Book review #13: Desolation Peak

Rock of a more literal kind concerns us here: the mountainous outcrop on which Kerouac endured an eight-week stay in the magnificent yet far from hospitable north western altitudes of the US

Jack Kerouac: Desolation Peak Collected Writings, edited by Charles Shuttleworth (Sal Paradise Press/Rare Bird, 2022)

I WAS BORN on July 19th, 1956, in the epicentre of the northern English city of Manchester, but that is a mere aside. At that moment, Beat writer Jack Kerouac was ensconced on the massive craggy hump of Desolation Peak, spending a two-month summer all alone on forest fire watch in the remote North Cascades on the edge of the US-Canadian border.

Kerouac’s voluntary isolation – he was paid a fairly paltry sum for his efforts at a time when the hardly-recognised novelist was still cripplingly poor – has emerged as a significant passage in his chequered life story, the source of key material in three of his books and now, we discover, via this carefully curated new collection, a fertile springboard for tens of thousands of other written words.

For, however the novelist’s hermit-like escape to this faraway Washington State location has been previously characterised, we are now aware via Charles Shuttleworth’s keenly focused anthology of journals and stories, articles and poems from this period that Kerouac’s time away from civilisation was far from artistically unproductive.

Pictured above: The cover of Desolation Peak

The actual experience in a hilltop cabin scouring the densely wooded horizon for phantom flames might not have been the pleasure and joy that Kerouac had hoped for – in fact, it seems as if this curious sojourn was generally quite the opposite of that for our hero – but the monk-ish retreat, once he had learnt to live with the pesky distractions of mice and mosquitoes. provided him with a motivation to pursue various creative ideas.

Yet, we might also ask, how successful ultimately were those explorations? In short, very on one level: three of Kerouac’s most appreciated texts grew out of this long summer – a significant section of The Dharma Bums; the first part of Desolation Angels; and a travelogue feature re-born as part of the compilation Lonesome Traveller.

However, for the Beat follower who wants to dig deeper than the mere headline titles that gave the prolific novelist broad exposure and often acclaim, there is so much more here that Shuttleworth shares through his transcriptions and annotations, explanations and footnotes, not to mention a series of appealing photographs depicting actual pages of notes, images of the stunning landscape and so on.

So, what is present beyond an extensive journal, penned between June 18th and September 26th of that year and published here in full? Well, there are the opening chapters of a novel, Ozone Park, conceived in the ‘Duluoz Legend’ sequence and focusing on his parents’ life 1943-49; a planned sequel to The Town and the City called The Martin Family; a cycle of poems headed Desolation Blues; a collection of brief haikus gathered under the title Desolation Pops; and the reworking of a Buddhist scriptural guide The Diamondcutter of Perfect Knowing.

Pictured above: The cover of the Desolation journal

And what became of those fictional prose works specifically? In short, Ozone Park was never further pursued, which is a shame because Kerouac’s own literary autobiography, though voluminous, still has some holes in it, and The Martin Family venture was ultimately abandoned, too. Further development of the latter project would have been particularly valued as his epic debut novel The Town and the City lost around half of its 1,000 pages in the editing process before its eventual publication in 1950.

But this exercise is about more than just placing mislaid fragments in the public domain: Shuttleworth makes commendable attempts to understand the psychology of the author by close analysis of Kerouac’s frequently painful self-examination and useful reflection on the man’s artistic approaches, exploring the shifting methodology of a unique literary voice.

Should this striving, yet frustrated, creative – still off the establishment’s radar and well out of range of the mainstream media’s periscope – chase his innovative dreams as radical wordsmith or utilise more conventional forms of expression to attract publishers to his oeuvre? Should his main toolkit be free-rolling spontaneous prose or, instead, a more digestible deliberate prose? Kerouac agonises over the dilemma.

There is so much to engage with here – the writer’s desperate poverty, his ongoing anxiety about his mother’s uncertain domestic situation, his enforced disentanglement from alcohol while on these wild and windy heights, his spiritual hopes and fears and more besides.

In short, we might see the editor’s sensitive investigation as a highly illuminating accompaniment to a critical episode in the writer’s CV. His assured handling and interpretation of the material certainly goes well beyond mere reproduction of the newly published writings.

Shuttleworth contemplates clear evidence of Kerouac’s erratic mood swings in his behaviour and outpourings on the page and concludes that the novelist did suffer from what we would now describe as bipolar disorder. The classic symptoms – depression, manic happiness, irritability, negativity and even contemplation of suicide – are present, he believes.

Perhaps we could conclude with a candid and revealing extract from his journal of August 17th, in which a downbeat Kerouac has great difficulty in identifying any personal worth: ‘I am an artist beggar-bum above beyond good and evil […] wife-deserter, ship-jumper, tramp, job-loafer, mooch, psychopathic military shirker, drunkard, intimate of murderers and dope addicts and homosexuals and criminals and thieves, myself a dope-taker, contract-breaker with publishers, fugitive from the law, tax-evader, Catholic renegade, & materialist with cherubim tendencies.’ Desolate angel indeed.

Note: The editor of Desolation Peak is featured in our ‘Interview #14: Charles Shuttleworth’, published by Rock and the Beat Generation on November 30th, 2022