Special to The Gazette
In 1951, architect Ed White issued a challenge to his old college friend Jack Kerouac: “...sketch in the streets like a painter but with words.” Agreeable, Kerouac embarked on a cross-country meander through America from 1952 to 1954, penning his observations and meditations on art and life into small notebooks he carried in his shirt pockets. Now published for the first time Book of Sketches shows us one of the most celebrated Beat writers engaged in his ambitious experiment with unrevised spontaneity: Seizing and freezing life’s moments exactly, unapologetically, the way they bounce off him. The result is a lush account of 1950s America, a place where beauty (“all this green
fertility--“) lays paradoxically alongside spiritual decay: “It aint no atom / bomb will blow up / America, America / itself is a bomb / bound to go off / from within.”
Simultaneously microscopic and macroscopic, it is the nation, warts-and-all, under a magnifying glass. If Kerouac has mixed feelings about its inhabitants (farmers, cowboys, Indians, children, “Americans who think in terms of paranoia and oil” and others), he depicts them, nonetheless, with compassion, locating them in a landscape of bold, inventive language and rhythm and “sudden thought that inflames.”
In his introduction, George Condo notes that Kerouac’s approach to writing bears traces of several art-related influences: André Masson’s automatic painting, Charlie Parker’s informed improvisations, da Vinci’s propensity for observation, and Proust’s inexhaustible annnotation of the quotidian. On a personal note, Book of Sketches evokes, for me, a voice close to home: Irving Layton’s, still pontificating from the grave. Reminding us that “Whatever else, poetry is freedom.”
Carolyn Marie Souaid is a Montreal poet.
Book of Sketches
By Jack Kerouac
Penguin, 414 pages
$25
