Jack Kerouac, 1957 - by Jerry Yulsman |
“Paris is a woman but London is an independent man puffing his pipe in a
pub.” – Jack Kerouac.
Fifty years ago this month, early on
the morning of October 21st 1969, the writer Jack Kerouac passed
away aged 47. A little over a decade before his death the publication of his
second novel, On The Road (1957), based on
the real-life events of a madcap road trip across America made with his close
buddy, Neal Cassady, catapulted him to fame. The book, which was initially
drafted on a single continuous teletype roll without margins or paragraph breaks
in a three week Benzedrine fuelled marathon, notoriously defined a generation –
the ‘Beat Generation.’
On the eve of his success in
February 1957 he boarded a Yugoslavian ship, the Slovenia (probably the Jugolinija freighter, Slovenija, built in 1951), leaving Brooklyn on a twelve day
crossing bound for Tangier in Morocco. He and a somewhat unfriendly Yugoslavian woman
were the only passengers on board the freighter. While crossing the Atlantic
the ship encountered a large storm which tossed the boat about quite a bit. Watching
the towering wall-like waves descending on the ship from his porthole, Kerouac
had to pad the length of his bunk with pillows in order to wedge himself in and
prevent him from being thrown out of it. Once the storm abated he spent his
time befriending the ship’s two cats. Eventually the ship sighted land. Kerouac
at first thought the mountains he could see on the thin line of the horizon was
Africa but later found out it was actually the coast of Spain.
Slovenija, built 1951 |
In Tangier he stayed with his
friend, the writer, William S. Burroughs. Burroughs was living in exile having
accidentally shot his wife at a party in Mexico City in 1951, so the story
goes, when playing a trick which went wrong. The couple’s party-piece was supposedly
a William Tell-like game in which Burroughs wife, Joan, balanced a whisky glass
upon her head and Burroughs, a gun enthusiast, would shoot it off. The couple
were both drunk and high at the time of the incident, and their relationship
was also somewhat strained. The exact details of how Joan’s death occurred are
sketchy. Burroughs later skipped over the border to Mexico and so was convicted of manslaughter in
absentia for killing Joan.
Tangier, Morocco, 1957 - by Allen Ginsberg (Getty Museum) |
In Tangier Kerouac and Burroughs
spent their time wandering around the town, the beach, and the surrounding
hills, getting high or writing in their digs. There was also another ex-pat
American writer, a long-established resident in Tangier, Paul Bowles – author
of one of my most favourite novels, The
Sheltering Sky (1947). Even though Kerouac stayed in Tangier for around a
month his account of this trip doesn’t mention Bowles, who had little to do
with Burroughs at that time – much to Burroughs chagrin. Bowles was very likely
away travelling and so it seems unlikely that Kerouac met Bowles during his stay
in Morocco. However, a few years later the luminaries of the so-called ‘Beat
Generation’ en masse descended on
Tangier – Bowles wasn’t overly impressed with the new American counter-culture
trend, writing to his parents in 1961: “Everyday
one sees more and more beards and filthy blue jeans, and the girls look like escapees
from lunatic asylums, with white lipstick and black smeared around their eyes,
and matted hair hanging around their shoulders. The leaders of the ‘movement’
have moved their headquarters here.” Here Bowles is referring to Burroughs,
and the poets, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso – but Tangier wasn’t the Beats’
headquarters for long as all three moved on soon afterwards. Bowles did meet
Kerouac some years later in New York, Jack giving him a signed copy of his
novel, The Subterraneans.
Kerouac in Tangier, 1957 - by William S. Burroughs |
Leaving Tangier by boat again, this
time travelling fourth class – a decision Kerouac came to regret somewhat, as
once on board he discovered the five dollars he’d saved on the fare meant he
was not provided with either food or a bunk throughout the passage to the south
coast of France. From Marseilles Kerouac planned to hitchhike his way north to
Paris, but soon found this wasn’t going to be a viable way to travel as no one
stopped to pick him up, so instead he took a series of buses and trains.
