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In a world gone mad for distractions: some books that aren’t, from Kerouac to the Benin Bronzes via a Punky Reggae Party

Jack Kerouac, On the Road: the Original Scroll (2007)

Vivien Goldman, Rebel Musix, Scribe on a Vibe: Frontline Adventures Linking Punk, Reggae, Afrobeat and Jazz (2024)

Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museums: the Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution (2020)

There’s an extravagance about these books that’s not what has defined them or made their reputations. They are, after all, in their individual ways, serious undertakings, dedicated to the ever-serious task of elevating the human spirit.

But (bear with me here): they each speak with a considered, powerful and heightened – that’s to say, extravagant – intensity. At the heart of which is a burning desire to remake the world a better place (which, by the way, I perceive to be missing in so much of the utter shite published in this world gone mad for mere distractions).

Odd group? Not really: these books are joined by a common thread of respect, enthusiasm even, for what for lack of a better phrase is called black culture.

All three authors have experienced it and become immersed in it, first as outsiders, then as co-travellers of a sort, entering across a bridge constructed of shared humanity and an intuitive desire for social justice. And, not least, belief in the necessity of the impulse to risk and adventure, and through it to personal fulfillment. All expressed in wildly differing ways, and to different degrees.

It’s a very 20^th century thing, this cross-cultural communing, perhaps dateable to the recognition of jazz as legitimate artistic expression in the 1920s, then given ever-wider currency by - prominent among a slew of other things - the Spirituals to Swing concerts at Carnegie Hall in the 1930s, the Beat writers’ love of bebop in the 1940s and 50s, re-discovery of delta blues greats by musicologists, and electric blues by some British musicians, in the 1960s, then world-wide reggae hits and so-called world music in the 1970s (rebel musix, as Vivien Goldman puts it); and eventually a growing though still minority awareness of the global north’s indebtedness to cultures it has exploited for generations, and the still-rippling decolonialist wake of this admission.

Conventional reviews of these books are everywhere on the internet, so for today I want to focus on the way they’re bound together: in a joyous revelling in their subject. They don’t hold back. No hedging, inoffensive niceness with one eye on the next book contract and another on a TV adaptation. “You’ve got to stick at it (writing) with the energy of a benny addict”, Kerouac tells Neal Cassady, right at the start of the Scroll. My kind of book, and yours too I hope.

Future posts will detail the other two, but for now, here’s Kerouac and his legendary scroll. He was renowned for not holding back, of course. We know so because he tells us. “The only people for me are the mad ones: the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn, burn, burn like Roman candles across the night”. So, let’s light the blue touchpaper.

Part 1. On the Road, the Original Scroll, by Jack Kerouac

The classic Beat Generation text. Completed in 1951, though not released into the world until 1957, after extensive revisions by Kerouac and his editors, and removal of explicit drug taking and sex (hetero- and homo-), excised by a censorious, wary publisher. It was finally issued in the form Kerouac first intended, half a century late, in 2007.

On the Road: the Original Scroll is the unexpurgated version of On the Road, the novel that had been in Kerouac’s mind and notebooks since 1947. He typed it single spaced on an endless scroll, in three sleepless benzedrine and coffee fuelled weeks, in April 1951. “Typed it fast because the road is fast” he wrote to Neal Cassady. Nowadays that 100-foot roll of teletype paper is arguably the iconic artefact of modern American culture, even minus the few bits eaten by a dog. Uncensored, down to calling the many characters by their real names, it restores episodes and language of subterranean America too explicit back in the day and sometimes surprisingly candid even now. This is like a whole new book: it eclipses the 1957 edition, rite of passage for generations of readers though that classic has been.

It’s a high-octane, frank and provocative memoir of Kerouac’s literal and metaphorical search for meaning in the contortions of the wounded buffalo that was post-war America. Words flow like notes in a fast-tempo jazz solo, in streams of heightened, highly literary, excited expression. To Kerouac’s consternation it was immediately hailed as the quintessential Beat Generation book: nice for the royalties, but he saw On the Road - correctly - as much more than genre writing. Now reassessed as startlingly original, had the Scroll been published back in 1951, when Kerouac first submitted it, its reception would have been quite different.

Nevertheless, the commercial success of the 1957 release, and the work of other like-minded writers it gave exposure to, has long influenced music, art, politics and more, not just literature. The environment movement, peace movement, women’s equality movement, gay rights movement, civil rights, interest in non-Christian especially Eastern religions... All were given impetus by the very small cohort of writers and publishers – men and women both - who in the shadow of just-ended WW2 gate-crashed staid, claustrophobic America with a new vision of enlightened intellectual and moral exploration, much of it directly autobiographical but also with roots in Blake and Whitman and a dream-state tradition.

Kerouac never claimed to be anything other than a writer, but celebrity-hungry media made him a (very reluctant) figurehead for what became known as the counterculture. But he despised the hippies of the 1960s and it was more accurately Allen Ginsberg’s poetry and Ken Kesey’s LSD experiments (the Acid Tests) that more directly influenced that movement, at least before it degenerated into face painting and tie-dyed bell-bottoms in the warm California sun. I think a more accurate joining of the dots between Kerouac and what is sweepingly called “The Sixties” would more or less bypass the hippies and instead show that Bob Dylan was the inheritor of his linguistic mantle, the Velvet Underground his demi-monde, and John Coltrane’s journey from Giant Steps to Ascension via A Love Supreme his musical conscience.

