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.

The Story.

Note: I'll be relying on the plot summary provided by Wikipedia.  While the main subject of this review is focused on a radio drama adaptation the novel Doctor Sax, the synopsis itself is describing the contents of the original source material.  There's a distinction in place, yet it also seems to be one that doesn't make all that great a deal of difference.  For one thing, all of the major story beats turn out to be the same in both version of the Sax opus.  For another, there already seems to have been a lot of blurred lines in terms of which is the chicken, and which the egg in the history of this tale's composition.  That's because while the full-cast audio drama is based off of a screenplay the author either drafted out of the completed novel.  Or else it's also possible that the story Doctor Sax began its original life as a screenplay that was later turned into a book.  What makes this latter hypothesis a reasonable enough guess is the fact that there are passages in the book where it's clear that Kerouac can be seen availing himself of an amateurs' version of the typical Hollywood screenwriter's format.  The fact that this strange choice of layout design for something that turned out to be a novel leaves room for speculation that the story Kerouac had to tell might have begun life as a hoped for movie script.  One that soon transitioned into the novel format after questions of feasibility became obvious.  This may be speculation, yet it's one that accounts for the perfect synching of plot points found in both versions.

I've also chosen the Wikipedia synopsis to describe the story Kerouac has to tell, simply because it is the best summation of what happens in both the book and the radio play.  That's because each incarnation was a more or less straightforward transcription of the plot made by the author himself.  The only things that are missing are a few semi-fictionalized, slice-of-life details drawn from the writer's own biography and then highly embellished for the sake of drama.  In this sense, Kerouac can be said to be operating with the same level of artistic license as Ray Bradbury when he turned his real life hometown of Waukegan into Green Town, Illinois.  All the screenplay version does is cutaway these exaggerated bits of real life, and focus on the essentials, which remain unchanged in either book or screenplay.  The story proper, in either version, goes as follows.  "The novel begins with Jackie Duluoz, based on Kerouac himself, relating a dream in which he finds himself in Lowell, Massachusetts, his childhood home town. Prompted by this dream, he recollects the story of his childhood of warm browns and sepia tones, along with his shrouded childhood fantasies, which have become inextricable from the memories.

"The fantasies pertain to a castle in Lowell atop a muted green hill that Jackie calls Snake Hill. Underneath the misty grey castle, the Great World Snake sleeps. Various vampires, monsters, gnomes, werewolves, and dark magicians from all over the world gather to the mansion with the intention of awakening the Snake so that it will devour the entire world (although a small minority of them, derisively called "Dovists," believe that the Snake is merely "a husk of doves," and when it awakens it will burst open, releasing thousands of lace white doves. This myth is also present in a story told by Kerouac's character, Sal Paradise, in On the Road).

"The eponymous Doctor Sax, also part of Jackie's fantasy world, is a dark but ultimately friendly figure with a shrouded black cape, an inky black slouch hat, a haunting laugh, and a "disease of the night" called Visagus Nightsoil that causes his skin to turn mossy green at night. Sax, who also came to Lowell because of the Great World Snake, lives in the forest in the neighboring town of Dracut, where he conducts various alchemical experiments, attempting to concoct a potion to destroy the Snake when it awakens.

"When the Snake is finally awakened, Doctor Sax uses his potion on the Snake, but the potion fails to do any damage. Sax, defeated, discards his shadowy black costume and watches the events unfold as an ordinary man. As the Snake prepares to destroy the world, all seems lost until...(web)".  

The Reputation of the Author. 

In the world of the Arts, reputation is everything.  That's maybe not always a good thing, at least in terms of being able to enjoy the full range of true creative expression.  Yet it is what it is.  Just another one of life's little inevitabilities.  An easy way to identify who and what we're looking at.  One of the downsides to this conundrum is the way it has of pigeonholing the artist, often against their will.  To take Steven Spielberg, as an instance, everybody and their grandmother knows who he is based on the strength of just a single image: that of a boy and his best friend sailing across the face of the Moon.  It's become a shorthand for who the director is and what he represents.  There's not much to regret there, so far as it goes.  It's as accurate a summation of what Spielberg stands for.  An easy bit of iconographical shorthand that can suggest an idea of the artist in a small handful of frames.  What is sometimes in danger of being lost in this level of pop culture awareness is that Spielberg is also a very deft hand at crafting gritty historical dramas that sometimes have as much pathos and street smarts to them in a way that almost rivals the work of Martin Scorsese.  Yet it's the very popularity of E.T. flying through the sky that tends to obscure this other aspect of the director's career.  None of Steve's historical dramas has ever managed to eclipse his work in the Fantastic genres.  It's a reputation that he's built up with his own hands, in collaboration with those of others.  It's an ironic case of the Truth obscuring the whole story.

It's the great eternal catch of pop culture.  If you manage to make a name for yourself in just the right way, part of the price tag is that it becomes that one great moment of success that defines you, and no other.  Guys like Spielberg can go on to prove their skill at directing political thrillers like The Post, and it still won't make a difference to the culture that has embraced him.  He's the E.T. guy, now and forever.  The way this inevitability has played out for the reputation of Jack Kerouac is laced with an even greater sense of irony, inasmuch as he is now known as the most famous among an entire group of  voices that made up the literary underground of the 50s and 60s.  The punchline in his case is that his creative output offers less of a clash of styles for the reader to soak in.  For the most part, all of the Beat author's work ran on the same note played time and again.  The vast majority of Kerouac's writings amounts to a kind of roman a clef.  An ongoing, piecemeal work of autobiography which details the life and growth of the artist's mind as he makes his way through the streets, alleyways, and backroads in then immediate and contemporary context of the time that was Postwar America.  When you pick up any of his books like Desolation Angels or Lonesome Traveler and read about characters with names like Sal Paradise or Jackie Duluoz, it's really just the author writing about himself under a masque.

It's a narrative strategy that Kerouac employed throughout his career as an author.  The reasons for this seem to be twofold, to me.  Part of it was that it was all just a matter of good policy in the 50s.  All the pseudonyms and false fronts are there to protect the guilty and the innocent alike as the situation called for.  The other is because part of Kerouac's goal was to take the personal experiences of himself and his friends, and try to see if he could universalize it.  To make his readers understand the full import of the Beat Experience as he, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and others lived it.  The net result is a collection of published books that act almost as a series of informal photo albums that chronicle the exploits of Kerouac and his fellow Beats as they make their way through the 40s and 50s just living life and taking it as it comes.  What ends up happening in the process is that the astute reader comes understand that they're being given a sort of historical, in-the-making documentation of what would later on become known as the Counter Culture of the 1960s.  As we travel with Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Neal Cassidy, we're also sort of watching along as their exploits proceeds to lay the social foundations for a lot of the Free Speech and Civil Rights issues that would come to engulf America as the years wore on.  What's fascinating about it is how it starts out as just people trying to live their lives, and then going on gradually from there to discovering that their society doesn't like the idea of a life that's fully lived.

