jack kerouac’s Visions of Cody, his tribute novel
to neal cassady, is, arguably, Kerouac’s greatest
book, although at the time it was written, Kerouac’s
best reader allen ginsberg told Cassady that it
was a “holy mess.” No one who had not “blown”
Kerouac, said Ginsberg, could ever make sense of
Visions of Cody because of the book’s deeply personal material. What Ginsberg did not understand
at the time, but came to understand later, was that
Kerouac was writing his books with the clear sense
that they were all one long book, “The Duluoz
Legend,” as he called it. Therefore, any personal
references in Visions of Cody would in due course
be explained through reference to other installments in “The Duluoz Legend.” Regardless, the
reader who comes to Visions of Cody after having
read on tHe road, The dHarma Bums, or some
of Kerouac’s other works of conventional prose will
find the book as difficult to read in parts as James
Joyce’s Ulysses. Yet Visions of Cody is the version of
Kerouac’s book about his life on the road with Cassady that Kerouac himself thought was the best.
The novel is unique as a literary achievement
if properly seen in the context of Kerouac’s life and
how his life led to his development as an artist. Kerouac started to write the book in October 1951 in
Queens, New York, incorporating some of his Denver descriptions from summer 1950, and finished it
in the Cassady’s attic in May 1952. He wrote most
of the book after having written On the Road, which,
although it is a book with a freewheeling style, is
hardly as experimental as Visions of Cody. Even so,
Kerouac found no publisher willing to touch On the
Road, including his friend Robert Giroux, who rejected On the Road out of hand. Most writers would
have taken that as a message to restrain their style.
Kerouac saw such rejection as liberating. If On the
Road, a book that he knew was great, would never
be published, then he may as well write for himself
and write in as pure a form as he could imagine.
This new form was spontaneous prose.
Spontaneous prose can be seen as the literary
equivalent of the improvisational jazz solos of Lester Young and Charlie Parker or the “drip” paintings of Jackson Pollock. Kerouac would throw out
all of the rules about form and create a literature
that substituted images for plot—a breakthrough
that would have a profound influence not only
on Ginsberg (whose poems, he admits, were influenced deeply by Visions of Cody) but also on wil
liam s. burroughs (who by the mid-1950s had
come to the same conclusion about images versus
plot as had Kerouac). A comparison of “A Supermarket in California,” “howl,” and the later
“road” poems in The fall of america to the prose
of Visions of Cody, and the dash-style punctuation
of Burroughs’s prose in Naked Lunch and the cutup trilogy to Visions of Cody make it clear how influential Kerouac’s book was on the writing of his
two friends. Both read it in 1952. Ginsberg worked
as an agent for the book (unsuccessfully), and Kerouac typed the manuscript while living with Burroughs in Mexico City in 1952.
The book is divided into three parts. The first
part contains Kerouac’s “sketches” of New York
City in November 1951 with references to Cody
Pomeray’s (based on Cassady) childhood mixed
in. Part Two recounts Cody’s childhood and early
pool-hall days; it also describes Kerouac’s trip
West to visit Cody and Evelyn (based on carolyn cassady) in December 1951. Part Three is
a transcript of several days of tape-recorded conversations between Cody, Jack Duluoz (based on
Kerouac), and Evelyn at Cody and Evelyn’s house
in San Francisco. It also includes Kerouac’s imitation of the tape in spontaneous prose, along with
spontaneous-prose sketches, including a description of Cody. Part of the book was published by
New Directions in 1959. The entire book was
published posthumously in 1972 when it was issued with an afterword by Ginsberg entitled “The
Visions of The Great Rememberer,” one of the best
readings of Kerouac’s prose by any critic.
Kerouac was friends with a Columbia architecture student named Ed White (the model for
Ed Gray in Visions of Cody), who was an old Denver friend of Cassady’s. In October 1951 White
showed Kerouac some of his sketches on a notepad
and, as White says, “suggested that he could do
the same with notes.” White says Kerouac could
write extremely quickly, and he saw him carrying
around pocket notebooks after their conversation.
