Give a Brother a Hand

Recently I read the novel AND THE HIPPOS WERE BOILED IN THEIR TANKS by Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. Everyone by now knows of the Beats, and Kerouac and Burroughs were two of the most important members of this group. The strange thing to most of us was how so many of these close friends from the underside of society managed to become famous artists. It seems uncanny when just examined superficially. How do these blokes who all hung out together as low-life scum end up at the top of the artist heap by the time the late 1950s rolled around?

And of course, the more I read by these fellows, and the more I read about them, the answer became obvious.

They were pulling one another along. If one had success, he allowed the others to ride his coattails. As soon as a member of their club-that-was-not-a-club had a hit, he used whatever influence that gave him to help a brother. And so, they pulled one another along, if not always up. Thus, we saw HOWL, and ON THE ROAD, and JUNKY, and GO, and so on. Ginsberg, especially, always seemed to be working behind the scenes with publishers trying to talk editors into taking on the work of one of his friends. Each seemed to do whatever he could to help the others achieve literary notoriety, if not always financial rewards (but often that, too). There seemed to be almost no jealousy among them when it came to their respective works. And it was because of this weird kind of camaraderie that they did, in fact, reward one another through these shared friendships.

One does not see a lot of this in modern times. I can't think of another such example of it, but it might exist beyond my experience. I've certainly witnessed almost no instances of it in my own career as a writer.

Many of Kerouac's biographers claim that he was confounded by his fame and didn't know how to deal with it and never sought it. This is bullshit. He always sought fame--mentioned the desire to have it in his manuscripts before they were ever published to great acclaim. He ate that shit up and loved being the center of attention. This was a performance piece done with Steve Allen, who was always keen to be hip, especially in those days of the the peak of the Beats fame. Kerouac went with it and this was likely just before he began his big downhill alcoholic slide.

Burroughs, the child-molesting wife-murderer manages to show some brilliant insight on his old friend Kerouac.

The three biggest of The Beats: starting second from left: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs. Lowlife scum who hit it big in the field of poetry and fiction.

THE BEATS, A Graphic History

I hate to publish a less than positive review of work by any writer or artist I generally admire. However, I am so glad that THE BEATS will not go down as Harvey Pekar's last work, because it really was uninspired and not very good.


When I first heard about this book, it was described to me as a volume that looked upon the writers and artists who are known today as "the Beats" in a less than positive light, showing what lowlifes they truly were. If that had been the case, then the book would likely have been a better read.


All of the fans of the Beats (and I include myself among them) first look upon that lot as adventurous sorts out to prove themselves as rebels and to live outrageous and courageous lives. However, the more I read of them, and the more of their work that I read, it became obvious to me that they were--by and large--a bunch of creeps. Frankly, I would not have wished to have spent any time in the company of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, or the rest of the bunch.


They were--for want of a better term--scum of the Earth. They were not only devious in their dealings with society at large, they were deviants in almost every way one can imagine. They swilled too much alcohol, took too many illegal drugs; they stole money, food, cars--anything they needed. Some of them were murderers, or were comfortable being in the company of murderers--basically they didn't seem to care. A disturbing number of them were rapists and child molesters.

THE BEATS, quite the disappointing biography.

If a book had been written specifically listing these facts and rubbing the collective noses of their fans in this hard evidence, then the book might have been a success.


Alas, it did not really do these things, and the final product was rather bland. Instead of creating a work of insight and courage, Pekar and company ended up leaving us with what amounts to a boring drone of a book. It doesn't help that the artwork--mainly by Ed Piskor--is similarly uninspired. Piskor's graphics were pretty much as boring as the text, which is a shame. So much could have been done with the subject matter if only the contributors had been able to peel themselves away from the worship and awe with which so many of us use when regarding the Beats.


In point of fact, the Beats were a nigh-worthless lot of lucky criminals and assholes. That they found fame and success and were later to stand with the highest of the high is strange and wonderful in many ways, and stunning in so many others. I wish that had been the book Pekar and his collaborators had produced. If so, it would have been fun to read instead of merely boring.


The only section of the book that does break out of the mold set by Pekar was the piece focusing on "the Beat Chicks" by Joyce Brabner. She did in that one small section what I wish all involved had done when offered this chance to shine a new and more vicious light on that circle of crazy friends.