So over time, the note of social protest begins to creep into the writings of the Beats, until it explodes into the public consciousness at large with venues like the Berkeley Campus Free Speech rallies, the confrontation at the Pettus Bridge, and the Newport Folk, Monterey Pop, and Woodstock Music Festivals.  A great deal of the 60s is what happened when the content of the Beat writings somehow managed to become mainstream.  If I had to pinpoint the two groups of artists responsible for helping to catapult the whole ethos of the New York and San-Francisco poets to the mass audience, then it would have to be through the auspices of both Bob Dylan and the Beatles.  They were the ones who proved capable of amassing the kind necessary pop cultural clout that allowed the writings of Kerouac to have a greater deal of audience awareness.  As time has worn on, however, the net result has been that he's now recalled, if at all, as one of a handful of underground voices that went on to Inspire the trailblazers who came later.  Like with Spielberg's still current reputation, it's not really something you can call a lie.  Therefore it becomes an a Truth laced with irony.  Kerouac's reputation now means that he's seen as this rebel outlaw hero, the literary equivalent of James Dean and Marlon Brando.  The fact that's not entirely untrue means that a book like Doctor Sax sort of has no choice except to become a career anomaly.

The Pulp Inspiration, Style, and Childhood Context of Doctor Sax.

You just don't expect someone like the author of On the Road to write a work of Urban Fantasy.  It's not the sort of book that a glance at his other output would lead one to expect.  The content of books like Visions of Cody and The Dharma Bums make him out to be the kind of talent that belongs up on the same shelf with writers like John Steinbeck, Arthur Miller, or J.D. Salinger.  It just makes sense for Kerouac to belong to that fraternity of mid-century Social Realism.  Books with plots that are grounded in a gritty and hard-edged indictment of the contradictions and hypocrisies inherent in the American Way of Life.  He's someone who belongs to the literature of firebrands, not the pulp Fantasy tradition of someone like Ray Bradbury.  The very idea sounds like some sort of impossible fever dream  Therefore the author somehow must not have given a damn what his readers thought, because the story we've got on our hands today really does count as an Urban Fantasy in the vein of Something Wicked This Way Comes.  That's best short version summary I can give of the plot in either the screenplay or novel version.  That might sound enticing enough for the kind of people who like to read Bradbury.  Though if you're wondering if this means Doctor Sax is the kind of story I recommend, the answer is yes, with one major caveat.  You've got to prepare your mind for the kind of weirdness Kerouac is ready to deal out here.  That's because he follows the conventions of the genre in a very unconventional sort of way.

I don't mean he's interested in "subverting expectations" or anything like that.  Such a fad didn't even exist in his era, and besides, much like Bradbury or Spielberg, it's pretty clear the author has an unabashed love for the pulp materials he's assembled to tell his pre-Joe Dante fable.  It's just that he goes about telling what is an otherwise normal Fantasy story in a very "out there" sort of way.  The first thing that strikes the contemporary reader is the book's style.  I can see how most of us raised on the straightforward descriptive form of prose that's pretty much considered the norm everywhere would be put off by the way this author constructs his sentences.  That's because Kerouac believed there should be no sort of distinction between prose, poetry, and music.  He was one of those pioneering creative types that liked to push the boundaries of the prose format to its limits.  Omar Swartz tells it best in The Rhetoric of the Road.  It's in this work of analysis that  the critic lays out a good beginner's description of what Kerouac was hoping accomplish by experimenting with how the words go together.  According to Swartz, it was all part of the program of what it meant to be a "Beat" writer in the 50s.

"The word “beat” itself, coined by Kerouac...has many connotations that relate to the above discussion.   Kerouac recorded three poetry al- bums, one of which is a dialectic exchange between Kerouac and two famous jazz musicians, Zoot Sims and Al Cohn (11)".  "It is not just what Kerouac wrote that gave the counterculture its identity, it is how he wrote it as well. Kerouac’s theme in On the Road is freedom, and his writing style, which he described as “spontaneous prose,” was the vehicle of this freedom’s expression and vision. His approach to writing was modeled after jazz musicians. In a Paris Review interview, Kerouac explains the influence of jazz and “bop” in his work: 'Yes, jazz and bop, in the sense of a, say, a tenor man drawing a breath and blowing a phrase on his saxophone, till he runs out of breath, and when he does, his sentence, his statement’s been made . . . that’s how I therefore separate my sentences, as breath separations of the mind (9-10)".  "Kerouac’s intent as a writer is to poeticize life and thus circumvent its many sufferings and woe; he refers to himself as a “jazz poet” who works in a prose medium (87)".  The writer himself is able to provide a good example of what his prose sounds like when spoken aloud, as he read from On the Road in a late night appearance with Steve Allen.  

It's this desire to heighten and Romanticize life (in literary, as well as sexual terms) that explains the curious nature of the opening sentences that great the reader of the Sax book.  Here, for instance, is the way the author chooses to begin his tale of fantastical happenings in a small town.  "The other night I had a dream that I was sitting on the sidewalk on Moody Street, Pawtucketville, Lowell, Mass., with a pencil and paper in my hand saying to myself ‘Describe the wrinkly tar of this sidewalk, also the iron pickets of Textile Institute, or the doorway where Lousy and you and G.J.’s always sittin and dont stop to think of words when you do stop, just stop to think of the picture better — and let your mind off yourself in this work (3).’  So far things don't sound too out of the ordinary from how we expect a book of this sort to be written.  In terms of content things are both straightforward and sophisticated by turns.  We're introduced to the author as he prepares to recall his childhood as recounted and colored through a lens of Fantasy.  Sharp-eyed readers will be able to spot the thread of literary allusion running through this inaugural paragraph in the way it contains echoes of Homer and John Milton.  These were writers who often began their stories with invocations of the Muse, that sometimes took place in a dream.

With this frame of reference in mind, it's clear that Kerouac is signaling to his audience that what we're about to read or hear is the garbled fragments of childhood memory as they are refracted through the sometimes surreal logic of REM sleep.  It's a crucial opening setup that shouldn't be overlooked.  By casting his narrative as the product of a dream recounted in slumber, Jack is more or less granting his readers permission to indulge in the off-kilter nature of the secondary world we are about to enter.  In a way, he's given us a literary means to allow ourselves to go along with his crazy-quilt stylistic choices, such as the way the book's second opening paragraph is constructed.  "Doctor Sax I first saw in his earlier lineaments in the early Catholic childhood of Centralville — deaths, funerals, the shroud of that, the dark figure in the corner when you look at the dead man coffin in the dolorous parlor of the open house with a horrible purple wreath on the door. Figures of coffinbearers emerging from a house on a rainy night bearing a box with dead old Mr Yipe inside.

