William S. Burroughs, Junky, 1953

For the proper experience this is one of those books that ought to be read as a first edition, with its cheap cover illustration that was meant to inspire a degree of horror towards heroin use in those who picked it up. Starting life as one half of an Ace Original double paperback, with fifty years hindsight it’s easy to see how Junky took the road from cheap pulp fiction to cult novel, and while Burroughs didn’t intentionally romanticise heroin use, today, like heroin itself, this kind of book or film is now mainstream. Under the thin disguise of ‘William Lee’ Burroughs is unapologetically confessional, yet Junky probably wouldn’t have made publication at all if he didn’t also display the redemptive element of repeatedly trying to kick his heroin habit (and instead fall back on the lesser social evils of morphine, coke, alcohol and petty crime), first in New York, later in New Orleans then Mexico City. Junky isn’t an alienating experience because Burroughs does not take you on that journey; instead his alienation arrived here fully formed with the everyday world already rendered meaningless – including his wife (who he killed between drafts of this book) and, for the most part, the law – and in replacement his junk habit was promoted to the almost everyday activity of a natural bodily function like sex, a mere extension of himself stripped of its negative and antisocial connotations. Burroughs’s writing is for the most part deadpan and functional yet he occasionally indulges in wonderfully descriptive and concise analyses of what’s going on beneath the skin – not his own skin or his own experiences while under, but the skins of those exterior horrors, other people, and these passages were an early root from which were later to come the excesses of Naked Lunch. This is a relatively safe book now, but it’s lost none of its immediacy.  PY

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Jack Kerouac, Beat Generation, 1957

A play that Kerouac wrote around the time of writing On the Road, but was only discovered in 2005 in a New York attic. The entire play is just a group of friends mostly “shooting the shit”, easy dialogue that rarely scratches below the surface, though Kerouac’s weighing up of his Catholicism against his interest in Buddhism finds a voice in the third act. A minor piece very much of its time and place, the most useful inclusions in this edition are the brief bibliography and biography of Kerouac that, when combined, succinctly sum up his life and not inconsiderable troubles in just fifteen pages.  PY

MORE ON JACK KEROUAC :  BEAT MUSEUM  |  PENGUIN 'JACK KEROUAC' MINISITE  |  WIKIPEDIA

Jack Kerouac, Tristessa, 1960

Two trips into the junkie houses of Mexico City in pursuit of Tristessa, a beautiful Mexican morphine addict, make this one of Kerouac’s most uncomfortable and tragic short books. The “kickwriting” occasionally goes into overdrive and Kerouac often risks losing the reader if you don’t keep up with the pace. It’s a long meditation on a slow loss, and one (as usual) fuelled by plenty of drink and drugs.  PY

MORE ON JACK KEROUAC :  BEAT MUSEUM  |  PENGUIN 'JACK KEROUAC' MINISITE  |  WIKIPEDIA

Jack Kerouac, On the Road, 1957

— On the Road swings to the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns and drugs, with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveller and mystic, the living epitome of Beat. Now recognized as a modern classic, its American Dream is nearer that of Walt Whitman than Scott Fitzgerald, and it goes racing towards the sunset with unforgettable exuberance, poignancy and autobiographical passion.

The big deal about On the Road was mostly lost on me when I read it back in the 1970s, at a time when its prominent reputation meant it should have made much more of an impact. After a recent second reading and having since learned more about Kerouac I can understand what set him off on his road back and forth across the US but the excess of stimulants still leaves this reader non-plussed. Neal Cassady, incarnated here as Dean Moriarty and being both the heart and tao of the book and the whole Beat Generation, was the focus around whom the more observant Kerouac bracketed his own search in the character of Sal Paradise. There are some great passages and the last trip into Mexico feels like an encore to an already epic story, the whole of which is written in rather sentimental style compared to his later ‘stream of consciousness’ approach. I still think he was intellectually lazy in comparison to Burroughs or Ginsberg but On the Road – or more specifically Dean Moriarty himself – still takes you on a fast and thrill-seeking ride, the impetus of which is hard to shake off.  PY

MORE ON JACK KEROUAC :  BEAT MUSEUM  |  PENGUIN 'JACK KEROUAC' MINISITE  |  WIKIPEDIA

Bob Dylan, Tarantula, 1966

As self-indulgent as his sleeve notes to Highway 61 Revisited, this appeared as an underground press publication around 1965/66 though not as a book until 1971. Marginally ‘beat lit’ at least in its aspirations, as a stream-of-consciousness text it would make better sense if Dylan had given himself narrower parameters within which to work, and is only identifiably ‘Dylanesque’ because each chapter is capped with some pretty shaky urban poetry. Yes, he always was a better songwriter than poet. May make more sense when stoned.  PY

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