Dr. Sax and the Great World Snake (1952/59/2018).

Some artists can arrive on the scene and leave an impact so big that there's almost no choice except for their names and efforts to became part of the lexicon of daily life.  It's a specific shelf space reserved for the likes of Shakespeare, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, Kurt Russell, Rod Serling, Mark Twain, or Charles Dickens.  The one uniting element between all of them is that they've managed to carve out a place for themselves in our shared memories.  It also doesn't hurt that some of them did so through the talented use of motion picture images, meaning we'll always have tangible examples to point future generations toward, thus ensuring that their names are now destined to last for something close to forever.  Then there is the pop cultural shelf-space reserved for artists whose talent is by no means second-tier.  It's just that their names keep sliding off our memories more often than any of them might be comfortable knowing.  Everyone can recall Rod Serling and his Twilight Zone, for instance.  Yet how many people have ever heard of the name Richard Matheson?  There may be an avid subsection of the audience who are just about ready to tear their hair out reading the above question.  How can I forget someone as important as important as him.  The answer is that it's now impossible for me to forget who Rich Matheson was.  Yet that's just what a vast majority of the rest of the faces in the aisles have done.  Everyone has somehow managed to recall who Rod Serling is.  He's become one of the great National Icons of television.  Very few can remember who Matheson was, however, or why his name is one that's worth remembering.  

I think a similar fate has transpired with the writer under discussion here today.  If you say the name Jack Kerouac out loud, you're likely to be greeted with a mixed and muted response online, and with looks of genuine puzzlement out in the streets.  That's because we're dealing with one of those Names that was able to have it's one defining moment in the spotlight, only to sink back again into a kind of strange cult celebrity status of obscurity.  I'm willing to say this is the case even if a site like Google Trends consistently pegs the audience awareness of his name at a healthy ratio from around 60 to 80s% over the past five years.  Even if that's the case, there's still some explanation required for why anyone would remember the name of some nebulous sounding author from back in the days when Elvis Presley was just a strapping young truck driver with dreams of music floating around in his head.  A basic summary of the facts goes something like this.  Jack Kerouac was the son of French-Canadian immigrants who made their home in a section of Lowell, Massachusetts that is still sometimes known as Little Canada.  Le Petit, as it was sometimes known, was a predominantly working class community where English was the second, rather than the first language.  In fact, when it came time to transfer to his first school outside of the district, Kerouac's classmates thought him of him as somewhat backwards.

This was because he'd grown up in both households and neighborhoods where the only words he ever heard were French Canadian.  Kerouac's experiences of growing up in Lowell are comparable to a sense of experience that was shared by two other artistic sources; one of them well known, the other obscure.  Playwright and screenwriter Chazz Palminteri once wrote an entire one-man theater performance around his experiences of growing up in New York's Little Italy.  He spoke of the neighborhood in which he grew up as a place that the rest of the history seemed to just pass by.  This was most evident when the 60s rolled around, and any up-to-date longhairs and Hell's Angels traveling through the Bronx would receive an interesting form of temporal-cultural shock when they got to Palminteri's neighborhood  and discovered that everyone there still dressed as if Eisenhower had never left the White House.  A similar type of setup was in place for Kerouac's child era neighborhood.  The only real difference was the language and culture involved.  Yet even here there is an interesting sense of overlap with the kind of community ambience fostered by the author's childhood.  If Martin Scorsese had ever visited the Lowell of Kerouac's childhood, the first thing that might jump out at him is its familiarity.

That's because the two major hubs of the Petit District centered around either the Greek Orthodox, or else the Roman Catholic Church.  Just as in the Little Italy of Scorsese's younger days, the otherwise dour, New England Puritan ethos of Kerouac's original stomping grounds were decorated in various places with an entrenched sense of Old World Iconography.  The author even recalled a specific pathway where the local parish had laid out a series of encased plastic statues depicting the Stations of the Cross.  Kerouac had very vivid memories of being led by his mother down this pathway to a series of ritual steps, at the tope of which stood a giant Crucifix that was constructed out of either stone, plaster, or a little of both.  This was a ritual of the author's childhood that Kerouac returns to time and again during the course of the story that's under discussion here, today.  And the sense inherent obsession with which the image  of that pathway keeps cropping up in the narrative action is enough to put the reader in mind of any number of scenes out of a typical Scorsese movie.  The kind that would feature a portrait of the artist as an already guilt-ridden, lonely young man.  All that's missing is Tony Bennett or Louie Prima on the soundtrack to make the scene complete.  It wasn't the Big Band Lounge Lizard acts that captured Jack's Imagination however.  That honor went to the world of Jazz music.

This is a topic that we'll need to go into at better length in the review proper.  For now, it's enough to know that being exposed to Jazz, and the African-American culture that it emerged from proved to be something of a lightbulb moment for the budding talent.  It brought home to Kerouac the realization of what life was like beyond the narrow confines of his New England community.  This aspect of breaking away from the sort of dour Puritanism of one's childhood is what brings us to the second major aspect that would go on to shape the story that would eventually become Doctor Sax.  It's the sort of American Gothic Fairy Tale Tradition that is best typified by the part of Ray Bradbury's mind that was responsible for novels like Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes.  Much like the African-American culture of Jazz, this is a topic that will deserve its own space for discussion later on.  What matters most of all right now is that it was the artist's first major exposure to records of Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Lester Young, and Charlie "Bird" Parker, and later on the works of writers like Herman Melville, James Joyce, and in particular Thomas Wolfe that allowed Kerouac to realize his talents for the written word.  It was these discoveries that made the most lasting impressions on him.