"The statue of Ste Thérése turning her head in an antique Catholic twenties film with Ste Thérése dashing across town in a car with W.C. Fieldsian close shaves by the young religious hero while the doll (not Ste Thérése herself but the lady hero symbolic thereof) heads for her saintliness with wide eyes of disbelief. We had a statue of Ste Thérése in my house — on West Street I saw it turn its head at me — in the dark. Earlier, too, horrors of the Jesus Christ of passion plays in his shrouds and vestments of saddest  was at the foot of my bed pushing it one dark Saturday night (on Hildreth & Lilley secondfloor flat full of Eternity outside) — either He or the Virgin Mary stooped with phosphorescent profile and horror pushing my bed. That same night an elfin, more cheery ghost of some Santa Claus kind rushed up and slammed my door; there was no wind; my sister was taking a bath in the rosy bathroom of Saturday night home, and my mother scrubbing her back or tuning Wayne King on the old mahogany radio or glancing at the top Maggie and Jiggs funnies just come in from wagon boys outside (same who rushed among the downtown redbricks of my Chinese mystery) so I called out ‘Who slammed my door (Qui a farmez ma porte?)’ and they said nobody (‘Parsonne voyons donc’) — and I knew I was haunted but said nothing; not long after that I dreamed the horrible dream of the rattling red livingroom, newly painted a strange 1929 varnish red and I saw it in the dream all dancing and rattling like skeletons because my brother Gerard haunted them and dreamed I woke up screaming by the phonograph machine in the adjoining room with its Masters Voice curves in the brown wood — Memory and dream are intermixed in this mad universe (4-5)".  These are just the first two pages of the story in total so far.

Right off the bat, the author has chosen to place us in a topsy-turvy world where any appearance that suggests an idea of life as it really is would just seem out of place.  This is a hyper-fantastic sketch pad world that owes more to the logic of cartoons than it does to anything that actually happened to Kerouac when he was growing up.  If the opening puts us in mind of Homer and Milton, then the strange broken cadences of run-on sentences puts one in mind of the James Joyce who wrote Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.  This shouldn't be too surprising to veteran fans of this author, as the Scribe of the Open Road was on the record detailing his fandom for the prose poet of the Dublin Streets.  The prose of this peculiar bit of Urban Fantasy is a lot more coherent and cohesive than just about anything found in the Wake.  It's just an open question of how far the average reader of today is willing to follow the author down the pretty Gonzo sounding direction the plot ends up going with.  A basic synopsis of the plot is that it's one of those coming-of-age Fantasies that used to be a childhood staple of every 80s kid's life.  It focuses on a pivotal year in the life of young Jackie Duluoz.  We follow him a long as he tries to navigate that precarious moment of time when the first strands of adulthood begin to encroach on the idyll of childhood, and so the daylight half of  the novel serves as a kind of 1930s era Wonder Years.

The nightside half of the tale concerns what happens when the protagonist begins to notice how it seems as if the ghosts, vampires, and other fantastic creatures that either haunt his dreams, or are else conjured up in his Imagination seem to be very busy taking on a sometimes wondrous, yet often macabre life of their own.  At the center of these less than normal shenanigans stands the mysterious individual known only as Doctor Sax.  A magical figure who appears to be one half hero and the other half devious trickster who often delights in keeping both Jackie and the audience in guessing whose side he's on with all the supernatural happenings.  The irony of such a basic premise is how familiar it all sounds in an era where whole generations have been raised on books like Salem's Lot and It; films like Explorers, The Goonies, and The Monster Squad; or TV shows such as Goosebumps, Are You Afraid of the Dark, and Eerie, Indiana.  If anything, a bare bones synoptic retelling of the story might give the reader the impression that it's the kind of thing that children's authors like R.L. Stine, Bruce Coville, or John Bellairs would have penned at some point during their heydays.  The plot sounds so familiar at this point that most of us could probably spin out the contents of the entire narrative in a Mab Libs fashion.  It sort of begs the question of what could Kerouac have to offer us from this familiar genre setup?

Well, the answer to that question all seems to depend on how far you can go with the kind of descriptions Kerouac gives to the story's more arabesque elements.  For instance, let's take the description the book gives for one of its two main antagonists.  He's a supernatural bloodsucker who predates the arrival of Stephen King's book on the scene, making Kerouac something of an unsung pioneer of the Vampire in a Small Town trope, even before authors like Richard Matheson brought it all mainstream with the publication of I Am Legend.  Matheson published his book in 1954, yet Kerouac as already at work on his idea by 1952, and maybe even a year or so earlier.  What's even more telling is the way in which both authors choose to tell their respective stories.  Here's the opening paragraphs from I Am Legend as a control sample of what I'm talking about.  "On those cloudy days, Robert Neville was never sure when sunset came, and sometimes they were in the streets before he could get back. If he had been more analytical, he might have calculated the approximate time of their arrival; but he still used the lifetime habit of judging nightfall by the sky, and on cloudy days that method didn’t work. That was why he chose to stay near the house on those days. He walked around the house in the dull gray of afternoon, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, trailing threadlike smoke over his shoulder. He checked each window to see if any of the boards had been loosened. After violent attacks, the planks were often split or partially pried off, and he had to replace them completely; a job he hated. Today only one plank was loose. Isn’t that amazing? he thought (1)".

What Matheson gives us in these passages is an almost textbook demonstration of a Literary Standard.  The baseline criterion for what a good, solid prose line is supposed to look and sound like on the page.  In just three paragraphs, Matheson is able to introduce us to our main character, and the fact that he lives his life in a constant state of siege and peril.  The authors has managed to convey so much vital information in just the span of a little over a hundred words.  There is a good chance that Matheson's prose in this novel deserves its own space as an illustration of the best uses in the Elements of Style.  I bring all this up because its exactly this same stylistic gold standard that Kerouac sees fit to toss clear out the door for the sake of the peculiar dramatic effect he's after.  Here's how the Dharma Bum author chooses to introduce one of his two lead villains.  

"Count Condu came from Budapest — he wanted good Hungarian earth to lie still in during the long dull afternoons of the Europe void — so he flew to America by rainy night, by day slept in his six-foot sand box aboard an N.M.U. ship — came to Lowell to feast on the citizens of Merrimac ... a vampire, flying in the rainy night river from the old dump along back Textile field to the shores of Centralville . . . flying to the door of the Castle which was located on top of the dreaming meadow near Bridge and 18th. Upon the top of this hill, located symmetrically with the old stone castle-house on Lakeview Avenue near Lupine Road (and the long lost French Canadian hoogah names of my infancy) there stands a Castle, high in the air, the king surveyor of the Lowell monarchial roofs and stanchion-chimneys (O tall red chimneys of the Cotton Mills of Lowell, tall redbrick goof of Boott, swaying in the terminus Clouds of the wild hoorah day and dreambell afternoon —)

"Count Condu wanted his chickens plucked just right — He came to Lowell as part of a great general movement of evil — to the secret Castle — The Count was tall, thin, hawk-nosed, caped, whitegloved, glint eyed, sardonic, the hero of Doctor Sax whose shaggy eyebrows made him so blind he could hardly see what he was doing hopping over the dump at night — Condu was sibilant, sharp-tongued, aristocratic, snappy, mawk-mouthed like a bloodless simp, mowurpy with his mush-lips swelled inbent and dommerfall as if with a little hanging Mandarin mustache which he didn’t have — Doctor Sax was old, his strength of hawkshaw jowls was used on age, sagged a bit (looked a little like Carl Sandburg but shaped with a shroud, tall and thin in a shadow on the wall, not Minnesota road walking open air curly Gawd-damn glad in saintliness days and Peace — (21-22)".  If you're first impression was, "What did I just read", something tells me you should rest assured, the author probably meant it that way.  One of Kerouac's goals as a writer was to see if he could break free from what he felt were the sort of constrictions and censorships that he felt might have been holding back many artists like him from being able to explore the furthest reaches of possible creative expression, whether on page or canvas.

