bacon pyramiding to eggs, cigarettes, the grocery slip all mixed up with new toys, new socks and housedresses and lightbulbs, eagering after every future need while their men-louts slammed around with balls and racks and sticks in the dimness of their own vice.78
[That’s a] nice, long sentence. That business of jumping from pool hall to supermarket and getting all the detail into it comes from Neal Cassady’s reading aloud of Proust where there’s such a compound of disparate elements put together within one sentence.
Then the ultimate image at the end of Saturday night is the red neon light on a redbrick wall in a back alley of Denver where nothing is happening. People are just vomiting drunk and it’s the end of the road, that is to say, all the excitement winds up in a giant disillusioned redbrick wall. The idea of people getting together for a big Saturday night is something that recurs all through his books. This redbrick wall is one of the “unspeakable visions of the individual.”
. . . or maybe filling the windowed eyes of a hotel with their sheens, the glitter and yet the hidden beyondish gloom of this drove Cody in his secretest mind as it has myself and most others to further penetrations into the interior streets, the canyons, the ways, so much like the direction music takes in the mind or even the undiscoverable flow of dream images that make dreaming a tragic mystery; and so seeking rushing all dreams into the heart of it, always the redbrick wall behind red neons, waiting.79
. . . that was namelessly related in his poor tortured consciousness to the part of the redbrick wall he had always seen from the smooth old waitingroom be
nch of the Country Jail when his father had been arrested for drunkenness on Larimer Street probably with five or six others taken en masse from a warehouse ramp . . .80
Then a page later:
. . . see Cody Pomeray trying to hurry into the heart of the great Denver evening that to him will find its obvious focus in the poolhall where sometimes the hour is so roaring that with the Tremont parlor backdoor open you can see a solid block of poolhall through the two joints like looking down an endless mirror all cuesticks, smoke, green; hustling to stab the heart of the night or be stabbed but always missing because it is not in the poolhall, or downtown further where the redbrick walls lead further, glowing from blackracked neons into unspeakable secret glittering centers where everything must be happening or at least give modified indication of where to go for it, show down what . . .
. . . listening, I’d say, not to the Hit Parade but the Saturday night dance parade remote bandbroadcasts most networks have (while the woman of the house is ironing the fresh fragrant wash), in your bathrobe and slippers, preferably Chinese style, with the funnies. But Saturday night is to be best found in the redbrick wall behind the neons, it’s now infinitely bleaker than ever, like the iron fire escapes at the blind wallsides of those great fat movie auditoriums that squat like frogs in businesslike real estate are so much bleaker on Saturday nights, they cast more hopeless shadows.81
Then there’s an interesting passage of Cody’s direct approach, making friends with the pool shark and reproducing his language, the excitement of his talk, trying to cover all psychological angles at one time. It was the climax of Kerouac’s early vision and it was the scene around which Visions of Cody was built, like an instant snapshot in eternity. Maybe it is Kerouac’s greatest moment of writing.
Kerouac brings many elements of the book together, it’s the entire gang out together Saturday night at dusk. Tom Watson having introduced Cody to his poolhall gang, middle-class kids, and then this lower-class kid joins them and shows off. He turns out to be smarter and more interesting and more athletically energetic than all of them. It’s a characteristic Kerouac theme, kids playing football in an empty lot, simultaneously paired with the panoramic vision of the entire heaven at sunset. Then he introduces an old man lamenting the passage of life. He realizes that he’s on the way down into death and he’s already lost his youth and his sex and nobody loves him. It ends with the camera zooming in on Cody’s face, making a football tackle.
Suddenly out on East Colfax Boulevard bound for Fort Collins Cody saw a football game going on among kids in a field, stopped the car, said “Watch” ran out leaping madly among kids (with noble seriousness there wearing those tragic lumps like the muscles of improvised strongmen in comedies), got the ball, told one blondhaired boy with helmet tucked underarm to run like hell, clear to the goalpost, which the kid did but Cody said “Further, further,” and the kid halfway doubting to get the ball that far edged on back and now he was seventy yards and Cody unleashed a tremendous soaring wobbling pass that dropped beyond the kid’s most radical estimate, the pass being so high and powerful the boy completely lost it in eyrieal spaces of heaven and dusk and circled foolishly but screaming with glee—when this happened everyone was amazed except Johnson, who rushed out of the car in his sharp blue suit, leaped around frantically in a mixup of kids, got the ball (at one point fell flat because of his new shiny-bottom shoes that had only a half hour’s poolroom dust on ’em) and commanded the same uncomplaining noble boy to run across the field and enragedly unfurled a long pass but Cody appeared out of nowhere in the mad lowering dusk and intercepted it with sudden frantic action of a wildfaced maniac jumping into a roomful of old ladies; spun, heaving a prodigious sky pass back over Johnson’s head that Johnson sneered at as he raced back, he’d never been outdone by anybody (“Hey whee!” they yelled in the car); such a tremendous pass it was bound to be carried by the wind, fall in the road out on East Colfax, yet Johnson ran out there dodging traffic as mad red clouds fired the horizon of the mountains, to the west, and somewhere across the field littler tiny children were burning meaningless fires and screaming and playing football