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pulsive, as partial and erratic as his view of women was deplorable.
Yet he seemed in touch with certain hidden vitalities of the future,
verities beyond the ken of the middle class, like his warm response to
black Americans that Eldridge Cleaver found so remarkable in
Soul On
Ice,
or his involvement wirth the Buddhist notions that figure so signifi–
cantly in his work. Like Neal Cassady in conversation, Kerouac had
the gift of impromptu. Cassady's talent was in tirade, the tradition of
the nightclub comic best exemplified by Lenny Bruce, the Jeremiah of
the Dionysian outsider in ecstatic rout among the ashes of civilization.
Kerouac, too, could write out of such abrupt and ungovernable im–
pulses, but they were always tempered by the harmonies of his more
meditative fancies, his essentially devotional sensibility.
If
the Cassady
legend does become the lasting stuff of myth, it will be due largely to
this generous and fiery book, published over a decade afrter the fact of
writing, but all the more meaningful now that the bohemian releases
once so privately explored have become so much more accepted and
widespread.
"An amazing example of
scholarship without dullness,
of objectivity and love
for the
subject matter."
-Herbert
Marcuse
John
Tytell
