That is the question. King of the Beats chronicles the life, career, inspiration, and friends of Jack Kerouac, and how this enduring figure of American literature and culture had far more to offer than "my own confusion."
The Jack Kerouac documentary “King of the Beats” is constructed out of old footage from the fifties and sixties, and interviews with Kerouac’s old buddies and associates, now all dead, except for Lawrence Ferlinghetti. As a consequence, the film has a dated look. It is all pretty familiar material to me. My first date with my wife was to a poetry reading in North Beach, San Francisco, 1957. That was the year "On the Road" was published and Kerouac shot from obscurity to the limelight.
The documentary opens with his guest appearance on "The Tonight Show" with Steve Allen; it also provides one of the highlights of the film as Kerouac does a very effective reading from "Road." All the usual suspects are included to bear witness to his life and genius - Herbert Huncke, John Clellon Holmes, Michael McClure, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Robert Creeley, his first and second wives, and others.
The film makes clear that his years of obscurity were his fertile years as a writer and that once he achieved fame and the limelight he started a downward spiral that ended up with his death from acute alcoholism in a hospital in St. Petersberg, Florida. Like Jackson Pollack and others, he could not make a smooth transition from being hidden to being a popular figure. He could not handle fame and so desired to be “safe in heaven dead.” He was only 47 years old when he died, but he was a burnt out case. That phrase, “safe in heaven dead,” came from his book of poems called "Mexico City Blues," from the 211th Chorus.
The last third of Kerouac’s life was as messed up as his difficult Catholic youth. It was during his creative middle years that he successfully expressed the spirit of his generation, and left his mark on our cultural life and became an enduring figure in the pantheon of American writers active during the mid-20th century. May he rest in peace.
An aside: Two weeks ago I bought a just-released copy of the original scroll version of the "On the Road," which includes, almost in the style of a DVD, three essay-long commentaries on the production of the scroll and the author’s life as “King of the Beats.”
“Let It Come Down” is the name of one of Paul Bowles novels and the title of a documentary that was made in the late nineties just before Bowles died in 1999. The line comes from "MacBeth," spoken by Banquo about an approaching rainstorm, but is actually a clever lead-in to the violence that’s about to befall the speaker. Most of the film is taken up with a labored conversation with the octogenarian Bowles, who is lounging on a couch in his apartment in Tangiers, Morocco, where he had lived for many years. The interview took place in 1995. The film also includes interview sessions with Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, and the three of them together, which as it turned out, was the last time Bowles saw the pair of old comrades. Both Ginsberg and Burroughs died in 1997. Other lesser lights, friends in Tangiers, were interviewed as well and contributed to an understanding of not so forthcoming elderly author of "The Sheltering Sky" and other works.
Often Bowles is amusing himself at the expense of the filmmaker who is asking him questions. She thought he was “opaque and remote.’’ I read him as cryptic and elusive, but I found a couple of his answers interesting. When asked about life in Tangiers - how was it to live so closely and so long in a Muslim nation? - he said, “No non-Muslim knows enough about the Muslim mind to dare find fault with it. They are far, far away from us. We haven’t an inkling of the things that motivate them.” Our current experience in Iraq and other parts of the Middle East is finding how true that is. She then asked him what he thought of "Moby Dick." “The book makes no sense and I could not relate to the characters. People like me, who have no religion in their background, have difficulty relating to the book. And it is a religious book. But I could not see anything special about chasing a white whale. What was that all about?” I would agree that it is a religious book but still, I think to some extent Bowles has his tongue in his cheek. Bowles also quotes his New England father, a dentist by trade, and very orthodox in his opinions, who wrote him a letter after reading "The SHeltering Sky," in which he said, “What gutters have you been living in? Isn’t it time you get up and sit on the curb instead?” There’s nothing like a little encouragement from home!
When Burroughs was asked about Bowles' autobiography, "Without Stopping," he said it should really be titled "Without Telling." Why? Because he was a homosexual and there isn’t one word about that in the book, whereas Burroughs and Ginsberg were very open about their homosexuality. Bowles hung out with the Beat crowd on occasion, but really was not one himself, especially not in his approach to novel writing, which was traditional. However, his sensibility and ideas were definitely modern. And "Without Stopping" was meant to refer to the fact he was a compulsive traveler throughout his life. It wasn’t so much on the road as on a boat or plane. His main theme as a writer was this: When an American is on foreign soil what dangers does he and she face?
For JERRY PFAFFL, writing about movies is an act of love and exaltation. Once a week while growing up he and his brother were taken to the neigborhood theater by thier parents to see second-run movies. He remembers sitting in the dark and being utterly mesmerized by noir thrillers, technicolor musicals, Westerns, and Biblical epics. When he was a college student he discovered the wonder of foreign movies and how more daring subject matter was possible. When he was teaching at UNLV he founded CINEMA X, a film society devoted to the showing of contemporary experimental films. When he was working at Bookmans on Ina he was in charge of the Video and DVD department and his nametag read "The Movie Guy." In sum, movies have always been his passion.
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