In a letter to Cassady, Kerouac calls these sketches
“everything I sense as it stands in front of me and
activates all around, in portable breast shirtpocket
notebooks slapping.”
The “sketches” of New York recorded in Part
One of Visions of Cody were made by Kerouac in
November 1951. The sketches include the men’s
room in the Third Avenue El railway station, reflections in the window of a bakery in Jamaica,
Queens, and St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Throughout,
comparisons are made to the perceptions of the
hero of this book, Cody. For example, the sketch
of Hector’s Cafeteria was an important setting in
Cody’s first visit to New York in 1946. The overall
connection between the “sketching” style and the
storyline of the book is that unlike On the Road,
this book will be the “complete Cody,” with few details left out.
Kerouac says that in “the Autumn of 1951 I
began thinking of Cody,” and we know that Kerouac had been receiving letters from Neal and
Carolyn Cassady asking him—even pleading with
him—to come visit them, offering Kerouac their
attic as a writing space. As Carolyn describes in
off tHe road, she and Neal had come to the
conclusion that Kerouac was an essential part of
their life and was a necessary element in their marriage. Kerouac’s attempts to travel West to see the
Cassadys were slowed by his impulsive (and shortlived) marriage to Joan Haverty and by returning
bouts of thrombophlebitis, which led to his hospitalization in September and early October 1951.
Part One ends with what in many ways is a
love letter from Duluoz to Cody. Duluoz believes
that only Cody understands him and that he is
“haunted” by Cody. They have wasted too much
time, and he almost lost everything by going to
Mexico with Julien Love (based on Lucien Carr),
a reference to Ginsberg and Carr’s trip to Mexico
in August 1951, just a few weeks before Joan Burroughs was accidentally shot by William Burroughs
in a game of “William Tell.” He adds a postscript to
Evelyn assuring her that he is “Cody’s friend, not
his devil,” for in the past Duluoz’s arrival has signaled domestic chaos.
In summer 1949, financed by his $1,000 advance on The town and tHe city, Kerouac
moved himself and his mother to Westwood in
the foothills of Denver. His mother did not like
Denver and left almost immediately, but Kerouac
stayed and took the opportunity to visit the old
haunts of Cassady and his pool-hall gang. In fall
1950, while staying with his mother and his sister
in Richmond Hill, Kerouac wrote these experiences. Before sitting down at the kitchen table
to write, he would sneak into the bathroom and
smoke several joints which rolled were from marijuana that he had smuggled back from Mexico on
the trip with Cassady that is described at the end
of On the Road. The marijuana-inspired style of
these passages—which constitute much of Part II
of Visions of Cody—were a breakthrough, Kerouac
felt. Ginsberg and Cassady disagreed, saying that
the marijuana was obscuring Kerouac’s judgment.
Certainly, the marijuana allowed Kerouac to focus
on details to a level that he had never done before. He wrote 20,000 words alone about the day
when Cassady first met his friend Jim Holmes in
Peterson’s Pool Hall in Denver. In Visions of Cody,
Kerouac refers to this section as “where in North
Carolina tea dreams I also saw Cody and tried to
write a ‘story’ about it.”
Cody’s history as its retold in Visions of Cody
has at least two sources. Readers of Cassady’s incomplete memoir The first tHird will find considerable overlap between Kerouac’s account and
Cassady’s. Kerouac probably saw the beginnings
of The First Third when he stayed with Neal and
Carolyn in 1950 and 1951. Cassady’s letters to Kerouac also contain a good deal of the information—
and also approximate the spontaneous style—in
the first part of Book II of Cody. In fact, it was
Cassady who apparently taught Kerouac to smoke
marijuana and take Benzedrine to write nonstop,
free-flowing prose.