Travelling through Provence to Arles and Avignon, the landscape evoking thoughts and
reveries of famous artists, such as Van Gogh and Cezanne, as well as poets and
writers, such as Rimbaud, Flaubert, Balzac, Genet and Celine. In Paris he
wandered, similarly in awe of the city’s “Proustian
showgoers” hailing cabs on the boulevards, passing through Saint-Germain-des-Prés – erstwhile haunt of Albert Camus,
Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir – spending his time getting footsore
tramping around the endless galleries of the Louvre, again revelling in his
descriptions of the paintings he saw there. “Fragonard,
so delicate next to Van Dyck, and a big smoky Rubens (La Mort de Dido). – But
the Rubens got better as I looked, the muscle tones in cream and pink, the
rimshot luminous eyes, the dull purple velvet robe on the bed.” Haunting
bookshops, and presumably the famous bouquinistes
along the River Seine, near Notre Dame. Enchanted by the Sacré Coeur in Monmartre. He seems to have relished the charm of eating
simple fare – coffee and pastries for breakfast; onion soup, fresh bread, pâté,
and “thin stemmed glasses” of red
wine for dinner. Everywhere he goes compulsively commenting on the beautiful
women he sees.
Sacré-Cœur, Montmartre, Paris, 1957 - By Inge Morath |
From Paris he set off for London. He
had just enough money in his pocket to see him across the English Channel,
intending to pick up a royalty cheque from his London publisher when he arrived.
“Swiftly we left the French shore and
after a spate of blank water we began to see green carpets and meadows stopped
abruptly as with a pencil line at chalk cliffs, and it was that sceptered isle,
England, springtime in England.” – As with Paris, he was already in love
with the idea of London before he reached it. Invoking pilgrim-like thoughts in anticipation
of its mysterious, Dickensian atmosphere. Imagining himself exploring the
city’s twisting streets and alleys in the thick ‘pea-souper’ London fog, like a
character in a Sherlock Holmes story.
Victoria Station, London - 1956 |
Arriving by rail at Victoria
Station he had an impromptu brush with the law, finding himself suddenly
accosted by a group of London “Bobbies.”
As he describes it this was probably because he was unshaved and “looked like a bum,” but also because he
arrived in close proximity to a “Negro”
fellow (Kerouac’s word) who seemed to be somewhat mentally unstable. His
travelling companion, who he’d seen on the same boat from France but whom he
didn’t actually know, had no passport or other travel documents and so was duly
hauled off by the Police. It’s interesting to note that this was also the time
of the arrival of the so-called ‘Windrush Generation’ – people from the
dominions of the British Empire in the Caribbean who were officially invited to
settle in the UK; many of whom similarly had no documentation, a fact which has
recently caused significant controversy and injustice with the heavy-handed and
overtly racist bureaucracy of the ‘hostile environment’ initiated by Theresa
May’s Tory government, shamefully seeking to expel them and their descendants from
the UK irrespective of their long and decent law abiding contributions to
cosmopolitan British society over the last six decades. Kerouac defined the
Beats as “sympathetic” – relating himself
to all struggling peoples – the working class, the underprivileged, the down
and outs – the vast underclass of society who are all simply trying to make
their way in the world, free of the shackles and the burdens of conformity and
prejudice.
Victoria Station, London - 1956 |
Arriving at Victoria with scant
money on him, Kerouac soon found himself in deepening hot water, with a British
immigration officer questioning him closely. He only managed to convince the
man that he really was a writer when scrabbling in his rucksack he managed to
produce a magazine article about himself and the writer, Henry Miller. This
sufficiently impressed the officer, who claimed the British authorities had also
recently detained Miller too! – And so, with genuine relief, Kerouac suddenly found himself free to go. He set out on foot, tramping his way, via Buckingham Palace, to the Strand.
The Strand - Street of Ink, 1969 - by Ron Embleton |
In my late teens and early twenties
I read a lot of books by, and about, Jack Kerouac. I used to write a lot of
poems when I was at Sixth Form College too. It was a creative time for my
friends and me, a sort of Dead Poets
Society. We mainly circulated our poems in a kind of handwritten samizdat, with a few getting published
in the college’s weekly newsletter. A friend in my Classics class asked me one
day if I liked Jack Kerouac. “Never heard of him, who he?” – I replied. The
friend thrust a copy of Maggie Cassidy
(1959) into my hands and said: “You need to read him.” The friend was right. I was
instantly hooked. There was something about the lyrical oddity in the way
Kerouac wrote which seemed to zap straight to the centre of my mind. I didn’t
always understand all of the things that he was saying, but I liked the way he
was saying it. His writing thrummed with an energy and intensity. The words
seemed to rocket along at a pace which was both thrilling and intoxicating. I
loved the way that whatever Kerouac was scribbling about (or pounding out on
his typewriter) he always seemed to be on the move, and he had a band of close friends
with whom he clearly forged deep and lasting almost spiritual connections – this
seemed to click with me and how I perceived my own friends.
