Kerouac's Tristessa on record
When, in 2013, an album responding to one of the Beat Generation's less familiar novellas was issued, this essay accompanied the release
ALTHOUGH the record producer Jim Sampas had embarked on a number of projects marrying works of Beat writers with musical scores, including texts by Jack Kerouac and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, his 2013 album Esperanza was one of the more esoteric and certainly interesting: a less well-known Kerouac story and a soundtrack by a gathering of young artists who were less well-established. The Low Anthem and William Fitzsimmons were joined by, among others, Sonic Youth stalwart Lee Ranaldo. These were my liner notes which accompanied the Reimagine Music release…
‘Trembling and chaste: The long sadness of the Mexico City night’
Simon Warner
Jack Kerouac, the leading light of that maverick pack of 1950s writers who forged the so-called Beat Generation and sparked a social and cultural revolution in the process, is best known for his exhilarating lust for life, expressed in a series of high-octane novels that distilled his adventures and his hopes. In books like On the Road, The Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels he transformed his own picaresque autobiography into thrilling, foot-to-the-floor fiction.
Yet if Kerouac’s image as freewheeling spirit, unfettered hobo, hitchhiking hero of the open road, has been enduring, his motivations, his obsessions, were far more complex. For every vivacious celebration of everyday wonder, he was drawn also to the darker recesses of experience: the plight of the human soul, the early realisation that ‘we’re all going to die’.
His concerns were tied intimately to his early Catholic upbringing, religious foundations that would both inspire and taunt him for every day of his short 47 years. Through the church he was touched and tainted by God, by the saints, by the Virgin Mary, and threatened constantly by the bony tendrils of his own festering mortality.
There are few examples in his large body writing that better represent the dolorous yin to the effervescent yang of the novelist’s worldview than his 1960 novella Tristessa, a story which actually reflects on experiences he had endured around half a decade before in the seething cauldron of Mexico City, a burgeoning mid-century metropolis on the cusp of the primitive and the modern, a chaotic termite hill of the devotional and the damned.
Tristessa is a morphine-addicted prostitute with whom he falls in love. Kerouac’s narrator is first hopelessly drawn to this frail and exotic angel of the streets, then returns a year on to discover she has gone into inevitable decline. Few accounts of love can be so haunted by the shadow of approaching tragedy and the writer, we can assume, only escapes the ultimate conclusion to this fated affair by moving on, his usual default when things became just too difficult to manage.
Yet the relating of this shadowy romance is touched with a terrible beauty. Kerouac’s prose is jagged, brittle and broken, staccato phrases punctured by long dashes, a spontaneous combustion of compassion and terror. Amid this Boschian nightmare of rainy alleys, disease and squalor, the novelist still weaves a tapestry that almost pre-empts the wonders and mysteries of Latin American magical realism.
There are many recognisable features, too: Kerouac’s Franciscan affection for animals is a regular motif – the cat, the dove, the chicken earn tender mentions – and the magnetic pull of the mystical, whether Christian or Buddhist, infuses the account, too.
Further, another notable figure from the writer’s gallery of real-life associates drift in and out of the Mexican night, but the individual called Bull is based not on Kerouac’s long-time friend William Burroughs but rather another exiled addict, William Garver. Here dubbed Old Bull Gaines, he is a key protagonist in the curious love triangle as the drama unfolds.
Tristessa is an important, and truthful, part of the myth of Duluoz, the name the writer often adopted for the central character in this cycle of confession. This particular tale is harsh but it is vivid; it has both the brilliant and garish colours of neon midnight and the sepia tones of eternal sadness. But if it is frequently bleak, it is honest and moving, and for all its bitter tears, fundamentally humane.
Now, on this remarkable album, twelve rising artists and bands, working in a range of genres, respond to the novella – taking on its themes as inspiration, adopting its very words as a lyrical source. Almost 60 years after Kerouac’s doomed tryst in ‘the Nirvana glare of Saturday night’, these songs offer a contemporary take on a less celebrated, but no less rich, slice of the writer’s kaleidoscopic canon.
This is a red hot review of Jack at best-- winding his way through the smells and substance in a foreign land and its underground. Kerouac in Mexico is true grit with the mystery in it, works like this let you see things you never see among the civilized. Your description of this period really captures it.