In later years, Kerouac summed up his early education in the following fashion: "the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night (23)"!  So, armed with the sense of revelation that most cloistered children carry with them once they've discovered how greater and multi-faceted the world outside the confines of narrow upbringings are, Kerouac eventually packed up what few belongings he had, and made his way to New York.  Once there, he began to find his way toward Greenwich Village's Bohemian scene, where he was able to meet and fall in with a group of like-minded compatriots such as Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and for a brief period at the start, the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who acted as something of the distant founder of the literary movement that Kerouac would soon become something of the de facto face of, along with Ginsberg.  They called themselves the Beats, and the artistic circle that soon began to gather and take shape around them was later considered as the Beat Generation.  There's a lot that could and has been said about this group of writers, and the counterculture revolution that they helped to kickstart in the middle years of the 20th century.  Out of all the commentators of this literary circle, the best writings I've found still belongs to Theodore Roszak.

In his book The Making of a Counter Culture, he writes: "Questions about the quality and purpose of life, about experience and consciousness, about the rationality and permanence of industrial growth, about our long-term relations with the natural environment arose more readily in America than in the older industrial societies.  The United States was closer closer to the postindustrial horizon where issues of an unusual kind were coming into view.  Oddly enough, many of those issues could be traced to pre- industrial origins. They stemmed from a dissenting sensibility as old as the lament that the Romantic poets had once raised against the Dark Satanic Mills (xiii-xiv)".  Here is the point where David Stephen Calonne helps add to the picture by pointing out: " It may seem difficult to fathom how youth in a country enjoying unprecedented material prosperity would exhibit such restless discontent. Yet in addition to the threat of nuclear annihilation, the nation’s gross injustices – continuing and violent oppression of women, African Americans, homosexuals, and Native Americans – made it impossible for the Beats to avoid rebelling against their society’s hypocritical “values.”...The Beats challenged not only American homophobia and militarism, but also racism. During a time of violence and segregation, bridges between the white and black literary communities began to be forged in friendships (6)".

I'd argue it's Roszak, however, who gets right what Calonne still misses.  This is something that goes right to the heart of the literary, artistic, and social liberation that defined the New York and San-Francisco Poets and Novelists.  For Roszak, it all comes from the intellectual and artistic ethos that defined a creative movement inaugurated by the 19th century English Lake Poets.  "This perception of the world is the outstanding character- ordinary of the shaman, nothing is characteristic of primitive song, a trait that reappears in the poetry our society most readily designates as Romantic or visionary (248)".  In particular, Roszak theorized that it was the poetic efforts of William Blake that marked him out as something of the ultimate patron saint of the 50s and 60s underground rebels.  There's even a particular passage in his breakout book where the critic takes an example straight from the Beat writers to demonstrate the reliance on a fundamentally Romantic inheritance for about just about all of their major literary efforts.  In speaking of Ginsberg's poetry, for instance, Roszak notes how this essentially Romantic strain is "already there, giving Ginsberg’s poetry a very different sound from the social poetry of the thirties. From the outset, Ginsberg is a protest poet. But his protest does not run back to Marx; it reaches out, instead, to the ecstatic radicalism of Blake (126)".  I just have one more thing to add here.

In addition to Calonne's sense of nonconformity in the name of social justice, the fact that Roszak is able to pinpoint the ultimate origin of the Beats and the 60s in the writings and art of the Romantics leads me to the conclusion that all Kerouac and his friends got up to back during the Eisenhower Era was to find themselves falling into what I'd describe as a by then time-honored pattern, or tradition of dissent in American life and letters.  It's a strand of the National Character that I've discussed on this blog once before, something that goes all the way back to and during the events of this Country's Founding.  For me, this line of dissent has its origin in a moment of shared reaction to a specific moment in the Nation's past.  Perhaps a better way to phrase is it say that it was the culmination of a whole series of moral reactions that were startled out of succeeding generations of citizens due to the outrages perpetuated by this Country's unofficial first founding, with the arrival of the Puritans at Plymouth Rock.  This, to me, was an inflection point, or sorts.  One that set forth a pattern of compulsive-abusive behavior which crafted a modern sense of bigotry and prejudice on these shores.  From the landing of the Plymouth Settlement is the moment when the first modern form of white racism against both Native and African-Americans had its particularly American form of birth aftershocks.

Everything else that can be spoken of as not being allied to that inflection point is best thought of as a reaction against such abuse, in various ways and forms.  Perhaps even up to and including the official American Founding, flaws and all.  Looked at from this perspective, in addition to the likes of Blake, there are other forgotten artistic names that might be spoken of as pioneering this Tradition of Dissent into creative formats.  These would include lesser known talents such as America's first major poet, an African slave girl by the name of Phillis Wheatley, a pioneer of the Horror novel called Charles Brockden Brown, as well as more relatively well known names like Twain, Bradbury, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.  In fact, it's within the genre confines of the latter two names that Kerouac's work here today is best seen in light of.  As what we've got here is one of the most curious products ever to come out of the Beat Generation.  It's a bizarre piece of work called Doctor Sax and the Great World Snake.