Re-reading Jack

‘I think of Dean Moriarty.‘ Trucks thunder
along ‘La Provencal’ from Southern Spain
to Northern Italy, then back again -
Cadiz/Milan, Milan/Cadiz. I wonder
why, when I’m obsessed, so torn asunder,
by wanderlust, I opted to remain
domesticated?  Blessed by the mundane,
this bourgeois life maybe my biggest blunder.

Blind drunk, the bar-room bore: ‘Last night I dreamt
Babe Rawlins lay with me.' (what can be worse
than rat-arsed Geordie blues?) ‘Last night I dreamt….
Before my coup de grace, the second verse,
the barman grabbed  my beat-up blues guitar.
I sang outside. I watched a shooting star.

I think this is a silly poem which makes a couple of serious points. When we travelled to the Costa Brava in the Summer of 2005 I look Kerouac's 'On the Road' and 'Big Sur' with me as holiday reading. I suppose driving the 1000 miles south from Buxton to Estartit I had plenty of time to reflect on 'being on the road' and think about the cultural differences between road travel in America and Europe. I've chatted to a number of Americans about my travels and their default position tends to be, America is big and Europe is small, and of course that's true. However it's not as small as Americans think. It certainly seemed to come as a bit of a surprise to  the Americans who I got chatting to on my trip to the East Coast in 2003 when I explained that  I had not met Tony Blair in person. The motorway mentioned in the poem - Cadiz to Milan is 1440 miles long, actually that's further than from Portland, Maine to Miami.


The A9 autoroute (La Languedocienne/La Catalane) near Narbonne

Of course the difference is not really geographical but cultural. Bruce Springsteen can still bring the house down singing 'Thunder Road'. A 'road trip' through America still sounds cool; tell friends that you are about to drive from Buxton to Rome and they simply become incredulous. There is no romance of the road left in England; what little there ever was has been purloined by right wing petrol heads like Jeremy Clarkson who has stolen road travel in the same way  the British National Party has annexed the Union Jack.

Nothing illustrates the difference between here and the States better than the titles of popular songs. Americans can still get dewy eyed over 'The Time I get to Phoenix' or 'The Wichita Lineman' and casting all sense of grammatical probity aside are happy to belt out 'my kind of town Chicago is'.   'By the time I get to Ipswich', The Winchester Lineman, my kind of town Northampton is - doesn't quite work! There are exceptions which prove the rule - Waterloo Sunset, London Calling, Ferry Across the Mersey. Well, London is a world city so does seem cool, and for a brief moment in the early 1960's the Mersey sound made Liverpool seemed cool too. Otherwise, our attitude to dear old blighty is that it's slightly naff, but it's home.

So, I suppose my motivation in writing the poem was to reflect on the 'On the Road' culture, but as a European.

The second point is about the meaning of the romance of the road to a middle class bureaucrat. Phillip Larkin explored this notion more extensively in ' Poetry of Departures'.

Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,
As epitaph:
He chucked up everything
And just cleared off,
And always the voice will sound
Certain you approve
This audacious, purifying,
Elemental move.

And they are right, I think.
We all hate home
And having to be there:
I detest my room,
It's specially-chosen junk,
The good books, the good bed,
And my life, in perfect order:
So to hear it said

He walked out on the whole crowd
Leaves me flushed and stirred,
Like Then she undid her dress
Or Take that you bastard;
Surely I can, if he did?
And that helps me to stay
Sober and industrious.
But I'd go today,

Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,
Crouch in the fo'c'sle
Stubbly with goodness, if
It weren't so artificial,
Such a deliberate step backwards
To create an object:
Books; china; a life
Reprehensibly perfect.

The sestet of my sonnet is my 'swagger the nut strewn road fantasy'. Babe Rawlins is a minor character from On the Road', a sporty type from Denver. Like most characters in Kerouac's stories they are fictionalised versions of real people. In the case of Babe Rawlins then the gap between fiction and reality is interesting. Babe Rawlins is actually Beverley Burford. In real life she was a pioneering sportswoman who helped popularise Colorado's burgeoning outdoor tourism in the 1950's. She married a congressman and died just a few years ago, presumably well to do and respectable. Not exactly your stereotypical beat.

Beverley Burford aka 'Babe Rawlins'



The relationship between the bourgeois and the bohemian is always amusing; I like the fact that Alan Sillitoe actually wrote 'Saturday Night Sunday Morning' sat under Robert Graves' almond tree in Majorca and Joyce perfected 'The Dubliners' in Trieste. Equally my paean to the Beats was written in a very nice duplex amongst Mediteranean oaks and pines. The nearest to raucous we ever managed was sipping a soft, smokey Penedes   in the evening on the terrace whilst reading.

Does that matter? How can there ever be authenticity in any art?  Art is about illusion; if anything appears authentic then that probably signals a particularly fine sleight of hand on the part of the artist.

When Paul Stephens published the poem in The Chimaera in 2008 he printed it next to this drawing of Dean Moriary by Patricia Wallace Jones. I like the shootong star.

Before my coup de grace, the second verse,
the barman grabbed my beat-up blues guitar.
I sang outside. I watched a shooting star.