Hooray Ron Silliman–
My general reading style is to be in the middle of ten to twelve books at one time, switching back & forth as the whim strikes me. It can take me literally years to finish a major work – The Cantos, for example, or more recently Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Drafts in its various volumes – and usually I think I get more out of a work from the prolonged engagement. Don’t ask me how long it’s going to take to finish Ted Berrigan’s Collected Poems – at the rate I’m going, I’ll be lucky to get it done before my 70th birthday. I intend to enjoy every second.
I read many books at once too. Today I finished Melville’s Clarel. Is it still the longest poem in English? I took at least two years to read it. Maybe three? Skimmed a few small chunks now and then—as one does in any really long work. Read lots of the extensive notes and commentaries too. Huge volume. Melville wrote it after he was sure his writing career was over, but before Billy Budd. So it is a pretty private mulling over of most all of his themes and characters, aspects of himself for sure by now, all woven around a slightly fictionalized remembrance of his trip to the Holy Land. Big on philosophical divigations and issues of faith after Darwin. Tender Stoicism.
Louis Menand has a terrific essay on Kerouac in today’s New Yorker, “Drive He Wrote.” He talks about how the car functions in the book and relates it to how the car works in Nabokov’s novel from the same period, Lolita. He’s got one of the best (long) paragraphs I’ve ever seen on the sexual confusions of Kerouac’s crowd. Cassady “was a priapic pinball machine whose sexual bouncing around was plainly plainly from desperation. No one would want to be like that. The Beats were no rebels; they were misfits.” Then he pinpoints how all of this works in the book. Kerouac “was not a macho anti-aesthete. He was the opposite, a poet and a failed mystic. He was what in the nineteen-fifties was referred to as a “sensitivo.” The book is really about, not sexuality, but masculinity. “There is no good cultural model, in the period in which the story is set, for the kind of men the characters are–as there was no model for Kerouac and Ginsberg themselves.” “The Beats were men who wrote about their feelings.”
Near the end he has this clincher—which, since I just read Lolita this summer and just a few weeks ago, not On the Road but the book I like better—— Dharma Bums – I totally dig, daddy-o: “Lolita” is in the canon; “On the Road” is somewhat sub-canonical—also a tour de force, like Nabokov’s book, but considered more a literary phenomenon than a work of literature.” “Nabakov showed writers how to squeeze a morality tale inside a Fabergé egg; Kerouac showed how to stretch a canvas across an entire continent.”
Exactly. Kerouac and Pollock. Nabokov and Rothko? Gottlieb? maybe there is no painterly analog to Nabokov.
