michael mcclure feels that this novel is one of
jack kerouac’s most beautiful pieces of writing.
Though it has been criticized for its romanticization of a Mexican woman, it is also one of the most
passionate portrayals of a woman that Kerouac ever
wrote. Kerouac wrote this romance about his relationship with a beautiful morphine addict in two
installments as the story unfolded in Mexico City
in 1955 and 1956. Kerouac was living on the rooftop in the Orizaba Street apartment where he had
first visited william s. burroughs in 1950. Burroughs’s and Kerouac’s friend, the old-time junky
Bill Garver who is called Old Bull Gaines in this
novel, was living in the building, and his morphine
connection was a young Indian woman named Esperanza. Interestingly, Kerouac changes her name
in the novel from one that means “hope” to one
that means “sadness,” which reflects how Kerouac
saw the world. Esperanza had been an addict since
she was 16, and she had married Dave Tercerero,
Burroughs’s heroin connection. When Tercerero
died, Esperanza started a relationship with Garver.
Theirs was a relationship of mutual dependency.
Garver needed her to move through the Mexican
underworld in search of morphine, and she needed
his money. Kerouac fell in love with her and felt
that he was trying to save her from the destructive
life that she was living.
The book is written in a spontaneous prose
style, similar to that of the first part of desolation
anGels (which he was also writing in 1956) and
The suBterraneans, a novel whose interracial
romantic relationship parallels the one in Tristessa. The novel is a sustained moving sketchbook
of Mexico City’s slums, junkies, prostitutes, and
drunks. Intermixed with this description is Kerouac’s own philosophical take on his surroundings.
Kerouac’s Buddhism allowed him to see the world
as an illusion and a dream; thus he could move in a
society that to most people would be repulsive and
even terrifying—moaning, sick junkies stumbling
into the dawn in search of another fix, smiling bandits with their hands in their wallets. One of the
readers for Viking said of this book that it should
not only be turned down for publication at Viking,
but also it should be kept from being published at
all. Kerouac enthusiasts, of course, are glad it was
not. This is pure Kerouac.
Once again, Kerouac’s persona is Jack Duluoz. At the center of this novel is Duluoz’s love
for Tristessa. But this is no simple love story. Duluoz is still a practicing Buddhist who is denying
himself sex (a practice that is derided by Burroughs
in letters to Kerouac), and his lust for Tristessa is
sublimated into affectionate interplay with animals. Tristessa runs a fingernail down his arm, and
it nearly makes him jump out of his chair. At one
point, she tries to explain to him, with a pantomime of lunging hips, that friends show their affection in bed. Even then, Duluoz imagines that her
tone is girlish, not seriously sexual, and he believes
that the blame will all be on him if he seduces her.
Duluoz returns after a year and finds Tristessa ill and self-destructive. He has given up his
vow of chastity and feels that had he been sexually involved with her the year before, he might
have been able to save her. Now, it appears to be
too late. In one horrifying scene, after a night of
drinking and morphine shooting, Tristessa falls unconscious and splits her head open. Duluoz thinks
that she is dead, but she recovers, and he takes her
back to Orizaba Street for help. There Kerouac
slowly comes to realize that it makes much more
sense for Tristessa to marry Old Bull Gaines than it
does to marry him. To marry an addict, you have to
be one, he says, and he cannot. In an effort to understand where Old Bull Gaines and Tristessa are
coming from, he shoots morphine with them.
The book is a fascinating twist on the obstructed romance motif of much of Western literature. At first, Duluoz’s Buddhism prevents him
from being with Tristessa. Later, it is Tristessa’s
addiction that thwarts the romance. One darkly
funny scene has Duluoz trying to pass, with Tristessa, through a kitchen that is full of women to get
to his rooftop bed with her, but the women will not
let her in. She has been known to throw violent
fits, breaking glasses and kitchenware. Tristessa’s
own sincerity is also questioned by Duluoz when
he suspects that she might be the leader of a gang
of thieves who have robbed him, even taking his
pad of poems. The book and their relationship
ends with Duluoz showing his immaturity in a way
that is similar to the relationship between Sal Paradise and the Mexican girl Terry in on tHe road.
Kerouac’s own appraisal of the novel was that it
was not as bleak as BiG sur. Tristessa’s tragedy appears far less so in light of the inevitability of her
relationship with another addict, Old Bull Gaines.
At times Duluoz loses his Buddhist calm and feels
dismayed at a God who would treat his children
this way.
Literary critics can use this book to support the
view of Kerouac as a writer who romanticized what
he called the fellaheen, the indigenous peoples of
the world. Yet, Kerouac honestly felt connected
to the fellaheen. It is important to note that Kerouac was able to mix fairly well with these people
and does so without trying to convert them to his
own Buddhist philosophy. The book was published
as a 35-cent paperback by Avon in July 1960. The
cover proclaimed it as a “new and hauntingly different novel about a morphine-racked prostitute,”
and the salacious cover art suggested a very different story than the one that Kerouac had written.
Bibliography
Grace, Nancy McCampbell. “A White Man in Love: A
Study of Race, Gender, Class, and Ethnicity in Jack
Kerouac’s Maggie Cassidy, The Subterraneans, and
Tristessa.” In The Beat Generation: Critical Essays,
edited by Kostas Myrsiades, 93–120. New York:
Peter Lang, 2002.
Rob Johnson