JACK KEROUAC, RIP
Coyne, John R. Jr.
dedicated to the memory of Ho, could we not still come out ahead in Vietnam? It would be a showcase of documented Communist aggression for all the world to see. The only problem here would be...
...Dear Coyne," he wrote, "This brochure reads like a complaint by Al Capone...
...A deep, profound love affair with America...
...Some of them have settled down in the suburbs now, some of them have gone back to the little towns they came from...
...The only problem here would be where to file it with so much other evidence: Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, East Germany, Berlin Wall, Czechslovakia, Hungary, etc...
...We'll drink a glass or two of good cheap rotgut wine, and for a little while it will be 1950 and we'll think again of magic names like Denver and Tucson and Santa Fe...
...Abraham Lincoln used to enjoy telling the story of the Illinois land speculator who, when accused of being land hungry replied that he was not...
...But in a peculiarly American way, the way of Walt Whitman or Hart Crane or maybe even Fitzgerald...
...It would be a showcase of documented Communist aggression for all the world to see...
...For their hatreds were not his, and his love for America will forever lie far outside their experience...
...And some of them sit in small dark bars in places like Denver and Santa Fe, stranded like bits of driftwood on a beach after flood tide...
...For if, as Frank Meyer states and Khrushchev and Brezhnev have substantiated, we are in a struggle with world Communists who over fifty years ago declared war on the western world and its strongest member the United States, it is not only futile but criminal to battle one arm of the Communist machine while oiling the rest of it by seeking trade and detente...
...Hopefully this time we would be able to monitor from neighboring countries the trials and executions of war criminals and other enemies of the state...
...And this the neo-Beats will never imderstand...
...And so what if it didn't read quite like we expected...
...With this article we eagerly welcome Mr...
...They were punks who had made their minds up about the world before they knew anything, and they had expropriated the legend...
...And we'll all devoutly hope that Jack's road ended where it should...
...He'd been a high school football hero back in Lowell, and on a good boozy night Scott Fitzgerald just might have traded The Great Gatsby for Jack's varsity letter...
...Jack's dead," they'll murmur, and have another one for that road they'll never travel again...
...He referred to a long whining diatribe printed by N e w Left tax-refusers...
...Coyne as an associate of The Alternative...
...H e loathed them...
...And the stories, apocryphal perhaps, but the stuff of the Fifties' legend...
...D Jack K e r o u a c , RIP by John Coyne Published with special permission from National Review...
...To hell with the carping over the quality of the prose, the depth of the thought...
...Then he broke his leg after a long splendid punt return, and that finished football at Columbia...
...But their claim was not legitimate...
...dedicated to the memory of Ho, could we not still come out ahead in Vietnam...
...M e n in their forties, gray and used up, and it takes a little more booze each month to work up to anything like a moment or two of that old wild exuberance...
...On the day of his death I had a note from him...
...Betting that the reds will perform on cue we may finally be shaken to our senses and develop the resolve that there will not be any more Vietnams...
...The wild jags, the fistfight with a professor, the trips with Cassady...
...And every now and then, against our wills, we'll still make an occasional trip up to the West End Bar, the place that Jack once ruled...
...D Page 4...
...Disreputable, sure...
...Just how valuable is Vietnam to the non-Communist world...
...To the contrary, he stated, all he really wanted was that land which joined his...
...And in between, he sat down and wrote a best-seller in 21 days...
...W e didn't give a sweet damn, for he was saying something we all ached to find our own way to say: we loved this country and we wanted to tell it so...
...They hadn't earned it...
...To those of us who did some of our growing up around Columbia in the Fifties, he was the standard, the legend...
...And it is precisely this that comes through On the Road...
...Ask Japan, Korea, Thailand and Australia...
...W e may even decide to guard South East Asia and the other areas of our commitment in the world by all means necessary — military, economic and diplomatic...
...Jack believed, and they never would...
...At times perhaps even degenerate...
...some, like Allen Ginsberg, have freaked out way beyond return...
Vol. 3 • February 1970 • No. 4