As I said, I'm very happy that this was not Pekar's last word. Amazon.com just sent me an email that HARVEY PEKAR'S CLEVELAND has shipped. In a day or so I'll have his newest graphic novel, one dealing with his lifelong city of residence and from which I have read excerpts. It stands to be a real gem of a book, and a fitting addition to the Pekar bookshelf.

Influences

A lot of fiction heavily influenced my life in general, my life as a reader, and my life as a writer. Since I now make a decent paycheck now and again with my own fiction, that third influence on me is often foremost in my mind.

What books pushed me to write later in life more than others?

At some point I discovered the works of Charles Bukowski. At first it was his short stories that grabbed me, and then I moved to his novels, and then his poetry. Bukowski was an original. He made everything he did seem easy and casual, but that's not the way it was, at all. Underlying everything that he wrote was a humor and a wit that were both as sharp an insightful as any I've encountered. A lot of other writers try to imitate him, but no one succeeds at that. Don't try.

I also found Cormac McCarthy at some point. The first thing of his that I read was BLOOD MERIDIAN. It made quite an impact on me, and I've continued to read just about every novel that he produces. Some others are almost as powerful as that first one, but none of those have influenced me quite so much as that one. His style is another that one should not try to imitate. It's not that it can't be done--Charles Frazier did a passable patch on McCarthy with his COLD MOUNTAIN--but no one else can quite capture the world that McCarthy can conjure. Again, my advice would be to not even try to copy that style...and certainly don't compare yourself to Cormac McCarthy--this is a bit of hubris I've seen out of a few authors. Silly chaps.

I came upon The Beats rather late in life. I was well into my forties before I "discovered" them. It wasn't that I hadn't tried reading the work of that group of creators before I was older--but the fiction never held me for more than a few lines or pages, and so I'd cast that stuff off. Finally, though, I picked up ON THE ROAD for maybe the twelfth time in my life and, for some reason, that time everything fell into place. All the tumblers clicked. I was hooked for over a year on the fiction of Jack Kerouac, and then William S. Burroughs, and the rest of the bunch. I learned quite a lot from reading The Beats, and I almost abandoned genre fiction entirely after feeling that horrors and fantasies could never match the kind of power I was reading within the paragraphs of DESOLATION ANGELS or JUNKY. But eventually I came around and returned to what I knew best.

Somewhere in those past-40 years I found Robert Graves. First it was I, CLAUDIUS and then CLAUDIUS THE GOD AND HIS WIFE MESSILINA. Later I sought out his short fiction and after reading a bit of that I discovered some things about how to write that left me very well educated, indeed. Graves was a bit of a nut in many ways, but he was about as skilled a writer as I have ever encountered and I learned about as much from reading his fiction as from the works of anyone else I could name.

And even later than Graves and Kerouac and Bukowski I finally buckled down to read as much as I could of Hemingway. As with Kerouac, most of my friends had read Ernest Hemingway's work in their youth and been influenced by it as very young men. For whatever reason I found more to admire in the fantasies of Ray Bradbury and H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard and so would give up on the tempered realities of Hemingway. My loss as a young man, but there's nothing to be done for it now. Better that I finally appreciated him late than not at all. As with the others, reading his stories and novels showed me how to write more effectively than just about any of the fantasists with whom I'd been so engrossed from the age of eight through forty-two or so.

Did I waste a lot of my youth chasing dragons and demons and aliens creatures? Not really.

For the writer who influenced me more than any other was the crazed visionary Philip K. Dick. Most people today who know his name at all hear it because of his connection to so many film adaptations of his novels and short stories. He was, for many years, quite prolific and his mind was a vast factory of ideas. Today, he's considered the father of cyberpunk (go look it up). Some of his fiction seems dated--a product of the 1950s and 1960s and showing this in his language and condescending attitudes toward race and sex. But much of his work has stood the test of the decades since his death, and that material is as powerful now as when he first produced it.

My favorite Philip K. Dick novel is THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE. It is set in a world in which it was not the Allies who won World War II, but the Axis. Furthermore, he cast his characters in a North America that has been divided down the Mississippi River basin--the Germans in the East and the Japanese in the West. If he wasn't the first to exploit this concept, he was likely in the first tier of those using that idea effectively.

