Book review #41: Wild Twin

A post-Beat life, home and away

Wild Twin by Jeff Young (Little Toller, 2024)

TO MOVE IS to live. The picaresque literary tradition, from Cervantes to Twain and London, Steinbeck to Guthrie and Kerouac to Rechy, has spawned a veritable shelf of often semi-autobiographical fiction on the run. The idea, in almost any age, that travel can represent both the ecstasy of escape and the potential for self-revelation remains a captivating one.

But are its consequences always useful to the lone hero, the solo drifter, the silhouette on the horizon, the hitcher in the late shadows, who plots his – and it is usually his – erratic course? Can there be downsides to the momentum of wandering? Can the existential excitements of uncertainty compensate for the quiet security of stability and the comforts of home?

Jeff Young’s latest book-length contemplation on these matters might be regarded as a one-man guide to the terrain and also a salutary tale of sorts. But it is much more than a mere fable about going. It is also an account about staying: the lure of the highway with its compelling mystery and the pull of the domestic hearth. After all, wasn’t On the Road all about that?

This particular account of a personal odyssey is a memoir and a travelogue, a portrait, principally, of two cities – Liverpool and Amsterdam – though Brussels and Paris are on the zigzagging itinerary, too. But it is also an intense reflection on a family left behind and an ageing father who eventually leaves on a final journey of his own.

What makes Wild Twin – the title explained as Young’s alter ego, his split personality, the half of him that has to get away and taste the sometimes bitter waters of alien places – so interesting to Rock and the Beat Generation and to me, is its wonderful catalogue of references to not only the alternative literature that feeds his spirit but also to popular music, examples of which crop up with thrilling regularity.

The author is hypnotised, obsessed by rebel poets and renegade novelists – Ginsberg and Trocchi, Rimbaud, Genet, and Camus, Beckett, Patchen and Fariña – but he’s just as gripped by jazz and reggae, by glam and prog, by soul and punk and the myriad hybrids of the promiscuously creative 1970s.

Page after page bristle with citations of Bowie, Roxy Music and T. Rex, Lou Reed, Tom Waits and Television, Sly, Can and Sun Ra, the Residents and Patti Smith and many more, heartfelt references to singles and songs and albums and gigs emotionally enriching adolescent years played out on the always hyperactive Mersey beat. ‘Pop music,’ Young confidently asserts, ‘is memory.’

The main protagonist (and there is no disguising this is Young himself) in this narrative departs the drudgery of menial, unchallenging office work and tells his parents he’s quit the post and is heading to Europe. They don’t approve but they don’t dissuade and soon a 1970s version of a Beat adventure, this time with an Anglo hero and a European twist, is underway.

The hitching, the misdirection, the drenchings in motorway lay-bys, the random connections and shared cigarettes in vans and cars, the circular meanders, a self-mythology concocted in the limbo life of the passenger seat, the mistaken detours, nothing that Kerouac wasn’t himself describing in detail in his various celebrations of the white line and the hard shoulder.

Young wants to be Jack or Cassady or Corso: there are textual hints galore paying tribute to earlier Beat linchpins and their urgent escapades. As he travels, he conceives ‘some kind of degraded ideal of boho, Beat, dissolute-bum writer identity. An adolescent, unarticulated urge to become the low life outsider hoodlum poet…’

After big hopes, certain disappointments, several false starts and certain to-ing and fro-ing, Young eventually arrives at the great Dutch capital, a charming city of canals, liberal thinking, sexual freedom, relaxed drug codes and squats and, for two years in the early 1980s, it becomes his chaotic, ever uncertain, base.

His experiences, his frequent hand-to-mouth mouth existence, are a rich source for this astute and sensitive observer: Young’s prose tumbles in vivid flows, shifts to speedy descriptions of the ever-changing scene – an adaptation of the Kerouac ‘sketching’ principle – as fractured fragments mix immediate experience and, on occasion, welling nostalgia.

Cracked snapshots, episodic impressions, are both highly evocative and emotionally luminous as Amsterpool seems to bleed into Liverdam. Meanwhile a gallery of harlequin players – rising, failing, clinging on, fading, dying – including intriguingly Gregory Corso himself are caught by this perceptive penman’s roving lens.

‘I scribble their stories in my notebooks, try and get the colour of the characters down, trying to learn to write about these people, and finally start to feel I’m living in the sort of underground paperback I loved,’ he explains.

Young continues: ‘I even tell people I’m a writer but I’m still in thrall to the Beats and pay more attention to the costume than the syntax.’ Yet he openly confesses, ‘I am a complete novice – a novice at writing and a novice at living.’

Much is dangerous, plenty is sordid and a great deal frankly desperate. Nothing condenses the newly adopted lifestyle more strikingly than a tsunami of mice which floods the ramshackle apartment when the plaster wall reveals an open wound and the panicked rodents stream across the residents on the floor in their improvised cribs.

But in Wild Twin a great deal more comes out of the woodwork than frightened vermin. Young, through his highly individualised tales of the city, is able to capture a key period in the development of the artist as a young man, a relative ingenue who will, in time, go on to make a life as a writer on the page, on the stage and on radio. The book is a compelling record of that formative time, a foreign foray finally shaped by family mourning, a post-Beat journal richly infused by the first-hand experiences of felt life.

See also: ‘Interview #31: Jeff Young’, February 28th, 2025