Sunday June 01, 2003

JACK'S CASE. My dear old friend Eva, who reviews theatre for Public Access Cable, invited me to see, on her comps, the Joyce Johnson play "Door Wide Open" at the Bowery Poetry Project, based on Johnson's letters to and from Jack Kerouac. Eva seemed to think I'd be into it.She remembered that as a young'un I had been enamored of On The Road and The Dharma Bums. I had, of course. But then I graduated college, and after availing deepest bohemia for a seeming eternity or two myself, for a long time I failed to see what was so hot about him, my memory of his prose being poisoned by the shabby streams of consciousness his example had unloosed among the zillion latter-day, junior-league Jacks by whom I was surrounded.

I was in a mildly more receptive mood tonight. A few months ago I caught Pull My Daisy on PBS, and through that tiny window took a fresh look at the Beats. Ginsberg I could never forsake. The loopy grandeur of his poems, with their little towers of Naropa and Newark and Lower East Side bric-a-brac building bravely toward heaven, touches me still. And I recall a reading he gave in Tompkins Square Park, at the height of The Troubles in the late 1980s, where he threw back at the kids that idolized him the epithet Die Yuppie Scum: "Look at me. I'm wearing a tie. Am I a Yuppie?" All class, that guy.

Kerouac in the film interested me afresh. He had a blundering presence, especially beside the epicene Larry Rivers. Listening to his voice-over, I could not get over the feeling that he was putting us on. He sounded too much like Fred Ward in Henry & June, playing the regular-guy Ahtist touched by Da Muse. What was this guy really about? I would have looked at his books again if I'd had them. Did he really have something, or was he the dress-down equivalent of Chum Frink in "Babbitt," selling the old "spill-o'-speech" to a more rockin' crowd?

The play at its start made me anxious, and I was glad that tight seating forced us to the bar, where I could drink Bourbon and lean my head wearily on my fist. The thing was done as a reading, with a younger and an older Joyce Johnson stand-in off to one side while a young man, who in speech and manner resembled George Clooney doing Frank Sinatra, read the Jack bits. Jack as an up-and-comer and Joyce as an up-and-come-into were boring as hell. I liked Amy Wright as older Joyce (I had seen her several times off-Broadway years ago, and to now witness her once-gawky stage presence softened and made elegant by age sold me the memory-play angle), but the two young players projected no electricity past their lecterns. Worse, the pacing was flat and the lighting somnambulizing, and the Kerouac epistles fell like marijuana-scented mash notes to the stage. I loved the music by David Amram -- yes, that David Amram, whose accompaniment on piano, gourds, and flutes was beautiful throughout -- but my heart sank when I noticed that there would be two acts.

But toward the end of the first act, around the time "On the Road" took off, things got better. Jack loosened up -- only to fall apart, as the play/recollection would have it, but the Jack-actor became more vivid, more human, and the words, as written and as read, began to make sense. As an author of love-scribbles Kerouac had been tiresome; as a drowning poetry star trying to explain himself out of his self-sprung trap, he was electric. And the young Joyce, lashing back at last at her ill-treatment and playing less the lovestruck executive secretary, showed some life as well. The second act was even better, notwithstanding a maudlin coda.

Afterwards I thought, isn't it odd that the young, confident lovers were boring, but the embittered, conflicted fellow-travelers following the caravan of Beat unto its apocalypse were interesting? But no, no it isn't. We appreciate, or claim to, the life-affirming sweep of the Beats, and of course their big "yes" is very exciting and supplies some sparks -- but what became of the tinder to which those sparks was set is more interesting, at least when you've achieved an age greater than that of the young post-Beatniks gathered at the Bowery Poetry Project to witness this evening's event. "Yes" gets you to the door of life, but once you pass through there are a thousand wet blankets waiting to descend upon you, and you have to come up with a more nuanced strategy to keep going -- especially if you want to keep that little spark of "yes" alight. Kerouac, after some entertaining struggles, went home to live with his mom. I won't say that Joyce Johnson's mordant postscripts are as inspiring, or even as valuable, as Kerouac's death-plunge. Yet her careful reflection of his glory finally made Kerouac real to me again.

Was his failure preordained or preventable? Older Joyce makes a comment about this in the play. In Kerouac's case, I think the point is moot -- unless you want to believe that a rage to live is nothing but a folly to be avoided, and I'm not prepared to go all the way down that bleak alley -- not yet, anyway. Is Jack's case less edifying than those of great novelists who negotiated their way through a thousand disappointments and ended with some calm and quiet in old age? Well, what cases would those be, in America? Twain? He died raging. Hemingway? Blew his head off. Fitzgerald? Dead, drunk. Washington Irving, James Fennimore Cooper? I like those guys, but given the farther shores our literature has managed to reach via the aforementioned parties (and many left unmentioned), Irving and Cooper might as well have never gotten out of the blocks.

A lot to chew on there, and quite some time to pass before it's digested. I will say that Kerouac is more impressive to me now than when I walked into that theatre. As is anyone who tries anything like what he was trying. Assuming, perhaps unfairly, that there is anyone.