This sense of unnecessary constriction resulted in the author pushing himself to experiment with his signature Jazz Prose in all the ways he could think of.  It's what accounts for the strange, erratic sounding rhythm of his style in the scene above.  In terms of structure, the narrative description starts out sounding normal enough, if a bit flaky.  That initial note of things being out of the ordinary then takes on a sense of sharp, crystal clarity as Kerouac allows himself to break free from the kind of clear prose line that writers like Matheson utilized so well, and then goes in search of all the ways he can think of to make the words sound like music.  What starts out as a kind of slow drawl begins to skip a beat at some hard to define point, and from there the language of the story starts to jump and jive.  Coming out in quick bursts of minute description which put one in mind of the kind of classic Jazz drumbeats that you can sometimes hear in the music of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, or Dave Brubeck.  Kerouac appears to be trying to see how well he can make his words match the lyrical percussion of Joe Morello and Paul Desmond.  It's what accounts for the odd, off-kilter quality to what is otherwise meant to be a straightforward introduction to a vampire who will become a secondary antagonist later on.

In terms of strict narrative action, all that happens is that we get to watch the evil bloodsucker as he flies through the night over the sleeping small town, and lands at his castle hideaway.  The image contained in that description is such an old cliche it's practically a Halloween decoration at this point.  Whether or not that was true when it came time for Kerouac to set the scene down on paper, what's pretty clear is that the old Roadie seems to have realized two things.  The first was that cliche or no, he liked that hoary old Gothic image.  The second is that he clearly saw it as an opportunity to try what amounts to an extended experiment in prose making.  It explains the presences of these wild moments of Gonzo fragmentation that strings the narrative together in brief bursts of imagistic prose, which then has a great deal of tongue-in-cheek humor layered on top of it, such as the sudden appearance of Carl Sandburg as a description of the novel's title character.  This sense of deliberate playfulness on the author's part extends all the way to how Kerouac chooses to handle the dialogue exchanges between cast members.  For instance, here's the first exchange of words Condu has in the story with another character.

"‘My dear, unemotional as I allegedly may be I’m sure the antics of the gnome girls don’t rival yours when old Sugar Pudding comes home.’ ‘Why Count,’ tinkles Odessa the slave girl (Contessa in a camp) ‘how you do manage to be vivacious before evening blood — Raouls only now mixing the Divers —’ (Divers of Odds & Ends). ‘Is he with his old Toff in the belfry, meaning of course Mrs Wizard Nittlingen damn blast her thorny old frap.’ ‘I guess so —(23)’.  I'll have to confess, even I'm still tryin to wrap my head around the full implication of whatever the fuck all that just was.  What I can tell you for certain is that it just goes on like this once the supernatural elements start to make themselves known.  The whole thing appears to be an example of deliberate narrative strategy on the author's part, in contrast to writers like Matheson, where the prose is in sparse subordination to no more than what the scene demands. By contrast, for every seemingly straightforward bit of prose, such as this: "The door of the great Castle is closed on the night. Only supernatural eyes now can see the figure in the rainy capes paddling across the river (reconnoitering those blown shrouds of fogs, — so sincere (27)".  We then get dialogue exchanges such as the one one between the main villain, the Wizard Faustus and his wife.

"‘Faustus!’ cries his wife from the bath, ‘what are you doing up so late! Stop fiddling with your desk papers and pen quills in the middle of the night, come to bed, the mist is on the air of night lamps, a dew’ll come to rest your fevered brow at morning, — you'll lie swaddled in sweet sleep like a lambikin — I'll hold you in my old snow-white arms — and all you do’s sit there dreaming —’ ‘Of Snakes! of Snakes!’ answers the Master of Earthly Evil — sneering at his own wife...“Would I’d never seen your old fink face and married you — to sit around in bleak castles all my life, for varmints in the dirt! ‘Flap up you old sot and drink your stinking brandignac and conyoles, fit me an idea for chat, drive me not mad with your fawter toddle in a gloom . . . you with your pendant flesh combs and bawd spots — picking your powderies in a nair — flam off, frish frowse, I want peace to Scholarize my Snakes — let me Baroque be (49)'.  The only bit of helpful commentary the author provides us with for this goes no further than, "By this time the old lady is asleep (ibid)".  Come to think of it, I'm not even sure I've ever heard of such things as a dommerfall.  Nor could I tell you for the life of me what a "nair" is.  You might as well try to categorize and define a Bandersnatch, because that's the level of wordplay involved here.

Kerouac seems determined to hold true to this Lewis Carrollian dream logic in the presentation of his Urban Fantasy, and I'm at a loss to explain all of it.  What I can tell for certain is what specific Inspirations influenced the making of this strange crazy-quilt story.  It stems from the one artistic influence that didn't originate in a thorough self-grounding in the classics.  Rather than having its roots in the Ivory Tower, the main plot threads of Doctor Sax can be found in the American Pulp Fiction tradition.  In particular, it all comes from the author's grounding in the comic books and cheap dime store magazines that he used to pour through as a little boy.  The title character of the novel seems to have had one major Inspiration, in particular.  This came in the form of a pulp crimefighter known only as The Shadow.  Here is where I'll have to turn part of the commentary over to critic Erik Mortenson, and his essay What the Shadow Knows.  That's because he helps provide a lot of the background info on the kind of popular literary context that went into shaping Kerouac's peculiar blend of Urban Fantasy.

Mortenson writes: "During the Depression era of the 1 930s and the war years of the 1 940s, mil lions of Americans sought escape from the tumultuous times in pulp magazines, comic books, and radio programs. In the face of mob violence, joblessness, war, and social upheaval, masked crusaders provided a much needed source of security where good triumphed over evil and wrongs were made right. Heroes such as Doc Savage, the Flash, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Captain America, and Superman were always there to save the day, making the world seem fair and in order. This imaginative world not only was an escape from less cheery realities but also ended up providing nostalgic memories of childhood for many writers of the early Cold War (99)".  The pre-comic book precursor figure of the Shadow seems to have fulfilled this function for Kerouac, rather than usual roster of DC Comics heroes gallery.  Mortenson continues: "The Shadow, who began life in a 1931 pulp magazine but eventually crossed over into radio, was an ambiguous sort of crime fighter.  He was called "the Shadow" because he moved undetected in these dark spaces, his name provided a hint to his divided character. 