Silent film footage of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg et al in New York, 1959
Kerouac’s books spoke about
freedom, escape, creativity, exploration, openness, spirituality, hedonism,
love, anguish, despair, poverty, the feeling of being trapped – but knowing
that one day you’d exceed the horizon and excel into the limitless future. All
things could happen and probably would, given time, inclination, personal
drive, ambition, faith and belief. All the things that seem so vital and so
appealing to a youthful adolescent with similar fledgling literary ambitions. All
the things which characterise that first awakening, and the possibilities which
seem so limitless and abundant at that time of life. Exploring who you are, who you might be, what
you might do, and where you might go, both alone and in the company of your
closest friends. Kerouac’s world, and more importantly his prose and his poetry, seemed to sing itself electric about all of these things, the most vitally
important themes of life. Even though he was essentially of my grandparents’
generation, he was exploring and encapsulating a zeitgeist which remains eternal. He has distilled what it means to be young and alive to the world lived at large. The
timelessness of the jazz age and the distinctly American lyrical-tone he used to
describe it all only adds to the sense of 'cool' – at the time, making it all the
more appealing to the staid boringness of my English suburban upbringing.
One of the things about his books,
especially novels like On The Road,
Desolation Angels, The Dharma Bums, or
The Vanity of Duluoz, which was most appealing was the idea that you could
just get into a beat-up old car and drive and drive and drive across the vast
expanse of America, disappearing into a land of endless adventure. By
comparison the UK seemed very small and hemmed in, hence why his books lent
themselves so greatly to the imagination. But happily I remember reading his
collection of travel sketches, Lonesome
Traveler (1960), in the summer when I was transitioning between Sixth Form and
University, when I first read his account of his “Big Trip to Europe” in 1957.
This was the first thing he’d written which I felt I could actually relate to, because here he was in my city, walking the streets that I knew, exploring my world and describing it in words which I could really properly get to grips with. This was
clearly the piece which would connect me most closely to him as a person and as
a writer. And the line that was key for me was when he describes reaching Saint
Paul’s Cathedral on that first walk from Victoria Station – “… where it got too Johnsonianly sad. – So I
turned back, tired, and went into the King Lud pub for a sixpenny Welsh rarebit
and a stout.”
Ludgate Hill, c.1890 (Science Museum, London) |
The thought that I could go and
find the very pub in which Kerouac had drunk a pint of stout was too exciting
to believe. Guinness was one of my top tipples at the time and the idea that I
could find this very same pub and sit there sipping a pint of the ‘Liffey Water,’
just as he had done, was thrilling. But this was in the days before the
internet. In order to find the pub I’d have to go there and wander about in
search of it. Which is exactly what I did. Wandering down Ludgate Hill seemed a
good place to start, but every pub thereabouts seemed to have a name far
removed from that of the eponymous King Lud. It was becoming rather baffling
and so I eventually asked a passer-by, someone who looked like he might
appreciate a good pub and so be somewhat knowledgeable upon the subject and
perhaps the locale too. “Yes,” he said, “that name rings a bell. I think it’s
down there, on the corner.” And then, just as he was about to turn and go on
his way, he added: “I think it might have changed its name though.”
The King Lud, Ludgate Circus, c.1900 |
My sketch of the King Lud (Hogshead), 3 March 1995 |
Looking up the King Lud on the 'interweb' today there still seem to be a lot of fond memories of this pub
circulating. It apparently, very proudly trumpeted its claim to be the actual place
of origin for Welsh rarebit – although many people very much doubt this fact.
Lots of British pubs like to make grand claims such as this, and some more than
others manage to stick fast in the local folklore forevermore. It seems probable that the King Lud was gutted and refurbished when the railway viaduct which ran very
close behind the building was completely dismantled and removed – but
essentially the façade is just as it was when the pub was built in the late 19th
century. The carved wooden faces of King Lud himself still looked down from the lintels above the doors. They must have seen Kerouac entering the pub, just as they'd watched over me.
