AS A VERITABLE Beat scholar, a lyrical poet and a devoted rock’n’roller, Tim Hunt seems like a natural candidate for inclusion in Rock and the Beat Generation. The author of two highly regarded books about Jack Kerouac – Kerouac’s Crooked Road: Development of Fiction (1981) and The Textuality of Soulwork: Jack Kerouac’s Search for Spontaneous Prose (2014) – plus four poetry chapbooks and six full length books of poetry, he has real skin in the linked worlds of creativity and criticism.
Hunt’s scholarship fuels his poetry and his poetry fuels his scholarship. Though he’s well known in the field of Beat Studies – Professor Ann Douglas calls Kerouac’s Crooked Road ‘the best of the American books on Kerouac’ – Hunt is less familiar to today’s readers of On the Road, Visions of Cody and The Dharma Bums. To draw deserved attention to his achievement, R&BG is honoured to publish this new interview with Hunt by JONAH RASKIN…
JR: You now live in Normal, Illinois? But you aren't exactly a normal guy, or are you?
TH: Illinois State University was the last stop on my academic road. I was brought here to chair the English Department as an outside, expected to address ‘issues’. Our son and his family live here, so we've stayed. As a working class guy from the West, I’m not normal for Normal and wasn’t quite normal in academe, either.
JR: Can you remember the first time you heard rock'n'roll?
TH: It was in Middletown, California, at age 6 in 1956, a year I didn’t know then was pivotal for rock and for the Beats. An older cousin with a DA haircut, a hotrod Model A and a guitar swaggered into the backroom of my grandparent’s house, where I was stacking blocks or some such, and sang ‘Be-Bop-a-Lula’, an early rockabilly epic by Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps. After that I had no ears for Liberace or Perry Como, and I was done with Patti Page and her ‘Doggie in the Window’.
JR: When did you first read On the Road? What were your initial impressions?
TH: In the Summer of 1971 I was entangled with the draft, looking for distractions, and picked up Dharma Bums because I'd heard Gary Snyder figured in it. It seemed okay, so I picked up On the Road. To confess, I wasn't floored, but I went on to read Dr. Sax, and that did, indeed, floor me. Kerouac's full lyric intensity proved to be revelatory.
JR: What about Beat poetry?
TH: Poetry first hit me through Robinson Jeffers, whose work celebrates the Big Sur region of the California coast, then Snyder and Allen Ginsberg, and a chance encounter with Lenore Kandel’s Love Book at 16 in those pre-internet days put the X in sex back before such things were rated. In school, poetry was something called literature, but Jeffers, Snyder, Ginsberg and Kandel were guidebook, even scripture, and certainly life.
Pictured above: Hunt’s Kerouac study from 1981 became the recognised classic
JR: How have your feelings about On the Road changed over the years?
TH: It took me a while to learn to read On the Road on its own terms, rather than what I wanted it to be: a more narrative-based version of Visions of Cody. I’m still convinced Cody was the final version of On Road: As Typee to Moby-Dick for Melville; On the Road is to Visions of Cody for Kerouac. But as I came to understand ‘Spontaneous Prose’ less as a method for producing writing and, instead, more as a reimagining of what writing is as a textual medium, I came to respect On the Road in its own write/right. My second book on Kerouac, The Textuality of Soulwork, brings this notion to the foreground.
JR: The poems in Western Where (2024), your most recent book of poetry, seem to me to be a collection of road poems. Were they initially written when you were traveling? Did you revise?
TH: The third section (‘In This America’) is from the summer of 2016, mostly phrased as I drove, then written down when I’d stop. The final order in the book isn't quite the order in which the pieces were composed. Also, the line breaks have been adjusted in some cases to better cue the spoken inflections, but the poems haven’t been filtered or muted – Ginsberg advised ‘first thought, best thought’. Whether that holds here, these are at least first thought, honest thought.
JR: Is the book an elegy for a lost America?
TH: ‘In This America’ is less an elegy for what’s been lost and more an interrogation of how people respond to what they imagine has been lost. The poems in the first section tend to record a present that erases or mythologizes its past. The second section (‘The Fiddle’) is a kind of back story to ‘In This America’. Altogether the book is perhaps more a reflection on our desire for an elegy than an elegy for what has been lost. This wasn’t a conscious agenda in writing the pieces but rather thoughts occasioned by your questions.
JR: How do you reconcile, or not, Kerouac's attachment to spontaneous prose and the fact that he revised On the Road?
TH: The term revision suggests tinkering with words and phrasing: cutting here and padding there. My sense is that once Kerouac had written On the Road, his revising wasn’t of this sort. Instead, he would reperform a passage or scene or perform a new unit to weave into the set.
This is, I’d suggest, more akin to a jazz performer doing several takes of a song, each a somewhat different exploration of the source material or the initial occasion. We don’t talk about Charlie Parker revising ‘Embraceable You’. We talk about him improvisationally creating different takes.