"Although he clearly defended the interests of the average citizen, the Shadow also satisfied the demand for a vigilante justice. His diabolical laughter is perhaps the best sign of his ambiguity. One assumes that it is directed at his adversaries, but its vengeful and spiteful nature strikes fear into victims, as well as victimizers. He was a tour guide to the underworld, providing his fans with a taste of the shady, clandestine lives of the criminals.  Relishing his  role, the Shadow went beyond the simple exploits of a superhero like Super man, and even those he saved were not sure whether they would like to come across him on a dark night in a strange alley (99-100)".  "Although the pulps and the radio both shared the Shadow, the character manifested differently in each. In the pulps, the Shadow is part hardboiled detective and part mysterious avenger in equal turns. Lamont Cranston, his alter ego, is the same man about town as in the radio programs and resorts to the same type of deduction to solve his cases. But the pulp Shadow draws heavily on the detective novels of the period. He is tough, streetwise, and lives by his own code of vigilante justice outside the law. The pulp Shadow also has a stable of helpers (along with several alter egos) to do his bidding. He and his gang battle villains in streets and alleyways until the Shadow ends victorious, with the evildoers either dead or behind bars. The illustrations for the pulps likewise point to the influence of the hardboiled genre on Walter Gibson's writing.

"The stark contrasts of light and darkness are stylistically similar to film noir, a genre that borrowed extensively from the novels of Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and Raymond Chandler. The pulp Shadow fits nicely into a type of fiction that flourished in the 1930s and 1940s - the antihero who is beholden to his own code of ethics. What set the pulp Shadow apart from his hardboiled counterparts is what Gibson called his "mysterioso" side. In an interview with Ann Charters, Gibson remarked that he "didn't want to go into fantasy or science fiction" with his  character but rather wanted to create a "mysterious man who comes out of the dark." This mysterious aspect occurs repeatedly in the pulp magazines and is ultimately responsible for creating a character that exists on the border between tough vigilante and superhuman crime fighter. The Shadow's strangeness could be heard in his laugh. In "The Red Blot," the narrator declares that "a whispering laugh - an uncanny announcement of a sinister presence - this betokened the arrival of The Shadow." In another novel, his laugh is described as "mocking," "merciless," and filled with "hollow mirth." Terms like "uncanny presence" and the name "the Shadow" reinforce the sort of mysterioso atmosphere that Gibson created in his work. The Shadow unsettles as well as protects (100-102)".

Perhaps its this inherent dichotomy which became encoded into the Shadow as a baseline standard that explains the heady mixture of fear and reverence with which young Jackie Duluoz first approaches the book's title character.  For Kerouac's semi-autobiographical persona, Doctor Sax is a creature of the night whose appearance and moral compass is always walking an uneasy tightrope between hero and horror for the first half of the action.  It isn't until the latter pages of the novel, when the supernatural happenings around the lad's hometown become too pronounced for everyone but him to ignore that he finally decides to try and approach the shadowy Doctor Sax, and find out what this child of the night can tell him about what's really going on, and of where he stands in all of this.  In the author's real life, Doctor Sax's radio and pulp magazine Inspiration seems to have functioned as nothing more than a straightforward Inspiration to be admired, and maybe even emulated.  The real life young Kerouac seems to have approached the character of the Shadow with the same sort of reverence that most DC Comics fans still approach the Dark Knight even today.  Here is how Mortenson explains it all.

"Doctor Sax owes its existence to the Shadow. Kerouac was an avid fan of the crime fighter, collecting issues of The Shadow Magazine and spending hours perusing them in his room. The autobiographically-based protagonist Jackie Duluoz is also a fan, and there is much reading and trading of the magazines among his friends throughout the novel. Kerouac even considered titling his work after his favorite boyhood character. In a May 1952 letter to Allen Ginsberg, Kerouac states, "I have 'Doctor Sax' ready to go now ... or 'The Shadow of Doctor Sax,' I'll simply blow on the vision of the Shadow in my 13th and 14th years on Sarah- Ave. Lowell."35 The character of Doctor Sax is an amalgam in the novel, but by far the largest inspiration for Doctor Sax, both character and novel, was the Shadow (107)".  In her own essay on the book, "True Story" Novels as Autobiography, Ann Charters is able to elaborate on the biographical detail of how the Shadow influenced Kerouac as an embryonic young artist.  

"Kerouac took different literary models for several of the books, depending on his memory of the emotional mood of the period he was writing about. As an experimental writer he often compared himself to Marcel Proust and James Joyce, but the literary models he actually used were closer to home. For example, in Visions of Gerard he followed the narrative pattern of books chronicling the lives of the saints popular in the deeply religious Catholic community of French- Canadian immigrants into which he was born in Lowell. He gave Doctor Sax the subtitle Faust Part Three, but he was less influenced by Goethe’s classic than by the pulps he devoured as a schoolboy, in which the mythic forces of good triumph over the forces of evil. Kerouac wrote Doctor Sax to explore the world of his boyhood, when his imagination was stimulated by the dime magazines. He bought his copies of The Shadow in a neighborhood candy store in Lowell owned by a French Canadian proprietor named Destouches, whom Kerouac remembered as "the sickliest man in the world. ... an old dissipate, I can’t tell what kick, drug, drunk, illness, elephantiasis or whatall he had." (15) Kerouac’s description of the process of buying the magazines every week from the man he called "Old Leper," and sharing the copies with his boyhood friends Zap and Gene, gave a sense of his immersion in the world of pulp fiction.

"As Kerouac recalled, every other Friday after school he rushed home from the candy store with his new issue of The Shadow magazine and spent the evening in his bedroom "reading with cat and candy bar. That’s where all these things were born." (43) Even as a boy, he observed a ritual about reading his favorite pulps: "On Saturday night I was settling down alone in the house with magazines, reading Doc Savage or the Phantom Detective with his masky rainy night - The Shadow Magazine saved for Friday nights, Saturday morning was always the world of gold and rich sunlight (100-101)".  Charters then does a surprisingly good job of describing the atmosphere of what it must have been like for Kerouac to grow up immersed in the world of such Pulp Fiction Fiction Adventures, the literary precursors to the exploits of figures like Indiana Jones, by recalling what it was like for her, as a little girl, to share in this same popular fiction milieu.  

"Like most imaginative children, Kerouac invented games so that he could pretend to be the heroes and villains he read about. When I was ten, Kerouac’s age at the beginning of Doctor Sax, I have vivid memories of sneaking away from my home in the Bridgeport projects to escape into the nearby Connecticut woods after school in order to play Robin Hood. I told myself I was really in Sherwood Forest and assumed all the roles - my least favorite was Maid Marion - jumping creeks on imaginary horses and stripping leaves off sticks to engage in frenzied swordfights against the wicked King’s soldiers. My models were images from the movie version of Robin Hood starring Errol Flynn, and illustrations from books I borrowed from the neighborhood library (101)".  Compare this to Steve Turner's description in his illustrated biography Angelheaded Hipster, of a snapshot of the artist as a young man playing with his childhood friends.  "Jack began to create his own adventures involving The Shadow, and . with Pete and Mike Houde he would take to the streets with a cape draped across his shoulders to act out crime-busting fantasies- occasionally scaring local residents with their high-pitched screams as they hid behind hedges and climbed up tall trees.  It was out of these fantasies that Jack created the characters Dr Sax and Count Condu, representations of his haunted childhood: 'I first saw (Dr Sax) in his earlier lineaments in the early Catholic childhood of Centralville. ' Dr Sax embodied Jack's confusion over death and religion (37-38)".

