"A Last-Ditch Stand"

...Rev "A Last-Ditch Stand" Recent publication of Jack Kerouac's long-awaited Visions of Cody, as well as Ann Charter's biography, have brought on a renewed interest in the whole Beat phenomenon, and as periodically happens, all the so-called hippies on campus are again rushing out to the bookstores to read, many of them for the first time, On The Road...

...And so the Kerouac legacy continues to grow...

...But they are bursting with vitality and interest even at their slowest pace...

...Many spoke knowingly of Kerouac's "alcoholism...

...It is the first absurdist detective story, an innovation which, it suddenly appears, was long overdue...

...The beat movement was essentially a last-ditch stand for individualism...

...But I want to make this clear...

...The pity of all of this is that at most these two movies will be seen by a few million people...

...Marlowe has learned what Chandler's fans knew all along--his world is a richly amusing place and he might as well sit back and watch it in a philosophical mood, since it is wholly out of his control...

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...They speak of how exaggerated and caricatured our lives have become without speaking rancorously...

...And, as McLintlock wrote, Kerouac "disowned the American counterculture in one sweeping rollcall...

...When the book finally came out it seemed t h a t to a degree a t least Cook had gotten the point: "There is something a l i t t l e easy perhaps in associating the beat protest with the left activism as so many have done...

...And I wasn't trying to create any new consciousness or anything...

...He saw, perhaps sadly, his old pal Neal Cassady, "the mad Ahab of the wheel," ride off into the day-glo sunset with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, with whom Neal had become so involved t h a t the famous Kerouac-Cassady friendship manifested itself in l i t t l e more than a few muttered pleasantries when they met up again a t the HelPs Angels party in 1968...

...AIM) was founded to combat inaccuracies and distorted reporting by the major media...

...The people in Marlowe's world are not the wrenchingly life-like tormented souls of Mean Streets...

...Kerouac eventually split completely with the flipped-out Giusberg--although Ginsberg showed up for Jack's funeral in the fall of 1969 and managed to become a pallbearer and so get his picture in the newspapers--who had since become the leader of the flower power kids a t the Gathering of The Tribes and had "Om-ed" his way around the Pentagon with Robert Lowell and Norman Mailer...

...9 _9 _9 _9 City _9 _9 _9 State Zip _9 _ 9 The Alternative January 1974 25...

...But he cannot catch up to her and he is hit by a car while trying...

...Kerouac was, politically and~I argue this fully knowledgeable of the man's obvious excesses-temperamentally, a conservative...

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...The laconic Marlowe has become utterly passive...

...Mean Streets is a story of an entire neurotic demimonde, exactly corresponding to the demimonde that most of us carry around with us in our heads...

...By one popular notion, Kerouac was trying through the great "rucksack revolution" to shake the fabric of the American political system to the ground...

...His stature as a counterculture guru is well established and that, as Kerouac himself lamented, seems to be his fate: to be co-opted by a generation of "leftists" that never really understood him, and with whom he felt little kinship...

...When Esquire's John McLintlock sought him out in his Florida refuge shortly before his death, Jack ushered the magazine writer into a room strewn with Falstaff bottles and stacks of National Review magazines...

...We didn't have a whole lot of heavy abstract thoughts...

...It is by no means perfect--it has irrelevant background music, a laughably false bartender who quotes Blake, too many injokes about eating "Chinks" (Chinese food) ---but it is a masterpiece...

...Scenes in the house of the rich are shot through gauze, to emphasize the ridiculously unreal nature of the life these people live...

...Later, in Florida, Kerouac was to say, "I don't like Kesey...

...It's about the Communist conspiracy," he told one writer regarding the article...

...The plot is the same one Chandler used in every one of his stories, about doublecrosses and murders among rich people and mobsters...

...Chandler's usual smooth-talking, always-calm gangster is a grotesquely modish punk who smashes his girlfriend across her face with a Coke bottle to show Marlowe that he does that to people he loves, and he does not even like Marlowe...

...By another he was a junkie...

...If Kerouac had a hero," the interviewer wrote, "it was William F. Buckley, Jr...

