- introduction to the three passages
- one section from Book of Dreams
- another section from Book of Dreams
- a section from Old Angel Midnight
Lawrence Ferlinghetti called "the poetic raw material of the Kerouac saga, the substrata of his novels and a commentary upon them."
"Kerouac's work represents the most extensive experiment in language and literary form undertaken by an American writer of his generation." - Ann Douglas, writing in the New York Times Book Review [You will be reading two pieces of dream-writing] from Book of Dreams, published by City Lights in 1961. Kerouac kept several sheets of paper and a pencil attached to a clipboard on a string tied to the headboard of his bed, so he could write down his dreams immediately after awakening. He typed up the selections for Ferlinghetti, and his friend Philip Whalen put them in order for publication....
[The third piece here is] from Old Angel Midnight, in which Kerouac, influenced by James Joyce's experiments in Finnegan's Wake (1939), pushed spontaneous prose to its ultimate expression. Kerouac told John Clellon Holmes that his work in progress was "an endless automatic writing piece which raves on and on with no direction and no story." He experimented with free association in this poem, attempting to write down "the sounds of the entire world ... now swimming thru the window." The San Francisco poet Michael McClure recognized that in Old Angel Midnight, Kerouac had achieved one of his most remarkable works:
Never [wrote McClure] before has inconsequentiality been raised to such a peak that it becomes a breakthrough.... Inconsequentiality becomes a skewing of the established values of the senses and imagination into strange and yet familiar, but elusive, tantalizing and remarkable, constructs of image and sound.... The politics of Old Angel Midnight is that it is a reply by Jack to heavily armored, socially approved literature, as it was then taught and admired in colleges.... Old Angel Midnight is contemporary with exploratory jazz and with the painting which sought to make spiritual autobiography utilizing the gestures of the artist and his materials.... Old Angel Midnight is struggling to be occupied by consciousness and nothingness, and not by social commands.
first section from Book of Dreams
In a dismal studio room in New York my whole family Ma Pa & Nin and I have taken up quarters and "all got jobs" and here it's night, one dim light burning, we're conversing but it's a weird conversation, it seems I dont realize what I'm doing and involuntarily or carelessly (because not fearing wrath of women relatives and forgotten the father's because he so long gone in death) I'm rolling a stick of tea and talking right at them some wild excited inanities (born of T) they dont even listen to, rather they're discussing me solemnish and my father gets up and says "He's not worried about marijuana? Eh?" and he comes over to my side - I see him coming and I go blind, darkness takes the place of the entire scene, nevertheless now I feel his touch on my arm, he may have an axe, he may have anything and I cant see -- I fall fainting dead in the darkness, with a groan that wakes me up and prevents me from being found dead (if there is such a thing as death) in my bed in the morning-for my blood stop't beating when that Shroudy Traveller finally got his hand on me - He's getting closer & closer - I know how to be beyond him now-by not being concerned not believing in either life or death, if this can be possible in a humble Pratyeka at this time
second section from Book of Dreams
I'm looking for a place to sit and write quietly at the baseball park and go around a fountain and batting cage wire to a bench on the side where there's an old typewriter & desks under a tree and here I turn into "Malcolm Cowley" and start typing - but so old the Machine, to register letters ya gotta hit it one finger at a time hard, which I do, - & there's a sad young kid there, of 18, definite personality, curly brown hair, thoughtful, as an interested old Man of Letters I begin to interview him sympathetically and find he's a young tender poet so saddened he doesnt write much, or some such, -- walked 2 1/2 miles before I wrote this, so part forgot - So he stares into space in my dream and I worry about him -- Who's subjective? Who's objective?