Assembling all these pieces of background knowledge together allows us to construct a picture puzzle which ultimately shows that for all of the praise now heaped upon his name by the Ivied Halls of Academe, there is perhaps always going to be this sense of Kerouac as a writer who will always have at least one foot firmly planted in the field of popular fiction.  It'll probably never overshadow his reputation as a Beat Poet and author, or as one of the founders of the later Counterculture.  However, it does offer up, not so much an alternative image of the writer's artistry.  It's just that it highlights an overlooked aspect of his work that was always there to begin with.  It has the somehow endearing result that it's now possible to speak of the author of On the Road as sharing the same artistic contexts and enthusiasms as guys like Spielberg and George Lucas.  It even adds a certain amount of ironic yet fitting resonance to know that Joe Dante sort of incorporated Kerouac into his unjustly overlooked 1996 masterpiece Matinee, in the form of a greaser who aspire to write poetry in the vein of Kerouac and Ginsberg.  The punchline being that this guy is too dumb and violent to have any clear idea of what all those works are about.  It means Kerouac now gets a chance to take his place beside all the fun pulp movies and novels that later artists like Dante would use in their own movies further on up the road.

Conclusion: A Crazy Yet Fascinating Wild Ride!

That still leaves the question of how good is the story that Kerouac's written?  Well, I'll be honest.  There were a number of times when I couldn't help laughing my ass off at what I was hearing.  I was listening to an audio drama adaptation of Kerouac's book you'll recall.  One that was taken straight from an unsolicited script the author made himself.  In 2003, in honor of the Beat Founder's birthday, an enterprising fan by the name of Jim Sampas took it upon himself to try and see if he could realize Sal Paradise's unmet dream, and bring the aborted movie script to life in at least some dramatic format.  The medium of radio dramatization turned out to be the best arrangement he could find for a story like this, and I think that makes a good amount of sense.  There are some stories out there that are worthy of at least an attempt at dramatic performance, and yet whose quirky quality means they'll never get so much as within shouting distance of a shot at life on the big screen.  Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland is a good example of this.  It's got to be telling that no one has ever managed to completely capture the dreamlike atmosphere of the original novel.  I am also going to be controversial here and maintain that, despite their respective box-office success, the same holds true for LOTR and the Dune series.  These are all example of classic texts whose creative density will have to forever defy the captured image.

Kerouac's Doctor Sax belongs to this same select category of unfilmable texts, and this one is an example where the rule applies in spades.  It's clear from the language alone that while the action being narrated is meant to take place in a Main Street USA type setting, the way the author fills in his blank canvas is to take his real life hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts, and twist the whole thing into a warped, cartoon funhouse mirror maze.  It's the same approach that Ken Kesey uses for the mental ward stage of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, or that Hunter S. Thompson applied to what is otherwise a wasted weekend in the real Las Vegas.  Everything natural is turned into this weird and colorful prop in a Surrealist painting, with hints of the typical tie-dyed colors of the later Counterculture already peaking out at the fringes of the author's canvas.  Kerouac paints his funhouse setting in much kinder and gentler shades than anything Thompson ever did, yet it's clear the final result was always going to be too far out there for the mainstream cinemaplex.  And yet, the story is little more than a well told, Coming-of-Age, Urban Fantasy at its core.  It may be possible to wish that the author had painted his canvas in more understandable, down-to-earth terms, yet that would have meant going against what he stood for.

Kerouac was nothing less than serious when he decided that the buttoned-down world into which he was born had become too stifled and constricting to the kind of life he was envisioning for himself.  This sense of the need to break the confinement (to Shake the Cage, as one old 60s term has it) also extended to the way fiction was written.  He remained nothing less than determined to prove that it was possible to tell a story in a way that was outside of the norm, and it's a self-imposed stricture he seems to have held true to for the rest of his career.  What I've learned from studying this aspect of the artist's mind is that it tells me a lot about how Kerouac's name can both survive as a Counterculture hero, and still be regarded as more of an underground phenomenon at the same time.  It's not that the values he espoused weren't understandable.  On the contrary, as Robert Calonne makes clear, the vast majority of the world's populace has come to embrace the quintessentially Democratic Humanism that lies at the heart of the Beat Movement.  It's just I think it's telling that it took the advent of guys like Bob Dylan and Ken Kesey, films like The Graduate, and groups like the Beatles to help translate all of those graspable ideas behind Kerouac's otherwise unapologetic Jazz inflected prose into the mainstream.

The final result means that we're dealing with one of those niche type stories here.  It's possible for me to give this work a passing grade, yet I'm also aware that in doing so, it still won't translate into any kind of mass-market appeal.  We're not talking about the type of story that will be able to generate any kind of merchandisable toy line, or stuff like that.  This is an example of the writer making his efforts as deliberately anti-commercial as they come, while still managing to remember that it's the first and last job of all artists to be entertaining.  This is something I was able to glean from the process of my reactions to Sampas' radio adaptation, and how they shifted and changed as things went along.  I started out like I'm sure most listeners would, not quite sure if what I was hearing was meant to be some kind of a joke, and unsure where any of the plot was headed toward.  The strange sort of punchline is that as things went on, it's as if the pieces of the puzzle were beginning to fall into place.  The language remained gnomic and obscure, yet it was also decipherable enough to the point that I could pick up on what the plot points were, and the more this went on, the more invested I became.  At last, when we got to the novel's big finale, I might have still been laughing, yet this time it was a laughter born of understanding, thus turning the guffaws into a form of well impressed applause.  I'd discovered that Kerouac meant this book as a form of literary parody mixed in with affectionate pulp fiction homage.

There are moments where it's clear the author is taking the purple prose cliches from some of the worst specimens that the pulp magazine industry of his day had to offer, and finding all these interesting sort of ways for elevating dreck into art.  The way he pulled this off is the realization that bad art can be given a certain level of respectability if it's treated in the right humorous vein, and that's what Ol' Travelin' Jack was up to here.  Even if it turns out that comedy is one of the mainsprings of this story, that's not to say that Kerouac didn't write with a serious intent in mind.  This becomes crystal clear during the drama's third act, where Doctor Sax makes his always lingering presence known to Jackie Duluoz, and the two of them team up to try and save the town, and possibly the world.  Before we get to the underlying themes of the novel, it helps to pause and address one potential criticism that can be levelled against the writing in these moments.  For the first two acts, the plot almost sounds like two stories happening together on separate yet tandem tracks.  The first part belongs to the Coming-of-Age narrative, with scenes of young Jackie going about his days in something akin to The Wonder Years, yet with a darker edge to it.  The other track is the threat supernatural peril, and Doctor Sax's attempts to counteract it.

