peter martin

Jack Kerouac, The Town & The City. Always a strange book for me to pick up, given that it’s about Peter Martin from Galloway (really Lowell) MA. A book written by the favorite son of my hometown, with references to events that mirror those of my own life. I’ve never gone past the first hundred pages for this reason…interesting in its own right, given my rational, anti-superstitious nature.

What I love about this simple line, from a description of a first football triumph (again mirroring my own distant experience, same school, etc), is that it alludes to everything that Kerouac would pursue from this point on…the duality of human nature, the competing desires he felt, his constant battle between creative and destructive impulses…even the fact that for every reader who loves him, you can find at least one who hates him.

As for me, I always felt a bit both, a love-hate relationship with Kerouac’s ghost - like he allowed his considerable talents to get one-dimensional by valuing feeling over form in his stream-of-consciousness, jazz-inspired style. But - and this is big, and something I appreciate more with the passage of time - when it works, when he’s whipped himself into a frenzy and he reaches down into something real, there is no writer I feel more attuned with. We’re cut from the same cloth, share a common legacy, born into this strange little corner of the universe. I feel every last emotion as if it’s my own, every desire and disappointment. The only other writers I’ve ever felt that with were Henry Miller and Dostoevsky, and it was wholly unsurprising to me to find out that Kerouac idolized both of them. What all of them shared was a desire to make the writing transparent, to reach across the chasm and share an experience as if it was your own. Energy and the raw experience trump the language, character development, and plot in their hands.

Postscript: Kerouac published The Town and the City in 1950 at the age of 28. I turned 28 three days ago. I think it’s about time I finished this book.