The principal characters in Kerouac’s history
of Cody are Tom Watson (based on Jim Holmes),
Slim Buckle (based on Al Hinkle), and Earl Johnson (based on Bill Tomson). Holmes remained in
Denver his entire life, playing pool and betting on
the horses. Hinkle is the basis for the character Ed
Dunkel in On the Road, and his wife Helen (the
model for the character Helen Buckle) is the basis
of a character Galatea Dunkel in On The Road and
is an important friend to Carolyn Cassady as is described in Off the Road. Tomson, who was dating
Carolyn, introduced her to Neal.
A quarter of the way into the book, Kerouac
begins a new section that is unrelated to Cody’s
past. Here, Duluoz develops his own story about
himself and how he came to be heading West again
to be with Cody. He recounts writing the opening
section of book two and of his days at the hospital
recuperating from thrombophlebitis. Increasingly
the book becomes Duluoz’s rather than Cody’s
story. Duluoz feels himself to be at the height of
his powers as a writer because not only is he the
“maddest liver in the world” but he is also the “best
watcher and that’s no sneezing thing.” He tells us
that the book will resemble Proust’s great work, but
he will not have the luxury of writing it in bed; instead he will write it on the fly. It will be “the most
complete record in the world,” a description that
reveals Kerouac’s immense ambitions as a writer
in 1951. Kerouac is writing with such confidence
of the immortality of his work in progress that he
even refers cryptically to passages of his unpublished novel On the Road—as if any reader could
know the source. Still, he seems to know that one
day all of his works will be in print and that readers
will be able to put the entire thing together.
To visit Cody, Duluoz plans to ship out of New
Jersey on the President Adams. Deni Bleu (based
on Henri Cru) already has a place on board, and
they will travel together. However, Duluoz is unable to get a position on the ship and watches it
leave without him. Deni tells him to travel overland and to meet the ship when it arrives in Port at
San Pedro, south of Los Angeles. Duluoz borrows
$70 for the trip, procures a supply of Benzedrine
and Dexedrine, and hits the road. He arrives in
San Francisco, and he, Slim Buckle, and Cody hit
the saloons on Mission Street. Facing the ocean at
San Pedro at the end of Part II, Duluoz listens to
Deni lecture him about how Duluoz does not love
anyone but himself. In Part I, however, Duluoz has
written to Cody that he does love him, and it is to
Cody that Duluoz returns.
Kerouac and Cassady had long discussed
using a tape recorder as opposed to a typewriter
or pencil and paper to capture in the raw spontaneity of their marathon discussions and monologues. Cassady bought an Ekotape recorder, and
when Kerouac visited in December 1951, they let
it run as they sat around in the kitchen of Neal
and Carolyn’s apartment smoking marijuana,
drinking wine, playing records and musical instruments, and getting high on Benzedrine. Part III of
Visions of Cody is a transcript of five such nights
in early 1952.
Most critics find this section more interesting
as an idea than as a written text. Ginsberg admits
that the tape is “hung up and boring” at times, but
he says that the “art lies in the consciousness of
doing the thing, in the attention to the happening
in the sacramentalization of everyday reality, the
God-worship in the present conversation, no matter what.” The tape, he says, is thus a very direct
application of Kerouac’s theories of spontaneous
prosody: “It’s art because at that point in progress
of Jack’s art he began transcribing first thoughts
of true mind in American speech.” Kerouac himself was self-conscious about the ultimate failure
of the tape experiment, but maybe that was the
point. “You’re not going to get hardly any of this
recorded, you know,” says Cody to Duluoz, and
Duluoz replies, “Well, that’s the sadness of it all.”
Inarguably, though “Frisco: The Tape” is, in
terms of its content, an extremely valuable document. For the transcript, Kerouac presciently selected topics of discussion that fill in some of the
gaps in the early history of the Beats. Many biographers of the Beats seem to have overlooked the
material here, for many of the stories that are buried in the 150 pages of often drunken and stoned
conversation have not found their way into the
narratives of the lives of Burroughs, Kerouac, and
Ginsberg, in particular.