It isn't until somewhere in the midpoint of the both the radio play and its original, literary source material that these two narrative threads start to converge and weave together.  If there's any spot at which it's possible that some audiences might wish to file a complaint, then it rests in how Kerouac tries to meld these two plotlines into one.  I can see how there may be some who will complain that the writer makes the mistake of keeping the two narrative threads separate for most of the action.  That he doesn't do enough to make each of the story's two main elements feel integral to each other.  Instead, what seems to happen is that Jackie just takes a few glances around, becomes aware of all the weirder than usual shit that's going down around town, and so the way it comes to a head is that the kid just goes out for a stroll one night, manages to spot Doctor Sax, and decides to approach him.  Whereupon the title character asks if Jackie knows him?  To which the protagonist replies that, yes, he does.  Sax then offers Duluoz the chance to come along and fight evildoers with him, to which the boy agrees, and just like that, all the previous plotlines are resolved, and this somehow kicks off the final conflict of the book.  This is the most common complaint I expect others to make, aside from the author's style.

In terms of how Kerouac uses the language in his book, that was all his call long ago, and he stuck to it.  The good news is that all the wordplay kookery doesn't get in the way of the narrative, which is the real point of any novel, radio play, or film.  As for how Kerouac brings the two plot threads together, the good news is that it's a lot of more natural and less haphazard than just a surface glance reveals.  The narrator flat out tells us right from the get-go that he first spotted Doctor Sax lingering in the shadows in the wake of his older brother's passing.  One possible interpretation of this statement is that it was this early encounter with death at such a young age was enough to grant Jackie something akin to a pre-school version of second sight.  That somehow his brother's death was able to unlock a third eye in his mind, and because it all happened when he was barely four years old, he was able to embrace this newfound aspect of his reality with the kind of fairy tale simplicity that even children in real life seem to rely on.  There is also the opposing statement in the first sentence that the now grown-up narrator is recalling his childhood exploits in a dream.  Which means we're reading a dream journal of sorts, in which the major life lessons that the adult Duluoz learned long ago as a boy are being funneled through the REM lens of the favorite comics, books, films, and radio programs that he liked as a Lowell youth.

It means what we're dealing with is something that contains autobiographical elements of the main character's past, yet it's seen through the lens of the kind of Gothic Fantasy Mysteries he used to like before he ever knew anything about growing up.  In a way, that could almost be spoken of as the point of the whole novel.  It's something that can be seen in the function that the title character performs as the plot goes on.  Doctor Sax is implied to start out as the protagonist's fear of all the dark places of wherever he happens to be at, where even the strongest light can't seem to banish all of the shadows.  Once again, this is brought on by the death of the narrator's brother.  An alternate implication being that Sax is something of a figment of the protagonist's overheated and panicked Imagination.  A metaphorical manifestation of the world becoming a threatening place when he learns how those closest to him can be snatched away from him all of a sudden, without warning.  It implies that the earliest incarnation of Sax was just the thing that haunted his nightmares.  As Jackie grows older, however, like a lot of kids, he begins to gain a certain fascination about the things that scare him the most.  When he first begins to pick up on the adventures of the Shadow, both on the radio and in comic books, Jackie begins to imagine Sax as the mysterious, invisible crime fighter of his favorite childhood fantasies.

The implication of these scenes is that at some point, the main lead starts to see the shadow creature of his dreams less as a horror, and more like a comforting sort of hero.  Someone who is able to understand what it's like to live with the particular fears and worries that the rest of the grown-ups just never seem to understand.  This seems to be the throughline that the narrative has to work with, and so it begins to build upon this basis, like a foundation being laid one brick at a time.  From those first few moments of fear that results from a direct and clearly traumatic experience with mortality, a certain logic begins to grow out of each fantastical element that the protagonist either hears about, or glimpses out of the corner of his eye.  The reader is allowed to watch Jackie putting the pieces of the puzzle he's being presented with together to the point where he begins to understand that there's a larger implication to the fantastical plot points that happen around him.  We're meant to follow along as the protagonist comes to understand Sax and the nature of his exploits.  It all reaches a point where by the time Jackie finally encounters Sax in person for the real first time, he's seems to have arrived at an understanding of sorts.

He's seen enough weird stuff, and had enough experience of all the little hypocrisies and shams that the adult world like to place on the shoulders of little kids, so that when the third act commences, it does so with a proper sense of purpose.  Jackie went out for a late night walk with the express purpose of hoping to meet Doctor Sax, partly in the hope of getting some answers to all the supernatural shenanigans that have been going on, yet also on the chance that the good Doctor can provide him with the hope of hanging to at least some of the wonder that seems to hang over perceptions of childhood.  It's here, in the journey Sax takes Jackie on, that Kerouac doesn't hold back on the real main themes of his work.  It comes about in a scene where Doctor Sax proceeds to show Jackie a panoramic outline of his little hometown, and all the people who live in it.  He then tells the novel's child protagonist that one day soon, the adult world will "make keen misery" out of the youth that "doth pursue his legends".  He tells Jack that growing up "will disgust your mind in time...You'll come to rages you never dreamed (201)".

When Jackie asks, "Me, why? (ibid)", Doctor Sax lays out what amounts to little more than a diagnosis of everything that Kerouac felt was wrong and out of joint with the times he was living in.  "You’ll come to when you lean your face over the nose will fall with it — that is known as death. You’ll come to angular rages and lonely romages among Beast of Day in hot glary circumstances made grit by the hour of the clock — that is known as Civilization. You'll roll your feet together in the tense befuddles of ten thousand evenings in company in the parlor, in the pad — that is known as, ah, socializing. You’ll grow numb all over from inner paralytic thoughts, and bad chairs, — that is known as Solitude. You’ll inch along the ground on the day of your death and be pursued by the Editorial Cartoon Russian Bear with a knife, and in his bear hug he will poignard you in the reddy blood back to gleam in the pale Siberian sun — that is known as nightmares. You'll look at a wall of blank flesh and fritter to explain yourself — that is known as Love. The flesh of your head will recede from the bone, leaving the bulldog Determination pointing thru the pique-jaw tremulo jaw bone point — in other words, you’ll slobber over your morning egg cup - that is known as old age, for which they have benefits.

"Bye and bye you'll rise to the sun and propel your mean bones hard and sure to huge labors, and great steaming dinners, and spit your pits out, aching cocklove nights in cobweb moons, the mist of tired dust at evening, the corn, the silk, the moon, the rail — that is known as Maturity — but you’ll never be as happy as you are now in your quiltish innocent book-devouring boyhood immortal night (201-202)’.  A brief unpacking of this monologue reveals the following.  The style is and isn't awkward at the same time.  The writer knows what's he's doing here.  It can therefore be called good in an objective sense.  It will never catch on with mainstream sensibilities, however.  With that said, it is decipherable.  Once it's all been decoded, what's left revealed is a picture of modern life as a soul crushing piece of machinery.  It's what Ken Kesey describes in his best work as "The Combine", the systems that so-called "adults" put in place because they think it is for their benefit, when all it does is grind them back into the dirt from which they emerged with even greater efficiency.  In that moment, Kerouac's semi- autobiographical alter-ego has come to the same realization articulated by Rush lyricist and drummer Neil Peart.  "Any escape might help to smooth/The unattractive truth/But the suburbs have no charms to soothe/The restless dreams of youth (web)".  Yet even this is just the first part of a larger lesson.  