...He said as much himself ("I'm not a Beatnik, I'm a Catholic"), but beyond his stated convictions is substantial evidence...

...Based loosely on a Raymond Chandler story, the movie is an almost uniquely funny comedy--it starts out being funny and never stops being funny for one moment...

...William Burroughs, who had known of Jack's sentiments for some time, s n i i ~ h l y dismissed them as the result of "peasant" heritage...

...Great American Series I really thing...

...But still there was an uneasiness about dismissing in so cavalier a manner such an otherwise "normal" man's defiant rejection of the p a r t y line...

...Perhaps someday something can be arranged...

...I took it once," he confessed, "I didn't like it...

...Nothing in my books can be seen as basically in disagreement with that...

...But, as time goes by and much of the fog obscuring the life and meaning of Kerouac begins to lift, those who see the author of Visions of Cody by Jack Kerouac McGraw-Hill $8.95 Kerouac by Ann Charters Straight Arrow $7.95 The Subterraneans, Desolation Angels, and Big Sur as a bearded peacenik, extolling the virtues of mindlessness between drags on a reefer, are likely to be surprised...

...regret getting involved in this Donald Segretti, LL.B...

...Once, a t a p a r t y a t Ken Kesey's in New York, the poet Ginsberg s a t i r i c a l l y draped an American flag over Jack's shoulders...

...It no doubt troubled Kerouac in those post-Beat days when all his old pals were sliding so easily from beatnik-to-hippie...

...Not only was he saying these disturbing things, b u t his personal relationships with other head honchos and gurus of the count e r c u l t u r e - m a n y of them old friends like Giusberg--began to deteriorate as they went deeper and deeper into hippiedom...

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...His only action, until the very last frames, comes as quips and wisecracks...

...The viewers are at home and the shows are at the theaters...

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...Scorse.~e, who previously gave to the world {he hilariously simple-minded and pretentious Boxcar Bertha, has more than done his own penance...

...But Altman's characters are larger than life...

...I t was alien to him, Coyne has written, "the listless love and mindless good vibes" that the hippies were championing, and he wanted no part of it...

...It is a wonderful atfmnation of the power of movies to show us something piercingly insightful about our world in a vehicle which is hypnotically fascinating from the very first moment...

...The Long Good-bye is a tale of a society which has inflated itself to a size proportionate only to satire...

...24 The Alternative January 1974 While his young disciples were toasting him with t h e i r new-found m a r i j u a n a - - i t was "tea" to the hipsters back in the forties--Kerouac had already renounced drugs because, in his opinion, "they block out reality...

...The real action is on television, where creatures from another planet write, direct, and star in shows which get at least ten million viewers just for being on...

...The rich couple being harassed by the gangster live in a mansion in Malibu which seems to go on forever...

...One reviewer of the Charter's biography wrote t h a t Charter "gave short shrift to Kerouac's late-blooming conservatism, as it should be...

...John Deck, in the New York Times Review of Books wrote t h a t '~ne was a battered man when he shocked followers with his pronouncements...

...It is an allegory of the life that almost everyone suffers through--blocked and hemmed in by artificial barriers and laws which keep us from seeing the larger world and opportunities around us...

...When he spots someone he wants to talk to driving along Wilshire Boulevard, he runs after her car...

...His direction reinforces the feeling of claustrophobia which is written into the script and acted with brilliance...

...In a time when his America was being so ruthlessly and ignorantly reviled, Jack felt prompted--as someone who knew America i n t i m a t e l y - - t o defend it...

...I mean, we were just a bunch of guys out trying to get laid...

...The gate attendant for the lush Malibu compound does an imitation of a different movie star with each passer-by, first Jimmy Stewart, then Cary Grant, then Walter Brennan...

...Events overtake him and he cannot do anything to change their mocking his powerlessness...

...By another, he was the most "far out" radical the American literary scene has ever known...

...Cook pressed the point in the interview, and Kerouac objected, "Look, I don't know if you thought much about this a t all, or maybe you already made up your mind about me before you came here...

...r bothered me a lot, though," Kerouac continued, ' ~ a s the way a certain cadre of leftists among the so-called boats took over my mantle and twisted my own thoughts to support their purpose...

