I'll admit to being more fascinated by Richard Yates' life as reported in the 671 pages of Blake Bailey's biography than in Yates' writing. So this struck a nerve:
I’m no fan of hagiographers, obviously, but I’m only a bit less distrustful of literary biographers. Too often their books slide toward what Joyce Carol Oates has dubbed “pathography,” which she defined as “hagiography’s diminished and often prurient twin.” Its motifs are “dysfunction and disaster, illnesses and pratfalls, failed marriages and failed careers, alcoholism and breakdowns and outrageous conduct.”
Since we live in an age that’s obsessed with personalities and celebrities, it’s not surprising that so few readers are satisfied with loving a book and so many insist on knowing as much as possible about the person who wrote it. While this appetite has inspired literary biographers to produce a long shelf of pathographies and other monstrosities – does the world really need Norman Sherry’s three-volume biography of Graham Greene? – it has also resulted in some well researched and finely written literary biographies that did what such exercises do at their best: they led readers back to the subject’s books. Among these I would include Blake Bailey’s recent biographies of Richard Yates and John Cheever and, strangely enough, Ann Charters’s thorough and balanced 1973 bio of Kerouac. In her introduction, Charters wrote insightfully, if a bit clunkily: “The value of Kerouac’s life is what he did, how he acted. And what he did, was that he wrote. I tried to arrange the incidents of his life to show that he was a writer first, and a mythologized figure afterward. Kerouac’s writing counts as much as his life.”
I would argue that his writing counts more than his life, much more. Eventually Charters seemed to come around to my way of thinking. In 1995, after she’d edited two fat volumes, Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1940-1956 and The Portable Jack Kerouac, I interviewed her for a newspaper article. “I wanted (the book of letters) to be a biography in Jack’s own words,” she told me. “His life is in his books, but on the other hand the most essential thing is missing from those novels. What he tells you in the letters is that the most important thing in his life is writing.”
Why did Kerouac's writing give rise to an outpouring of biographies, commentaries, dissertations, articles, not to mention new editions and the publication of the shoddiest of his literary efforts, when Yates' novels and short stories had no similar effect? One thought is this. Kerouac was a sort of unwitting pied piper. His 1957 On the Road gave rise to the 'rucksack revolution' of the 'sixties. Yates' 1961 Revolutionary Road, his best novel, was backward-looking, in large part social criticism of the Zeitgeist of the fading 'fifties.
But my one thought is one-sided and wants augmentation and qualification. Later perhaps.
While I admire Yates' superb craftsmanship, his writing does not move me. Kerouac moves me. Literary slop, hyper-romantic gush, and all. So far I have found nothing in three of Yates' novels and a couple of his short stories like this:
Here is Jack Kerouac on the road, not in a '49 Hudson with Neal Cassady, but in a bus with his mother:
Who are men that they can insult men? Who are these people who wear pants and dresses and sneer? What am I talking about? I'm talking about human helplessness and unbelievable loneliness in the darkness of birth and death and asking "What is there to laugh about in that?" "How can you be clever in a meatgrinder?" "Who makes fun of misery?" There's my mother a hunk of flesh that didnt ask to be born, sleeping restlessly, dreaming hopefully, beside her son who didnt ask to be born, thinking desperately, praying hopelessly, in a bouncing earthly vehicle going from nowhere to nowhere, all in the night, worst of all for that matter all in noonday glare of bestial Gulf Coast roads — Where is the rock that will sustain us? Why are we here? What kind of crazy college would feature a seminar where people talk about hopelessness forever?
Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), Desolation Angels, 1960, p. 339.
Compare Mexico City Blues, 1959, 211th Chorus:
The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . .
. . . I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel
and safe in heaven dead.
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