Duluoz has never heard from Cody about his
experiences on Hubbard’s (based on Burroughs)
ranch in East Texas in 1948. He has only heard
Irwin Garden’s (based on Ginsberg) side of the
story. Cody is evasive about what Ginsberg identifies in the notes at the end of Visions of Cody as
their “Green Automobile Vow”—a vow of love, for
Ginsberg but not for Cassady, evidently, that they
made in the middle of a road in Oklahoma as they
hitchhiked to East Texas. Cody tells the story of
the bed that Huck (based on herbert huncke)
and Irwin make for Cody and Irwin to sleep in, a
famous Beat legend also recounted in Huncke’s
memoir The eveninG sun turned crimson.
Another part of the transcription documents
the culture of marijuana smoking that would become widespread in America 15 years later. The
Beats were a direct link between the drug culture
and the drug language of the jazz artists of the
1930s and the 1940s and the hippie counterculture
of the 1960s. Already, in this transcript, the reader
can see that a very specific ritual has emerged.
Cody talks the majority of the time in these
tapes, but Duluoz tells the story of his first meeting of Julien and Hubbard and June (based on
Joan Burroughs). He also discusses the relationship
between Julien and Stroheim (Dave Kammerer).
Carr’s murder of Kammerer is a key part of Beat history. There are also details about Duluoz’s early days
around Huck and Phil Blackman (based on Phil
White) and, in particular, the real-life Vicki Russell
that are not available in any other Beat book. For
example, Duluoz is quite candid about the fact that
they all knew that Blackman was a murderer. In this
unexpurgated account of the Times Square/Columbia scene of the early and mid-1940s, it is clear that
Duluoz, Garden, and Hubbard kept company with
fairly hardened criminals. Other highlights of these
pages include Duluoz’s memories of New Year’s Eve
1947 in the company of Vicki and Julien and also of
Cody’s thoughts on the deaths of Finistra (based on
Bill Cannastra) and June.
Cody takes the tape back and at Duluoz’s
urging tells about how he met his Denver “gang”
in the early 1940s. They talk about their mutual
friend Ed Gray, and Cody tells about meeting Tom
Watson. He tells Duluoz of the breaks that he was
given by Justin Mannerly (based on Justin Brierly),
who helped him get a job out of reform school recapping tires. On the tire job, he met Val Hayes
(based on Hal Chase), with whom he began to
have deep conversations about poetry and philosophy. Ginsberg believed that Chase convinced
Cassady that poetry was more important than
philosophy. This fact convinced Cassady to go to
New York and meet Chase’s poet friends, including
Ginsberg and Kerouac.
Evelyn has been in and out of the conversation, but she joins them after coming home from
her nighttime job as a photographer in the nightclubs that are located in the old Barbary Coast
district of San Francisco. Carolyn Cassady writes
about this job and those days in Off the Road. Both
accounts reflect Carolyn’s view that these were
some of the happiest times that Kerouac, Neal, and
she spent together.
Duluoz becomes drunk and drops out of the
conversation, giving Cody the floor with Evelyn.
These pages capture Cody’s natural storytelling
style as well as any in Beat literature. Cody tells
Evelyn about his days in Los Angeles before he met
her, the only such account available in Beat literature. Such stories are made safe for Evelyn. Cody
has to be careful not to discuss parts of his life
when he knew Evelyn but which did not include
her. For example, earlier she asks about when he,
Slim, and Duluoz were all together in New Orleans, but the subject is quickly dropped because
the story includes another woman.
Cody and Duluoz discuss June’s death and
Hubbard’s fascination with guns. They then speculate about how Irwin and Hubbard might die. Significantly, they do not speculate about their own
deaths, although later in the book Cody says that
he will die on a railroad track (Neal actually did).