Interestingly, Kerouac mentions that the ruins of “Hitler’s blitz” were still visible in the area surrounding Saint Paul’s. Contemporary photographs taken by Hans Richard Griebe capture perfectly the atmosphere Kerouac describes (see here). From the early 1990s up to the present day, the area has been significantly redeveloped – Kerouac and Griebe would hardly recognise it today. And the Hogshead, the former King Lud, itself – where, thereafter, I often used to drink during my undergraduate days – is very sadly no longer a pub at all today. The stout and the Welsh rarebit are now both long gone.
Interestingly, Kerouac mentions that the ruins of “Hitler’s blitz” were still visible in the area surrounding Saint Paul’s. Contemporary photographs taken by Hans Richard Griebe capture perfectly the atmosphere Kerouac describes (see here). From the early 1990s up to the present day, the area has been significantly redeveloped – Kerouac and Griebe would hardly recognise it today. And the Hogshead, the former King Lud, itself – where, thereafter, I often used to drink during my undergraduate days – is very sadly no longer a pub at all today. The stout and the Welsh rarebit are now both long gone.
Another location Kerouac describes
is the hotel where he stayed, near Leicester Square – “… I got a fifteen-bob room in the Mapleton Hotel (in the attic) and had a long divine sleep
with the window open, in the morning the carillons blowing all of an hour round
eleven and the maid bringing in a tray of toast, butter, marmalade, hot milk
and a pot of coffee as I lay there amazed.” – This building still survives,
and although no longer called the Mapleton a part of it at least is still a functioning hotel. Sadly the ground floor street-front, chock-full with little shops
selling tourist souvenirs and bureau de changes, manages to obscure the old
building entirely. A Pathé newsreel from
1951, showing the fire brigade rescuing a woman from the hotel's parapet, gives an idea as to what the hotel used to look like (see here) – but, as the newsreel
footage has no commentary, it’s not clear how or why the woman came to be stuck
out on the hotel’s roof and required rescuing. The incident clearly seems
to have drawn a crowd of concerned onlookers. It’s certainly the busiest part of
London town. A short walk away is Piccadilly Circus where walking back to the
Mapleton one night, perhaps after savouring the illicit delights of nearby Soho
(which he certainly knew thereof), Kerouac got talking to some Teddy Boys who jokingly
asked him if, as a fellow American, he personally knew the famous jazz
musician, Gerry Mulligan. Curiously Kerouac doesn't mention the fact that there was a very popular "all-nighter" jazz club in the basement of the Mapleton Hotel, called 'Club Americana' (see here). Although, thinking about it, perhaps that's why he was still in bed at 11am when the maid brought in his breakfast of toast and marmalade!
Piccadilly Circus, c.1950s |
Teddy Boys - London, 1955 (Associated Press) |
Kerouac mentions looking up
the French heraldic shield of his ancestral family name at the British Museum
and finding the family motto which accompanied it suitably ‘Beat’ – “Love, work and suffer.” He doesn’t
mention it, but I imagine his route from the Mapleton to the BM could very well
have been a stroll up the Charing Cross Road, famous for London’s bookshops
(sadly now much depleted) – where at the time another American writer was
engaged in a wonderfully eccentric correspondence with a British bookseller.
Helene Hanff’s letters to Frank Doel were published in 1970 as a book, 84 Charing Cross Road. Writing from New
York to place orders for obscure books on English literature with the
booksellers, Mark’s & Co., where Frank Doel worked, she and Doel struck up
an unlikely long distance friendship which slowly grew over time with Hanff eventually
sending him, his family, and his co-workers food parcels to supplement the
wartime rationing which continued in Britain long after the end of the Second
World War. Sadly she never got to meet Doel in person. He died in 1968. She
did, however, make the trip to London just after 84 Charing Cross Road was published – just in time to see the empty
shop, which had recently closed down. This trip is entertainingly
described in Hanff’s book, The Duchess of
Bloomsbury Street (1973). Reading Hanff and Kerouac as a native Brit, it is
interesting to see London and the British from a distinctly American point of
view – both writers seem to fixate with good-natured glee upon the British
vernacular, parodying the British accent a
la Dick Van Dyke in the Disney film, Mary
Poppins.
