Jack Kerouac: "Windblown World, Journals 1947-1954"

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Literature & Fiction
Author:	edited by Douglas Brinkley

"Powerful winds that crack the boughs of November!--and the bright calm sun, untouched by the furies of the earth, abandoning the earth to darkness,and wild forlornness, and night, as men shiver in their coats and hurry home. And then the lights of home glowing in those desolate deeps. We will walk in the windsweeps, gloating in the envelopment of ourselves. seeking the grinning intelligence of humanity..."

Jack Kerouac, "Winter Writing Log", November 12, 1947

For those who have read any of Kerouac's major works ("On the Road", Dharma Bums" ) or his poetry, this is a nice reintroduction to this great American author and his many influences, which were myriad and included works by everybody from Thomas Aquinas to Thomas Wolfe, from the moral fury of Dostoevsky to the dime novelists of the old West to the cinematic anarchy of W.C. Fields.

Douglas Brinkley, a noted historian of political and business big shots of the past, here steps back and gives us the inner-jottings, profound thoughts and irreverence of one of the great writers of post World War II America. It is part a gloomy tale of a man, often alone writing away in the middle of the night in his mother's apartment in Brooklyn, pounding out his first novel, "The Town and The City" with sweat and determination and then cutting loose with his friends (Allen Ginsburg, William S. Burroughs, Neal and Carolyn Cassidy,et al) through a variety of late-night philosophical discussions and carousing. It was Cassidy that was his greatest creation--as Dean Moriarty in "On the Road" he reinvents the Western hero (or, rather anti-hero) as part philosopher and part desperado. Nothing of detail in their wanderings together cannot be made consequential and interesting when "Sal Paradise" sets down to capture and deconstruct the dark nights and deep snows and foggy streets and lost and reckless and mad people of that book. And here is the opening drafts of that story:



The many trips across country are included in this volume as well. Kerouac loved the American landscape and not just the high cultural meccas of Greenwich Village and North Beach in San Francisco but loved the hearty people of the Dakotas and "the West Kansas Wilds". He was as much at home in a coffee shop on a bitter cold North Dakota night as he was at an evening with the swells at the Ballet Russe, enjoying his new found critical fame after "The Town and the City" opened the world of celebrity to him just a crack. It would latter burst open for him a few years later when "On the Road" became such a phenomenon even Jackie Kennedy felt obliged to read it and pronounce it wonderful. Kerouac, according to Brinkley, "found holiness in the mundane", a feat only Walt Whitman and few others had done so successfully.

Kerouac was searching for a newer and freer American existence. But his writing life was very disciplined. He went right from "Town and the City", finished in October ,1948, to begin his masterpiece "On the Road". Thousands of words flowed from his pen, but,according to Brinkley, he didn't simply write his most famous book in a spontaneous burst of invention fueled by Harlem radio jazz and coffee and cigarettes, but rather a work that was outlined and worked over extensively until the point came for the long single draft on a single extended sheet of paper that became famous.

"I really began "On the Road" in October, 1948, an entire year ago. Not much to show for it, but the first year is always slow... want to be finish it by next Spring to be free in Europe to study and make notes...Who knows? And besides, I don't care much for Europe. I'm more interested in 3rd Avenue now."

This is a good restart to Kerouac. If you haven't read his seminal works before, I'd recommend you go to them first and then return to this book, a magical lifting of the curtain on the subtle and saintly and sinful mind and soul of a truly original American voice.