The Empty Chair

Read The Empty Chair for Free Online Page A

Book: Read The Empty Chair for Free Online
Authors: Bruce Wagner
Burroughs and Jack wrote back in the forties, but no one’ll publish it. 2 Now
that
would make a wonderful addition to the bookmobile! I would’ve wanted to meet Carr before Neal Cassady . . . Friggin’ Ferlinghetti’s outlived ’em all, he’s older than these hills, but’ll probably go to Snyder’s memorial. Tough old buzzard. And no estimable talent whatsoever! When I think about the Beats—Lamantia, McClure, Corso, Whalen,
    and some of the marginal women . . .
all
the Beat women were marginal, all of the women and
most
of the men! Except Carolyn—Cassady—who’s
never
going to die, not as long as she’s pawning Jack’s and Neal’s bones for cash money. What a piece of work! There’s Joanne Kyger, Snyder’s ex (I think she still lives up in Bolinas, a lot of them did, Creeley and Whalen lived up there, Lewis Warsh, a whole slew), there’s di Prima and Annie Waldman . . . anyway, what popped into my head when I was up on the hill was, Snyder’s pseudonym in
The Dharma Bums
is
Ryder
—“Japhy Ryder,” remember? And all this time I’ve been thinking Djuna Barnes and her novel when it almost
had
to be Japhy
Ryder
who gave my son his name! Well, how do you like that? Which just
shows to go you
the fallibility of the proverbial eyewitness. Makes you really start to wonder. It’s all a dream, anyway, no? A broken mirror-puzzle. We just reshuffle the pieces. Who was it that said, “Reality is a possibility I cannot afford to ignore”? Leonard Cohen? Or maybe it was Lily Tomlin.
    Kerouac and Snyder were close. Jack looked up to him. Snyder was older and became Jack’s mentor in all things Zen. I haven’t thought about any of this in a
long
time, Bruce, you’re bringing it all to the surface . . . You know, Kerouac’s a god of mine, that’s why I go on about him. And I know my Kerouac! What’s disgusting is when the fancy literary folk write their essays for the Sunday book reviews, bloviating
on how
in love
they were with Jack
when they were kids
, how
On the Road
changed their lives, yadda yadda—or should
I say Yaddo Yaddo! You’ll notice how they usually grace us with their perfect opinions on the anniversary of the man’s death or when
they
have a new book out, and you’re reading about how much they loved him and thinking it’s a tribute when suddenly they
turn
on him. These tributes to the man who changed their lives suddenly become snarky critical
refutations
of his work! O they confess to loving and emulating him back in the day when they were feckless undergrads or during their own bullshitty rucksack
moment
—but then they grew up and put away childish things and destroyed whole forests so as to grace us with their neutered, mannered, irrelevant oeuvres. Their hors
d’oeuvres
. Five paragraphs in they cut this giant down to size as a mere folly of their youth. See, with me it was the reverse! Exact opposite. Do you remember Capote saying that nasty thing about Jack’s methodology (he said a lot of nasty things), “That’s not writing, that’s typing”? In my
own
feckless youth, I happened to agree
.
Being the precocious kid I was, I’d have taken “A Tree of Night” over
On the Road
all day long. Because
On the Road
is rather terrible, kind of an awful book in terms of sheer writing, particularly if you measure it against his others,
Visions of Cody
,
Doctor Sax
,
Windblown World
,
Lonesome Traveler
. In a hundred years,
Visions of Cody
will be the one, that’s his Everest. And the poems! Better than Ikkyu. And the paintings! Blake looks like a
child
next to Jack . . . But you see, I was a little snot, a classicist, and it took me the longest time to come around. Then
Big Sur
—Jack’s beautiful, beautiful novel—sort of kicked the door down and in I ran. And I knew without a

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