|
Well, you have to be
loose to stay with this one, as the punctuation is experimental to say the
least, and the grammar is often illogical (or, if you prefer,
multi-dimensional). If you want raw, then this narrative is raw, as if scanned
from Kerouac's notebook. In his afterword Tom Graves says Jack was too stoned
and lazy to do the necessary rewriting, just winged it on the success of On the
Road, which was knocked into shape by the editor Malcolm Cowley, a very
influential figure in American letters in the 50s despite being monitored by J.
Edgar Hoover. He might be right. Maybe fifteen good phrases, metaphors or
insights per forty thousand words isn't worth a reader's time. Graves quotes
Truman Capote on Kerouac: "That's not writing, that's typing."
Yet there's something
horribly magnetic about Tristessa, despite the chaos of the delivery and its
squalid interior documentary of the madonna-whore morphine junky Kerouac
chooses as his Muse. This isn't the sunny climes of Acapulco or San Miguel.
Kerouac's Mexico City (circa 1955) is an endless barrio of night and chilling
rain and living with animals in one room shacks. He sleeps with roosters, rats
and cats, all in his desire to be near this woman who never really returns his
love, as junk is the only thing she can love.
But Jack "Duluoz" is
smitten:
'The color of her face
is really tan... but in the lights that shine her face keeps changing,
sometimes it is jet-brown almost black-blue (beautiful) with outlines of
sheening cheek and long sad mouth and the bump on her nose which is like Indian
women in the morning in Nogales on a high, dry hill the women of the various
guitar....'
You can see the
picture, see what Jack sees, might even think the sluicing words are poetry.
Others will find the syntax irritating, turn away after a page or two. Others
will think Kerouac is just another sick traveller in a sick world. Despite
everything, despite the graffiti narrative, the dismal sociology of it all is
riveting at times. What lengths the author went to in order to express himself;
the masochism, the degradation, the absurd humiliation of playing the junky's
dog, crawling through the gutter, stoned and drunk, brazenly robbed of his
money and poems by sinister Mexican drifters and poisoned by Mexico's open
coffin of drugs: morphine, goofballs, pulque (cactus juice), mescal, beer,
reefers, unknown caps of this and that. It's supposed to be romantic, but it
doesn't take you long to see that this is the dark side of love, and that
Kerouac just might be insane. Early photos show him to be a handsome guy and
some of his women real beauties... yet no wonder he died in 1969 a broken
alcoholic at the age of 47.
His contact friend in
Mex City, the hard-core junky Bill Gaines, knows loving an addict is futile,
puts it this way: "You put Grace Kelly in this chair, Muckymucks morphine on
that chair, Jack, I take the morphine, I no take the Grace Kelly."
Kerouac knows this, of
course. He's learned a thing or two about junk and love, despite his role as a
Beatnik clown south of the border. 'But the sex when the morphine is loosened
in your flesh, and slowly spreads, hot, and headies your brain, the sex recedes
into the gut, most junkies are thin, Bull and Tristessa are both bags of
bones....' So Dulouz/Kerouac comes to realize that if Tristessa loves any
gringo, it's Bull, as Bull is Morphine. Jack might have money, he might have
poetry, he might have devotion, but she recognizes he's too romantic to be a
committed heroinisto. He thinks she's Mexico, a channel to the Aztec dream,
another neglected goddess who can be rehabilitated through the love of a decent
poet, and then, as his money runs low and his health lower, he realizes she's
not a woman, rather, a place, a state of mind, a dream as desperate and unreal
as the place that is Mexico City.
It might be the cider
you're drinking but in the end you think, this works, the story of Tristessa
works despite the messiness of the writing, the characters, the unwelcome
confession of another drunken author who gets lucky with a publisher and starts
a cult. He ends this sad tale of a sad woman with this: 'I'll go light candles
to the Madonna, I'll paint the Madonna and eat ice cream... I'll write long sad
tales about people in the legend of my life -- This part is my part of the
movie, let's hear yours --'
So it ends... he ends,
and you're invited to pick it up, carry "the story" forward. This is exactly
what America did, because when Kerouac was writing his main stuff -- including
Tristessa -- in the fifties the country wasn't sympathetic to minorities, gays
and junkies; later the Beat Generation subverted the conservative institutional
culture, and today is as close to "anything goes" as it has been since the late
Roman Empire.
Much has been said
about Kerouac's Catholicism and you do see it in Tristessa: 'Her blood is on my
pants like my conscience --' would be one fine example among many. Was he
playing Christ here? It certainly would've been no surprise if he'd ended up
nailed to a cross by the end of this short novel. But when you strip it all
away, the existential journalism and the gladiator poetry, he's just a tourist
with traveller's cheques and a passport.
Great afterword by Tom
Graves, "A Hard Look At The King of The Beats", which is actually a review of
"Jack Kerouac's Recordings and Other Matters". It is a 'hard look', although a
funny one. No academic devotee here glossing the King's failings, no homage in
search of a study grant. Some good insight into the Kerouac method in general,
although the real thrust of the piece is about his jazz poetry recordings. When
you think of the success of rap in recent years, you realize that this idiom,
this genre, this form of oral literature was never really explored fully in the
bop era. Was Jack any good as a jazz rapper? Graves has mixed feelings about
this. Maybe you're old enough to remember Kerouac with Steve Allen on piano
doing some
On
The Road, thought it was o.k. (even if he was reading rather than rapping
in the groove).
'...my poems stolen,
my money stolen, my Tristessa dying, Mexican buses trying to run me down, grit
in the sky, agh, I never dreamed it could be this bad'.
© LR Dec
2015
Tristessa at
Amazon:
US
|
Canada
|
UK
|
Australia
*Check out LR's
novel
RADIO
BRAZIL »»
LR
Jammin'
With Brando mp3 »»
|