But Dick goes further. Within the novel is another novel. This novel is called THE GRASSHOPPER LIES HEAVY. The characters hear about it--written by an author who has used the theme that it wasn't the Axis who won WWII, but the Allies. And in MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, walls sometimes break down and the boundaries of reality are changed and altered. The characters within Dick's book are left with the idea that there is another world--one in which they were the victors and not among the oppressed.

This novel affected me on many levels. The night that I finished reading it, I placed it on my bedside table and turned out the light and went to sleep. Some time later--well before dawn--I came awake. Or at least I thought that I was awake. Then I realized that I was dreaming very vividly that I was lying in my bed in my own house. And I dreamed that I had just finished reading a book that I had placed on the bedside table before turning out the light. That book was, I realized, THE GRASSHOPPER LIES HEAVY.

This realization so startled me that I had to get up to turn on the light to look at the book. So I sat up and reached for the light.

And then I woke up. Really woke up. I was already up on one elbow reaching for the lamp, pretty much in my sleep. I knew what I was doing. For a moment, in the dark, I froze. I couldn't recall if the book by my bed was THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE or THE GRASSHOPPER LIES HEAVY. Which one was it?

After a few moments I couldn't take the suspense so I turned on the light and reached for the book. Picking it up, I realized that it was THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE. The bad guys had not won WWII. I was not living in a world dominated by the likes of Joseph Goebbels and Reinhard Heydrich.

That's what writing is all about. That's power. That's talent. It's not something I'm ever likely to equal, but it's something to reach for.

Philip K. Dick may very well have influenced me more than any other author.

At least I think so.

Qualities I Hadn't Seen

For some reason I cannot name, I never cared for the Beats when I was a young man. My pals and acquaintances would suggest the obvious books to me and I’d take a look at them, quickly grow rather bored with the prose, and put them aside. People kept telling me what a great writer Kerouac was, or what an amazing experience one had in reading William Burroughs, or how gifted a poet was William Ginsberg. It was all dead air to me.

And then, one day, at the age of 44, I picked up my copy of ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac. Why? I’m not sure, but I’d have to assume that it was because I’d exhausted all of the unread books in my house (no mean feat, that), and I just really, really needed something to read. So for the sixth or seventh time in my life (but for the first time since I was in my early 30s), I gave Jack Kerouac one more chance.

And it grabbed me. I mean, that book sank its hooks into me way past the barbs and I was landed. I don’t recall looking up from those printed pages for several hours. I couldn’t get enough of that novel and I could not force myself to stop reading the vast road trips of the fictionalized versions of Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady. I read the book that day and reread it over the course of the next few days.

After that, it was a mad dash to snag as many of Kerouac’s novels as I could find in the bookstores. I’m pretty sure I’ve now read them all, finding some of them brilliant and a few of them tiresome. THE DHARMA BUMS remains my favorite of the lot, and I keep a copy near at hand most of the time and it’s not unusual for me to take the book with me on my backpacking trips into the wilderness areas I like to explore.

In the years since Kerouac’s work “clicked” with me, I went through explorations of the other Beat writers. Burroughs’ QUEER and JUNKY are two very powerful books, although I just don’t dig his cut-out stuff. I can’t dismiss it out of hand as I would have done in my youth, but for now I can’t find anything in it that makes me want to read past the first bits. I may change my mind at some date…find myself bored and with nothing to read. At such a time I may pick up NAKED LUNCH and find that I quite like it. But for now I find that I much prefer Burroughs’ fictionalized novels and essays to those more experimental works for which he’s so well known.

And, by the time I made my way through collections of Ginsberg’s poetry, I realized that I was as fascinated with these fellows as personalities as I was by the talent they exhibited in their fiction and their essays and in their poems. They lived strange lives to my way of thinking. Bizarre and unusual lifestyles that were not hidden at all in a time and place when such behavior could very well have landed any of them in seriously hot water. These guys had guts.

I think that’s what has always impressed me about Kerouac and his pals. It wasn’t necessarily what they did, but the fact that they did these things and lived their lives in the face of such complete resistance. That took a kind of courage I never had, because I’d never been in a position to test myself that way. It’s not easy to stand counter to the society in which one exists. In fact, I can think of nothing more difficult and nothing more frightening.

I adore much of their work, but I think that I admire the courage of the doing as much as the art exhibited in the telling.