Word: kerouac
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VISIONS OF GERARD by Jack Kerouac. 151 pages. Farrar, Straus...
...hard these days to evoke childhood's lost garden of innocence when current fiction insists that there is no such thing and that the very young are very wicked, with tendencies to parricide and cannibalism. Thus it is both a pleasant and surprising experience to read Jack Kerouac's Visions of Gerard, which asserts the faith that a child has a better chance of being good than someone older who is already visited by corruption. Perhaps only someone known as a high-bellowing beatnik prose man, and thus a bit of a child himself, could have pulled...
Thus described, Pynchon's book sounds like a Jack Kerouac eruption. It is not. The prose is quiet, sane and assured, even when it is describing something like the invention (by someone Benny meets at a party) of a coin-operated whorehouse for bus and railway stations...
With the advent of the U.S. beats, Miller hailed them as his own offspring and sent Durrell a Kerouac novel, observing: "It's good, very good, surpassingly good . .. Kerouac, you see, is just up my street. He swings. Doesn't worry. Good, bad, indifferent .. . Something comes through, writing this way." Durrell can't see it. "Really corny and deeply embarrassing ... and worst of all pretentious," he wrote, and added that he cannot abide "the emptiness of this generation of self-pitying crybabies .. . God or Zen is simply a catchword, as Freud was in our time...
...hoary-headed and toothless baboon," or with Swinburne when he refused to meet him on the ground that he did not want to know a man who was "sitting in a sewer and adding to it." Nor was Truman Capote seriously feuding when he remarked of Jack Kerouac's work: "That's not writing, that's typing." Novelist Nelson Algren was unable to goad either Sloan Wilson or Herman Wouk into a full-dress feud when he wrote: "If The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit married Marjorie Morningstar on my front porch at high noon...