304
JOHN TYTElL
Huncke occupied as a place of sinister rendezvous and joyous release.
Cassady describes Burroughs's life with Joan Adams and Huncke, in
1947 in New Waverly, Texas, where he and Ginsberg visited, and how he
drove Burroughs and Huncke back to New York City in a jeep full of
mason jars of marijuana that Burroughs had harvested. Cassady con–
jectures on how Burroughs, an expel1t marksman constantly shooting
target practice in New Waverly, fatally shot his wife Joan through the
head in Mexico the following year. These events are related in a manner
that antioipated Pop realism with a graphic and relentlessly obsessive
concentration on the ordinary; the catalyst is R,imbaud's aim of
de–
reglement des sens,
and when Kerouac passes out, Cassady's wife ap–
pears and the inexhaustible Cassady oontinues like an overflowing dam,
a model of the blocked writer with a story to tell and the ability to re–
call it w1thout the patience to set it down. His premise is that a story
can only be told once
to
achieve its fullest impact, and this may well be
the source of Kerouac's own publicized bias against revision, a reminder
of how close the Beats are to the oral tradition and the improvisationary
spirit of the blues. The real impunity of the tape follows from Cassady's
premise of immediacy as it tries to violate
the
barriers between art and
life.
It
doesn't succeed at all! Ironically, the tape almost becomes the
justification of literary enterprise, revealing the inadequacies of natural
speech when juxtaposed to the more poetic resources of the writer, sug–
gesting also in the boring bareness of its antistyle that ,the genuinely
"unspeakable visions of the indiV'idual" are the concern of art, and only
the subject of life. Despite the stimulation of drugs, the ,talk is grounded
in
inhibition, never soaring or even seal1ing, without ,the Zen zaniness
of Kerouac's own more sointillating imitations of the tape where again
craft courts the illusion of spontaneity with greater grace and deftness
than ,the actual can provide. Curiously, despite their early fears of a
bugged universe where no man could speak freely, Burroughs, Kerouac,
and Ginsberg have all used tape recorders in their work, anticipating by
light years the more recent innovations caused by the use of tapes
in
literary works by John Bal1th and others.
Jack Kerouac is right now our most misunderstood and underesti–
mated writer. Like Henry Miller he was uninterested in the ideal of
"literary" perfection or in the orderly fiotion of rus time, believing that
even seemingly immutable tastes could change. His writing was always
excessive, disorderly, and unbalanced because he responded to entirely
different imaginative priorities than most writers of his time, not
be–
cause he was unable to compose in the conventional mode of
his
first
novell
The Town and the
City.
His attitudes were often raw and im-