The British Museum, c.1950s |
The Old Vic, Waterloo |
Before Kerouac left London he returned
to Saint Paul’s and experienced a small epiphany whilst listening to the choir there
singing Johann Sebastian Bach’s Saint
Matthew Passion on Good Friday – “Holy
Bach spoke to me and in front of me was a magnificent marble bas-relief showing
Christ and three Roman soldiers listening: ‘And he spake unto them do violence to
no man, nor accuse any falsely, and be content with thy wages.’” He also took
in a play. “At the last moment I
discovered the Old Vic while waiting for my boat train to Southampton. – The
performance was Antony and Cleopatra. – It was a marvellously smooth and
beautiful performance, Cleopatra’s words and sobbings more beautiful than music
…” – From this we can likely infer that he left London from Waterloo
Station rather than Victoria. The cast of Antony and Cleopatra at the Old Vic in 1957 starred Keith Michell, Margaret
Whiting, and Derek Godfrey – the last of whom later starred in the same theatre
as Oberon alongside Judi Dench and Frankie Howerd in a Midsummer Night’s Dream in the following season. Seeing Shakespeare
performed on the stage in the Bard’s native land was for Kerouac the perfect
end to his literary pilgrimage through France and England. Little did he know
that it was also the prelude to his own elevation to the pantheon of literary
greats.
Saint Paul's Cathedral, 1954 - by Hans Richard Griebe |
Shortly after he returned to the
United States his second and most famous novel, On The Road, was published and a review written by Gilbert
Millstein for the New York Times
catapulted Kerouac into the public consciousness. His life was never the same
again. As is true of other extremely sensitive artists – essentially
introspective people inadvertently wrong-footed by the success of their own
talents – fame was something which didn’t sit so well with Kerouac. After years
spent drifting in various jobs, trying to make ends meet, scrapping together
enough money to pay for the next trip and the next adventure, he was still deep-down inside a struggling writer. A man more accustomed to obscurity, longing for
greatness and recognition. He was much more used to observing the world, but
now that he’d finally made it and found that the world was watching him so
acutely in its turn, things were suddenly sent wildly off kilter. Despite the successful
subsequent publication of his prolific backlog of other writings thereafter, many
of which had previously been rejected by various publishers, this intense
literary spotlight precipitated a sad decade of decline. He passed away, a
victim of his own despondency made manifest in frequent bouts of unrestrained alcoholism,
a little over a decade after that “Big Trip to Europe” in which he had wandered
so freely and so unknown through the streets of Tangier, Paris, and London. At
heart, a true lonesome traveller, summing up the essence of his life: – “Railroad
work, sea work, mysticism, mountain work, lasciviousness, solipsism,
self-indulgence, bullfights, drugs, churches, art museums, streets of cities, a
mishmash of life as lived by an independent educated penniless rake going
anywhere.” – Amen.
Jack Kerouac on the Steve Allen Show, 1959
Postscript: In 2012, the original teletype
manuscript – “The Scroll” – the first draft of On The Road was put on display for a short time at the British
Library in London (see here). I went to see it. It was a fascinating thing to behold, especially
given the almost mythical status this document has accrued over time, making it
a kind of mystical modern day holy relic in its own right – if only Jack could
have known on that day when he looked up his ancestral coat of arms in the
British Museum Library that one day his inspired 'spontaneous prose' magnum opus would be displayed by the
same institution in its new home just a few blocks up the street from the BM in Bloomsbury. I wonder what he would have thought of that? – Rather fittingly, for a writer who had been proud to work for a
short time as a railroad brakeman in California (as he describes in another
essay in Lonesome Traveler – “The Railroad Earth”), the present site of the British Library was a railway
stockyard at the time he visited London.
A London 'Bobby' on Ludgate Hill, c.1950s |
~
The essay above was published in September 2023 as a limited edition 'chapbook' by Beat Scene Magazine, titled JACK KEROUAC: LONESOME TRAVELLER IN LONDON – 1957. For more information, please click here.
Very interesting - I didn't know that much about Kerouac's days in London. Long, long time ago since I read On the Road and had a similar reaction to you. Does this pin us to a certain age like carbon dating? Went on a road trip around America in pursuit of that dream and sometimes found it in fleeting ways!
ReplyDeleteI loved The Sheltering Sky, and found it existentialism and self-annihilation faintly terrifying.
I think it probably does! - Although I've never managed to do the great American Kerouac road trip myself, even though I have been to the US a couple of times.
DeleteI know what you mean about Paul Bowles too. He's an odd one and one I find oddly fascinating, but I can't really put my finger on why ... I'd love to write a blog post about him, but I find the prospect a little daunting. Haven't managed to find the right angle just yet, although I do have something in mind, but it's taking a while to crystallise.