with socks, some just meaninglessly tackling one another all over in a great riot of October joy. [ . . . ] Ah but well, Earl Johnson wanted to throw a pass to Cody and Cody challenged him and said, “Run with the ball and let’s see if I tackle you before you reach that Studebaker where the man’s standing”; and Johnson laughed because he had been (absolutely) the outstanding runner everywhere (schools, camps, picnics), at fifteen could do the hundred in 10:9, track star speed; so took off not quite realizing what he’d done here giving Cody these psychological opportunities and looking back at him with taunts “Well come on, come on, what’s the matter?” And so that Cody furiously, as if running for his life, not only caught up with him but even when Johnson increased his speed in wholehearted realizing race caught up with him easily, in his sheer excitement, with his tremendous unprecedented raw athletic power he could run the hundred in almost ten flat (actually and no lie), and a sad, remote tackle took place in the field, for a moment everybody saw Cody flyingtackling horizontally in the dark air with his neck bulled on to prove, his head down almost the way a dead man bows his head self-satisfied and life-accomplished but also as if he was chuckling up his coat sleeve at Johnson about-to-be-smeared, both arms outstretched, in a tackling clamp that as he hung suspended in that instantaneous fix of the eye were outstretched with a particular kind of unspeakable viciousness that’s always so surprising when you see it leaping out of the decent suits of men in sudden sidewalk fights, the cosmopolitan horror of it, like movie magnates fighting, this savagery explosively leaping now out of Cody’s new suit with the same rage of shoulderpads and puffy arms, yet arms that also were outstretched with an unspeakable mute prophesied and profound humility like that of a head-down Christ shot out of a cannon on a cross for nothing, agonized. Crash, Johnson was tackled; Justin G. Mannerly called out “Why didn’t you try that in the road I have a shovel in the car” nobody noticing, even as he drove off; and Cody, like Johnson with his knees all bruised and pants torn, had established his first great position of leadership in Tom Watson’s famous gang.
Long ago in the red sun . . .82
That long sentence ending with that instantaneous fix of the eye, after all the panorama and the red sun. That was his first long sentence writing and his great breakthrough. At the time he was influenced by Cassady’s writing and by Proust. All the characters doing some separate thing, but in this instantaneous fix of the eye, all of them related for one epiphanous moment. All of it happening in the red sun in the field by the high school. He started out to write a big formal novel as a continuation of The Town and the City, but it led into the realization that everything was going on in his mind at once. Maybe he felt that the whole syntax was too constricting, so he thought what would happen if he just did a whole novel as a single sentence? At first, I think he turned aside from that as being too formalistic and began On the Road.
It is Kerouac’s opening serenade, or opening cadenza, the first writing he did into the whole theme of On the Road. When I first read that I just wept, it seemed so orchestral and so many different elements gathered together within one sentence and such a long breath, and such melodiousness, as if wit, moment to moment, the intelligence of the noticings, that it seemed uncanny, at the same time the philosophy amazing, the panoramic glimpse of time and space, grieving, woeful, and deep.
There’s a logical progression of his discovery of the nature of mind with an exposition and explanation to the world. It began with the idea of Visions of Cody, epiphanous moments, illuminated moments, or striking poignant moments. Then he extended it out through himself, accepting himself and beginning to dig how amazing his own private fantasy was with Doctor Sax and how amazing his private fantasy love history was with a girl, Maggie Cassidy. Finally the ultimate personal private vision would be the dredging up of his early traumatic sorrow at the death of
his older brother, Gerard, in the late twenties, Visions of Gerard, which is maybe the most poignant and lyrical of all of Kerouac’s books. I think it’s also a point of turnover from a Catholic viewpoint to a totally Buddhist one.
Visions of Cody is the most serious text we’ll run into. It’s the most creative text, and the most seminal text. It’s the one where Kerouac actually undergoes a transfiguration and becomes his art, he ceases to be a guy writing at his art and becomes interchangeable with the art. In a sense he gets crucified by his art or becomes one with his writing. His writing and his personality become identical and he becomes a superprofessional in the sense that he’s a saint of writing. That writing is not merely something in which he explores his own character or turns out pretty works, but where every word he writes is part of a larger chronicle rather than individual pieces. It happens in the course of the writing of Visions of Cody and for that reason it’s an amazing document. Everything after that for the rest of his life is a playing out of a single visionary moment that is registered in Visions of Cody.
Burroughs went through a similar experience a few years later. If this was Kerouac’s decisive moment where the writing and his personality became identical, Burroughs’s moment came around 1953. It is documented in his letters to me in which he enclosed chapters of Naked Lunch. Where Burroughs the writer of routines and Burroughs the man become identical, where there’s no difference any longer.
The next step for Kerouac, having completed On the Road, was a discovery that he made while hanging around in New York with Ed White. White was an architect and carried a sketch pad, so he suggested to Jack that he try taking his notepad outdoors [and] sketch verbally. The first part of Visions of Cody consisted in a series of amazing sketches which are a standard workbook for anybody who’s writing.