...I mean here I am, a guy who was a railroad brakeman, and a cowboy and a football p l a y e r - - j u s t a lot of things ordinary guys do...

...The usually execrable, but here, wonderful Elliott Gould plays Philip Marlowe, a private detective from the 1940s who has suddenly awakened to find himself living in the l.~s Angeles of the 1970s with girls as neighbors who sunbathe nude, a cat who will only eat one brand of food, and killers and victims who are imitations of themselves...

...The best Marlowe can do is say, "Yeah...

...The Raymond Chandler kind of detective story hovered for so long and so precariously on the brink of being absurd in itself that the slight push over the edge which Altman has given it does not work against it at all...

...By another--popularized by Allen Ginsberg and Gore Vidal, quite naturally--he was a drooling gay libber...

...It makes me sick," Jack wrote to John Coyne at National Review-who was then in the employ of Spiro Aguew---"It sounds like a complaint from Al Capone...

...When he decides he has wronged his girlfriend, he wants to give her "a totally open, totally natural apology...

...The swirl of voices and sounds near him never stops, even while he is sleeping...

...rm pro-American and the radical political involvements seem to tend elsewhere...

...This quite n a t u r a l l y disturbed a great many forward-looking and pious persons...

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...I'm solidly behind Bill Buckley if you want to know...

...And so, as the Beat mantle was being hijacked by a new a n d - - t o Kerouac--disgusting generation of "leftists" who talked a great deal about, but had l i t t l e knowledge or appreciation of, America, the deep-felt love of country t h a t Kerouac wove so wonderfully into his books could only grow...

...At the time, he had received a plea from a left-wing organization that he not pay his taxes because they were going to finance the Vietnam war...

...The country gave my Canadian family a good break, more or less, and we see no reason to demean said country," he wrote...

...It is a story of how a world which people choose to protect them eventually suffocates them, even though they may remain alive...

...I t was called "After Me, The Deluge," and in it he attempted for the last time to define his own position with regard to the New Loft...

...He l a t e r concluded, in all seriousness, t h a t its introduction into the United States was the doing of the communists to weaken the American social fiber...

...You a fag, Marlowe...

...So when Bruce Cook, who was then preparing his book, The Beat Generation, interviewed Kerouac in 1968, Cook, on behalf of a number of troubled souls, faced him with these accusations of conservatism the equivalent to them of heresy or cannibalism...

...So I took it," Kerouac explained, "and I folded it up the way you're supposed to, and I put it on the back of the sofa . . . the flag is not a rag...

...So he goes to her hospital room, takes off his clothes, and apologizes to her while standing naked...

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...That, anyhow, was how Jack saw it, and he was present a t the creation...

...He ruined Neal...

...Everybody j u s t assumed t h a t I thought the way they wanted me to think...

...It has gained national attention because of its highly professional approach and its fearlessness in tackling such media giants as The New York Times~ The Washington Post and CBS, NBC and ABC...

...It was shortly before his death in 1969 t h a t Kerouac had put together a piece for syndication in the newspapers...

...All of these are fictions--but the truth about Kerouac, I fear, would startle his unconscious subverters more than the yarns they themselves cooked up...

...As he lies bleeding on the pavement, the woman zooms off showing her personalized license plate--"LUV YOU...

...John Coyne, with whom Kerouac was corresponding j u s t before his death, says t h a t Jack could not---and did not w a n t - - t o make the obligatory transition...

...Listen," Kerouac told him, "My politics haven't changed...

...As a result, he has come to represent for many a kind of Cold War flower child who predicted and blessed everything that was to happen to youth pep-cult as the years of jazz and street kicks slid into those of acid and activism...

...His view of acid--LSD, the big kick of the sixties--was even dimmer...

...When the police take him in, a cop says to him, "Marlowe, that sounds like a fag name...

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...But Marlowe's world is an amusing place...

...Newsweek went so far as to question Kerouac's sanity...

...But first, the legends...

...You a fagT' Marlowe is just a by-stander while the world goes on around him...

...Arriving almost at the same time is Roberr Altman's The Long Good-bye...