Another section of the transcription fills in a
key part of the history of Hubbard and June. Burroughs moved to South Texas in late 1946 but returned almost immediately to New York when he
heard that Joan had been institutionalized. Cody
tells the story of Hubbard’s return. This part of
Burroughs’s history (as it intersects with Cassady’s)
is not available in any other Beat book. Though
Cassady seems to have confused this time with a
later return to New York by Burroughs when he
and Cassady drove Burroughs’s jeep from East
Texas to New York and attempted to sell the marijuana that Burroughs had raised on his New Waverly farm.
In the “Imitation of the Tape” section of the
book, Duluoz breaks in at one point and makes
one of his most memorable statements about why
he is a writer: “I’m writing this book because we’re
all going to die—In the loneliness of my life . . .
my heart broke open in the general despair and
opened up inwards to the Lord, I made a supplication in this dream.” The book has been written out
of the loneliness following his extended farewell to
Cody. “Adios, King,” he ends the novel.
Still, although he loves Cody, he resents how
Cody has come to be the very eyes through which
he sees the world. Cody also has become increasingly unperceptive about life in general. As Ginsberg says in his notes to the book, part of their
problem was that with Cody married and with two
children, he and Duluoz simply did not have anything to do together. “The Imitation of the Tape”
is meant to be a tribute to Cody that is more complete than On the Road, but it is also meant to
purge Cassady from the pages of Kerouac’s future
books.
Kerouac tries on all kinds of styles in this section and adopts dozens of voices. He adopts Cody’s
voice and even his thoughts. There are whole sections written in the style of Shakespeare, for at the
time Kerouac, Neal, and Carolyn liked to perform
Shakespeare’s plays in the living room at night.
The stream of consciousness that runs throughout
led Kerouac to question if “in the morning, if there
is a way of abstracting the interesting paragraphs of
material in all this running consciousness stream
that can be used as the progressing lightning chapters of a great essay about the wonders of the world
as it continually flashes up in retrospect.” He even
reverts to the style of The Town and the City for a
while and imitates his own voice in On the Road.
A major influence on the style of Visions of
Cody is jazz. Kerouac always wanted to write a jazz
novel, and parts of Visions of Cody are as close to
jazz as he ever came. Says Duluoz parenthetically,
“this is all like bop, we’re getting to it indirectly
and too late but completely from every angle except the angle we all don’t know.” As is true of the
solos of the great jazz musicians whom Kerouac
and Cassady admired, Kerouac never repeats himself even when writing the same story. He often repeats stories from On the Road, but they are told
differently, leading the thorough reader of Kerouac
to the conclusion that he truly could have spontaneously written these books in any number of ways,
all of them successful “solos.”
Part of Visions of Cody corresponds to On the
Road when Sal Paradise (based on Kerouac) stays
in Denver in spring/summer 1949. The Denver
gang is all elsewhere, so, left on his own, he visits Cody’s old haunts and walks through Denver’s
African-American neighborhoods, wishing he were
a “Negro.” Kerouac has been accused of romanticizing African-Americans in this passage in On the
Road; however, in Visions of Cody, he interviews
“one poor Negro soldier” about “Denver niggertown,” and when the soldier does not know about
it or will not tell him, Duluoz shows self-awareness
by realizing that the soldier could not possibly be
“involved in a white man’s preoccupation about
what colored life must be.” The Visions of Cody version is also notable for its inclusion of a section on
Robert Giroux (the “mysterious Boisvert”) in Denver. Giroux, Kerouac’s editor on The Town and the
City, was attracted to Kerouac and followed him to
Denver, but Kerouac was ultimately depressed by
Giroux’s “successful young executive” mentality.