“She was married to an out of work drummer hooked on barbiturates”, says a line in Go, the first published soon-to-be-called-Beat novel, by Kerouac’s friend John Clellon Holmes. Go (a perfect title for the bebop age) was written at the same time as On the Road, but published in 1952 - though it only sold 500 copies a year until On the Road changed America’s literary landscape five years later. There it is, the beautifully abject world of beatness in one sentence, the kind of line not found anywhere else in 1949, when it was written, except maybe on the back of a toilet door: a “beat” world in the original sense of the word. Late-night dashes to thieve or borrow money, for alcohol, marijuana, heroin and amphetamines and parties with bop on the record player, where home is decrepit furniture in a crummy cold-water walk-up in Spanish Harlem, and soon to be famous writers hitched and jumped freights across the continent, or eked out a living as night shift security guard, railway brakeman, or parking cars in one of the local lots. It’s all in On the Road, alchemised by Kerouac from beat to beatific.

Not sensationalist, unlike “beatnik” knockoffs (all free love, berets and bongos), this was simply a new and honest depiction of a post-war urban milieu, and its arrivals and departures from and to the hinterland of America’s soul. Its scenarios of alienation were, in fact, only a backdrop to what was the real action: a consistent search for a purer, higher plane of thought and deed, elemental to all Kerouac’s writing, from first to last, including ruminations on Buddhism, existentialism and mysticism. In poet Allen Ginsberg’s words, the Beats were “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night”. That marvelous line, in which reality is both physical and supernatural, is one of many such in Howl, his epic poem published the year before On the Road, with which it shares a reputation as a foundation text of modern American literature.

Kerouac and Ginsberg were healers, ministering to the rampant 1950s psychoses of self-censorship and fear, clouding our desires and hobbling our minds. 18-year old Ginsberg met the 22 year old Kerouac in 1944 (around the same time they both met William S Burroughs) and appears as Allen in the Scroll and Carlo Marx in On the Road ‘57 (and David Stofsky in Go). Like Kerouac, he was a poet of the new American night, which was no longer the wide open space of 19th century bullshit Manifest Destiny (lately reborn as Trumpian imbecility); become now the infinite railroad-and-highway-etched site of unchained imagination’s vast unfulfilled promise.

The intent of Kerouac in the late 1940s was to capture this in a new form of poetic prose - his notion of a new American novel, rich in texture and way beyond mere narrative. In a notebook entry in October of 1949 he wrote, “I want to bust out from the European narrative into the Mood Chapters of an American poetic ‘sprawl’ – if you can call careful chapters and careful prose a sprawl”. His decision to bypass the conventional stop-start limitations imposed by individual pages and work instead on an unending scroll, free even of paragraphing, was the breakthrough moment that made that idea a reality.

The inherent musicality of his prose (captured perfectly in Kerouac’s reading here), like Ginsberg’s poetry, recalls a saxophone player’s improvised lines of thought-in-action, invention to the point of breathlessness, perhaps even, on a good night, transcendence. The measure of its success, as in great jazz, is in its energy, its control, its surprising unpredictability, and that most difficult of qualities to pin down, its rightness - which might also equate to hipness in the original argot of Harlem’s streets, (definitely not fashionableness as in today’s usage).

“The only truth is music”, wrote Kerouac in Desolation Angels. True to his belief, he translated the headlong rush of the revolutionary 1940s bebop rhythms and tempos of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie - jazz now undanceable, no longer swing-based – into a different kind of dance. Dancing in Your Head, Ornette Coleman, jazz’s foremost saxophone experimentalist, later titled one of his albums, and that about nails it.

Here’s a more-or-less random extract from the Scroll (it’s full of passages like this - always movement, searching, spirit-yearning, journeys to “the end of the continent and the end of doubt”. Kerouac and Beatrice have just rolled into Los Angeles, down to their last 20 bucks:

“In the middle of the night I got up because I couldn’t sleep, pulled the cover over baby’s brown shoulder, and examined the L.A. night. What brutal, hot, siren-whining nights they are!... L.A. is a jungle. South Main Street, where Bea and I took strolls with hotdogs, was a fantastic carnival of lights and wildness. Booted cops frisked people on practically every corner. The beatest characters in the country swarmed on the sidewalks – all of it under those soft southern California stars that are lost in the brown halo of the huge desert encampment L.A. really is. You could smell tea, weed, I mean marijuana floating in the air, together with the chili beans and beer. That grand wild sound of bop floated from beerparlors; it mixed medleys with every kind of cowboy and boogie-woogie in the American night. Everybody looked like Hunkey*. Wild negroes with bop caps and goatees came laughing by; then long-haired brokendown hipsters straight off Route 66 from New York, then old desert rats carrying packs and heading for a park bench at the Plaza, then Methodist ministers with ravelled sleeves, and an occasional Nature Boy saint in beard and sandals. I wanted to meet them all, talk to everybody…”

*(Herbert Hunke, poet and writer, thief, junky, coiner of “beat” to describe the new literary style, aka Elmo Hassel in On the Road ‘57 and Albert Anke in Go).

As great jazz musicians do, the Beats generated not a frantic but a kinetic kind of energy, in which thought (finessed yet muscular) is balanced with action - which latter they executed both in words (prose and poetry) and physical movement, the most celebrated example being, of course, Kerouac’s autobiographical criss-crossing of America with Neal Cassady, later barely disguised as Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, on the journeys of self-discovery that became the backbone of On the Road.

The constant internal tension in kinetic energy, between the potential and the realised - the difference between the pair but also the inseparable unity of the pair – and for which the characters of thoughtful Kerouac and mad-to-live Cassady might be avatars - is one of the reasons On the Road in particular but also Go, Howl, and so many other Beat novels and poems, are still so readably perfect in our own times, if one has a mind prepared to dig beyond mere distractions.

Kerouac, Greenwich Village, 1958

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If you enjoyed this post, thanks! Here’s Part 2 to dig into:

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