If we were to imagine On the Road as an extended concept album, we’d see that the majority of it is comprised of takes from the original scroll performance, intermixed with takes from several years later, informed by the breakthrough of Visions of Cody, and by his initial explorations of Buddhism, and his evolving sense of the importance of ‘occasion’ and possibilities in the material.
JR: You came along at a unique moment in the 1950s when the Beat books were first published and when rock'n'roll was busy being born. Do you see yourself as a creature or a product of the 1950s?
TH: In the part of California where I grew up the long 1950s, as it’s called, extended well into the mid-1960s. Bobby Fuller’s ‘I Fought the Law and the Law Won’ came out in October 1965 but could have been a hit in, say, 1958, along with Eddie Cochran’s ‘Summertime Blues’. A child of that 1950s hangover? Maybe.
The poems in Ticket Stubs & Liner Notes (2018) play from/with the collisions between the small town 1960s era (really still the 1950s) and the advent of late 1960s San Francisco psychedelica – as if the Elvis Presley of Sun Records and Grace Slick were having, let’s call it, a moment in the back seat of a pink Cadillac or perhaps a VW bus?!
Pictured above: Hunt’s 2014 exploration of Kerouac and his writing technique
JR: Born and raised in northern California, you were in a unique place to hear the Airplane, and the Dead. Can you say something about that? Someone born and raised in London or Liverpool, LA or NY, would probably have had a different experience with rock. Geography was doubtless a factor.
TH: Dave Van Ronk and Leadbelly were chance encounters at about 15 in1965; then I heard the Byrds and Beau Brummels on the radio. At 16 I had a car, and several of us would drive down from Calistoga to the Fillmore and the Avalon in San Francisco, pretending we had long hair and hip clothes. Truth is, we went to the city for the music. We’d vaguely heard of grass and there was something called LSD, but we hadn’t a clue why the clouds of smoke didn’t smell like tobacco.
JR: Did you know about the hippie scene?
TH: We knew what we read in the newspaper and what we saw on the evening TV news. In Calistoga beer and cheap red wine were the illicit highs – if you knew someone over 21 who’d buy for you. Ralph Gleason’s write ups of the music scene in the SF Chronicle were our AAA road map and Michelin Guide hand-rolled into one. He was ‘The Man’.
Gleason's columns introduced me to jazz (Monk and Miles Davis), also to Merle Haggard at a time when country was simply there to be sneered at. I don't know if Ralph had a big heart (I imagine so) but I know he had HUGE ears.
JR: Can you tell me about your 1960s?
TH: At Cornell in the fall of 1967, my classmates were all Motown-ing it with a bit of the British Invasion mixed in. Music and musical styles were languages, and we were all becoming multilingual. A blink and then it was as if there was only one language – a language of politics (the Vietnam War, the draft, the Watts riots, MLK’s assassination, and Kent State). Woodstock? For a moment we pretended it had actually been and wasn’t already over. My 1960s? Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Fortunate Son’ shoving Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’ into the corner with an underscoring of Country Joe & the Fish’s ‘Section 43’.
JR: In the US and in other parts of the world today, ‘whiteness’ seems to be as big if not bigger than ever before. You seem to be conscious of yourself as a ‘white’ person. Yes? How did that happen?
I'm marked (perceived, acknowledged) as ‘white’, but our discourse of ‘whiteness’ is too often a way to evade issues of class and region, even to some extent ethnicity. And this discourse can, because of this, become a way to deceive, divide, and manipulate (as it is all too often in our current politics). When I went east at 17 to attend Cornell, I quickly discovered that I was not the same ‘white’ as the prep school crowd and that I had two options: be invisible or be outed as a hick. The key is to question the specifics of one’s whiteness rather than take some sort of generalized or essentialized fantasy of whiteness for granted.
JR: If you were to recommend to teens today two or three LPs from the 1950s and two or three books from that era what would they be?
TH: In the 1950s the 45 single was the coin of the realm, so I’d probably encourage seeking out some compilations of different styles and regions, but for sure Chuck Berry, some early Elvis, Ruth Brown, Fats Domino, Buddy Holly, but also Patsy Cline. Brenda Lee’s earliest hits, Carl Perkins, and James Brown, a gathering of doo-wop classics and another of so-called one-hit wonders and, and…. Rebel without a Cause as the iconic film? Plus George Lucas’s American Graffiti as a belated homage with Wolfman Jack as the Cheshire Cat to Al’s and Alice’s Wonderland?
And for the Beat unmasking of Eisenhowerean Containment Culture: first John Clellon Holmes’ Go, Joyce Johnson’s Minor Characters and Ralph Waldo Ellison’s Invisible Man to historicize and set the scene, then on to ‘Howl’ and On the Road and for the truly adventurous William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch and Bonnie Bremser’s Troia: Mexican Memoirs.
See also: An article covering our first 20 principal interviews can be found here – ‘Talkin’ ‘bout the Beat Generation’, February 12th, 2024 – and, further, check out ‘Interview #21: Geoff Nicholson’, February 20th, 2024.