In the final analysis, it seems that all Kerouac has done here is to verify Theodore Roszak's claim that the social upheavals of the 50s and 60s has its origins in the kind of revolt first pioneered long ago by the likes of William Blake and the Romantic Poets.  What Roszak said of Blake in Where the Wasteland Ends is more or less true also of Kerouac.  Books like Doctor Sax count as part of an "effort...to redesign the mindscape of an alienated culture (xxi)".  To try and shake the cage that the American way of life was being placed into.  Part of this goal included, as Calonne says, the task of meeting the demands of the Civil Rights of racial and sexual minorities; to see just how far this Country was willing to extends the idea of human dignity.  It bears repeating, beneath all the wordplay pyrotechnics, it turns out there's a very understandable, at times even admirable set of facts at the heart of these writings.  It's just that Kerouac's stated plan of trying to break the mold of the contemporary novelistic style is what keeps him from being a household name on the same level of John Lennon or Bob Dylan.  He may have had Lennon's skill at taking the concepts behind the Counterculture and giving them just the right language that the person on the street could understand, yet he just never bothered to go that route.

He also seems to have decided against Dylan's strategy of finding a happy middle ground between the gnomic and the explicable, where every line is somehow able to walk that skillful tightrope between being highly allusive and metaphorical, while also somehow allowing its fundamental meaning to remain graspable enough so that it doesn't remain a mere underground phenomenon.  Kerouac also seems not to have bothered with an understanding that Dylan always seems to have had, and which he allowed to bolster every lyric he's ever written.  Bobby Zimmerman always seems to have possessed the novelist's understanding that even poetry has to have a certain catchy turn of phrase with the ability to charm the audience if it wants to succeed on a mass level.  It's the reason songs like All Along the Watchtower are still recalled to this very day, while a book like Doctor Sax maintains its own level of obscurity.  The natural enough conclusion, then, seems to be twofold.  The first is that it's the author's style which accounts for a great deal of his underground, as opposed to any mainstream reputation.  It's also appears certain that this was a risk Kerouac was not just willing, but also determined to take on.

He made a clear choice to write his work in such a way as to make it all one great challenge to the establishment.  What this meant in practice is conjuring up a new form of prose that has the ongoing, lilting qualities of Jazz music, while also maintaining a baseline of narrative comprehensibility.  It means the prose is his biggest weakness, while also being his greatest strength at the same time.  I didn't know such a thing was possible until I hunkered down to get as a good a read as possible on Kerouac's writing.  If it isn't considered acceptable by our common standards, it's still not enough for me to label it all as an example of a bad style.  It's just sui generis, in the long run.  And the good news about it is that throughout it all, Kerouac seems to have kept a firm grasp on the most vital quality essential for any novelist.  He made sure that the language never got in the way of the actual story he had to tell.  It's what allows the narrative proper of Doctor Sax to shine through with its own unique voice.  What we're left with in the final analysis is an example of of the Urban Fantasy novel that's being played in a key that I don't think even the most encyclopedic historians of the Fantastic genres have ever noticed.

The most interesting thing about this story to me is how it's a combination of a familiar setup existing in a somewhat unexpected milieu.  Kerouac shares the same reputation as the rest of the Beat Poets in being perceived as this chronicler of the vagaries of daily American life, and of our continuous attempts to find a better way of, in Thoreau's terms, living authentically.  Part of the purpose of the Beat Prose is to use the language as a means of allowing the reader to arrive at the possibility of any authentic perception which would shake us awake to a better way of living our lives.  It may be possible to speak of this strategy as a form of reaching for a kind of ecstatic experience, yet this still results in the Beats being seen as these essentially down-to-earth explorers of the everyday.  What a book like Doctor Sax does is to make us aware of the fact that the Beats were not only aware of the genres of Fantasy, Sci-Fi, and Horror.  It proves that they were also capable of appreciating its artistic qualities, and that they weren't afraid to utilize it if the right idea came along.  It goes a long way toward demolishing the kind of Ivory Tower snobbery that has been allowed to accumulate around this group of writers.  It makes us aware that they tended to like the same sort of fantastical adventures the rest of us have liked.

In terms of its own performance, Kerouac's Urban Fantasy is a wild and intriguing amalgamation of the familiar and the novel.  We've read or watched this kind of story before.  It's a clear example of the artist working with a familiar format.  I'm just not so sure we've ever seen so many unfamiliar notes played out on such a well known narrative pattern.  It's a story that centers around a mundane life coming into contact and conflict with a supernatural reality, yet it's not just the fact that Kerouac injects a lot of fantastical creatures and settings into his plot.  It's that in doing so, he seems to be aiming for a lot of the myths less trafficked when it comes to this type of Fantastic fable.  He can be seen drawing upon concepts like Norse mythology for the idea of the Great World Snake.  Yet in addition to these familiar tropes, he also tosses in concepts like alchemy, and Eastern philosophical thought, and the remarkable thing is that he employs this hodge-podge, throw it at the wall and see what sticks approach, and yet it never once feels crowded and loose fitting.  Somehow, he keeps all these off-the-wall plates spinning all at once, and never manages to drop any of them.  This is a story that works as both a slow-burn buildup to the grand finale, while also being maintaining this crazy-quilt approach that keeps the reader riveted.

It seems like what we've got on our hands here is one of those niche Fantasy novels, one that's able to keep a foot planted in two genres.  It's the kind of book that probably belongs on the same shelf reserved for those quality Fantasy books that, while undeniably good, are still never able to capture the public Imagination in the same way that Lord of the Rings, or Something Wicked This Way Comes have been able to do.  Instead, it's more along the lines of Lud in the Mist, Gormenghast, The House on the Borderland, and perhaps the short stories of Clark Ashton-Smith.  They're all good in their own unique ways, and yet its a uniqueness that never caught on with the mainstream.  The other shelf it belongs on, that of the writings of the Beat authors, kind of further serves to cement the novel's cult status.  We're dealing with a work that's very much in the same vein as Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, it's a great story that most people will only gravitate towards if you can find a good modern prose translation that no longer asks too much of its readers.  I'm willing enough to champion the risks Kerouac took in penning this story of his, however.  I guess I'm just one of those readers who doesn't mind being challenged by the stories I read or watch.  I came away with the sense that I've had a good challenge in pouring through this particular novel.  Kerouac will perhaps always be best remembered for On the Road, yet the story of Doctor Sax has to count as one of those little hidden gems that deserved to be rediscovered.