Visions of Cody also describes Duluoz, Cody, and
Joanna Dawson’s (based on LuAnne Henderson) on
the road trip through the deserts of West Texas in
1949. Kerouac describes Marylou (based on Henderson) in On the Road applying cold cream to Sal and
Dean’s naked bodies as they drove. He is much more
explicit in Cody: Joanna “applied cold cream to our
organs.” Henderson’s far less erotic account (she
says they had no cold cream although she would
have loved to have some lotion in the dry heat) can
be found in her interview with Barry Gifford and
Lawrence Lee in Jack’s Book: An Oral Biography of
Jack Kerouac (1978). The ménage à trois suggested
by Cassady is covered in On the Road.
Another passage that corresponds to a section of On the Road involves Cassady and a
homosexual. In On the Road Dean tricks the homosexual into giving him money for sexual favors, which he promises but on which he reneges.
In Visions of Cody, Duluoz cowers in a motel
bathroom as Cody performs “slambanging big
sodomies that made me sick”—and the homosexual never gives Cody his money. In his notes
to Visions of Cody, Ginsberg asserts that Kerouac
would have been a lot happier if he had simply
joined the sex party.
Visions of Cody, just as On the Road, describes
a version of Kerouac and Cassady’s destruction of
a Cadillac by driving it from Denver to Chicago
in 17 hours. In On the Road, Kerouac leaves out a
side trip that the two made to Detroit, where Kerouac tried to revive his relationship with his first
wife, Edie Parker. She sends him away curtly. In Visions of Cody, Kerouac also describes Cassady’s first
meeting with Diana Hansen in New York: “She
was a raving fucking beauty the first moment we
saw her walk in.”
The section “Joan Rawshanks in the Fog” is
one of Kerouac’s most popular and most frequently
anthologized pieces. While living with Neal and
Carolyn in San Francisco in winter 1952, he took
a walk one night, and just a few blocks from the
Cassady’s apartment he encountered a Hollywood
crew shooting a Joan Crawford film called Sudden Fear. He rushed back to the Cassadys to tell
them, but they were not impressed, and Kerouac
went back alone with his notebook. Kerouac’s
description of the Hollywood shoot needs to be
seen in the context of his theory of spontaneous
art. The “vastly planned action” of the scene that
Crawford repeatedly rehearses is the opposite of
how Kerouac believes that the best art is created.
“Blow, baby, blow!” he says he yelled at Crawford,
urging her to cut loose with an unrehearsed moment of true living in the same way that a jazz artist “blows” a solo or that a writer such as Kerouac
“blows” long, spontaneously written works such as
“Joan Rawshanks in the Fog.” He says “the movies
have nothing now but great technique to show,” a
comment that could apply equally well to technically proficient fiction and poetry of the type that
are valued by most of the critics of his age. By
contrast, the kind of film that he loves reflects the
“wild form” that he told john clellon holmes
he was seeking in fiction. The Three Stooges captured that wild form early in their career, he says,
but in their “baroque period” they were repeating
themselves, a falling-off in inspiration that was reflected in the more violent style of the later Stooge
films. Similarly, Crawford’s faking of emotion contrasts greatly with the self-consciousness of Cody,
who dislikes telling stories that he has told before
because he remembers the way he told it and thus
has lost his fresh perspective. Through passages
such as “Joan Rawshanks in the Fog,” Kerouac reveals that his ideas about spontaneous writing are
not just about technique but embody an entire
philosophy of life.
In both Visions of Cody and On the Road, Kerouac describes the characters that are based on
Cassady as having simply talked themselves out. In
Visions of Cody, not only has Cody talked himself
out but also Kerouac apparently has finally written
himself out about Cassady. His next book, doctor
sax (which begins to surface in several references
at the end of Visions of Cody), will be his most personal book, one about the imaginary, mythic landscape of his childhood.
Bibliography
Gifford, Barry and Lawrence Lee. Jack’s Book: An Oral
Biography of Jack Kerouac. New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1978.
Hunt, Tim. Kerouac’s Crooked Road: The Development of
a Fiction. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1981.
Rob Johnson