Jack Kerouac,
Interviewed by Ted Berrigan
The Paris
Review - The Art of Fiction No. 41
Part Two
INTERVIEWER
How come you've never written about Jesus? You've written about Buddha.
Wasn't Jesus a great guy too?
KEROUAC
I've never written about Jesus? In other words, you're an insane phony
who comes to my house . . . and . . . all I write about is Jesus. I am Everhard Mercurian, General of the Jesuit Army.
SAROYAN
What's the difference between Jesus and Buddha?
KEROUAC
That's a very good question. There is no difference.
SAROYAN
No difference?
KEROUAC
But there is a difference between the original Buddha of India, and the
Buddha of Vietnam who just shaves his hair and puts on a yellow robe and is a
communist agitating agent. The original Buddha wouldn't even walk on young
grass so that he wouldn't destroy it. He was born in Gorakhpur, the son of the
consul of the invading Persian hordes. And he was called Sage of the Warriors,
and he had seventeen thousand broads dancing for him all night, holding out
flowers, saying, “You want to smell it, my lord?” He says, “Git outta here you
whore.” He laid a lot of them you know. But by the time he was thirty-one years
old he got sick and tired . . . his father was protecting him from what was
going on outside the town. And so he went out on a horse, against his father's
orders and he saw a woman dying—a man being burnt on a ghat. And he said, “What
is all this death and decay?” The servant said,”That is the way things go on.
Your father was hiding you from the way things go on.”
He says, “What? My father!! Get my horse, saddle my horse! Ride me into
the forest!” They ride into the forest; he says, “Now take the saddle off the
horse. Put it on your horse, hang it on . . . Take my horse by the rein and
ride back to the castle and tell my father I'll never see him again!” And the
servant, Channa, cried, he said, “I'll never see you again. I don't care! Go
on! Shoosh! Get away!!”
He spent seven years in the forest. Biting his teeth together. Nothing
happened. Tormenting himself with starvation. He said, “I will keep my teeth
bit together until I find the cause of death.” Then one day he was stumbling
across the Rapti River, and he fainted in the river. And a young girl came by
with a bowl of milk and said, “My lord, a bowl of milk.” [Slurppp] He said, “That gives me great energy, thank you my dear.” Then he went
and sat under the Bo tree. Figuerosa. The fig tree.
He said, “Now . . . [demonstrates posture] I will cross
my legs . . . and grit my teeth until I find the cause of death.” Two o'clock
in the morning, one hundred thousand phantoms assailed him. He didn't move.
Three o'clock in the morning, the great blue ghosts!! Arrghhh!!! All accosted him. (You see I am really Scottish.) Four o'clock in the morning the mad
maniacs of hell . . . came out of manhole covers . . . in New York City. You
know Wall Street where the steam comes out? You know Wall Street, where the
manhole covers . . . steam comes up? You take off them covers—yaaaaaahhh!!!!!
Six o'clock, everything was peaceful—the birds started to trill, and he said,
“Aha! The cause of death . . . the cause of death is birth.”
Simple? So he started walking down the road to Banaras in India . . .
with long hair, like you, see.
So, three guys. One says, “Hey, here comes Buddha there who, uh, starved
with us in the forest. When he sits down here on that bucket, don't wash his
feet.” So Buddha sits down on the bucket . . . The guy rushes up and washes his
feet. “Why dost thou wash his feet?” Buddha says, “Because I go to Banaras to
beat the drum of life.” “And what is that?” “That the cause of death is birth.”
“What do you mean?” “I'll show you.”
A woman comes up with a dead baby in her arms. Says, “Bring my child
back to life if you are the Lord.” He says, “Sure I'll do that anytime. Just go
and find one family in ´Sravasti [FLAT LINE OVER THE FIRST A AND THE I PLEASE
THANKS!] that ain't had a death in the last five years. Get a mustard seed from
them and bring it to me. And I'll bring your child back to life.” She went all
over town, man, two million people, ´Sravasti [DITTO!] the town was, a bigger
town than Banaras by the way, and she came back and said, “I can't find no such
family. They've all had deaths within five years.” He said, “Then, bury your
baby.”
Then, his jealous cousin, Devadatta (that's Ginsberg you see . . . I am
Buddha and Ginsberg is Devadatta), gets this elephant drunk . . . great big
bull elephant drunk on whiskey. The elephant goes up—[trumpets like elephant going up] with a big trunk, and Buddha comes up in the road and gets the
elephant and goes like this [kneels]. And the elephant kneels
down. “You are buried in sorrow's mud! Quiet your trunk! Stay there!” He's an
elephant trainer. Then Devadatta rolled a big boulder over a cliff. And it
almost hit Buddha's head. Just missed. Boooom! He says, “That's Devadatta
again.” Then Buddha went like this [paces back and forth] in front of his boys, you see. Behind him was his cousin that loved
him . . . Ananda . . . which means “love” in Sanskrit [keeps pacing]. This is what you do in jail to keep in shape.
I know a lot of stories about Buddha, but I don't know exactly what he
said every time. But I know what he said about the guy who spit at him. He
said, “Since I can't use your abuse you may have it back.” He was great.
[Kerouac plays
piano. Drinks are served.]
SAROYAN
There's something there.
INTERVIEWER
My mother used to play that. I'm not sure how we can transcribe those
notes onto a page. We may have to include a record of you playing the piano.
Will you play that piece again for the record, Mr. Paderewski? Can you play
“Alouette”?
KEROUAC
No. Only Afro-Germanic music. After all, I'm a square head. I wonder
what whiskey will do to those obies.
INTERVIEWER
What about ritual and superstition? Do you have any about yourself when
you get down to work?
KEROUAC
I had a ritual once of lighting a candle and writing by its light and
blowing it out when I was done for the night . . . also kneeling and praying
before starting (I got that from a French movie about George Frideric Handel) .
. . but now I simply hate to write. My superstition? I'm beginning to suspect
the full moon. Also I'm hung up on the number nine though I'm told a Piscean
like myself should stick to number seven; but I try to do nine touchdowns a
day, that is, I stand on my head in the bathroom, on a slipper, and touch the
floor nine times with my toe tips, while balanced. This is incidentally more
than yoga, it's an athletic feat, I mean imagine calling me “unbalanced” after
that. Frankly I do feel that my mind is going. So another “ritual” as you call
it, is to pray to Jesus to preserve my sanity and my energy so I can help my
family: that being my paralyzed mother, and my wife, and the ever-present
kitties. Okay?
INTERVIEWER
You typed out On the
Road in three weeks, The Subterraneans in three days and nights. Do you still produce at this fantastic rate?
Can you say something of the genesis of a work before you sit down and begin
that terrific typing—how much of it is set in your mind, for example?
KEROUAC
You think out what actually happened, you tell friends long stories
about it, you mull it over in your mind, you connect it together at leisure,
then when the time comes to pay the rent again you force yourself to sit at the
typewriter, or at the writing notebook, and get it over with as fast as you can
. . . and there's no harm in that because you've got the whole story lined up.
Now how that's done depends on what kind of steel trap you've got up in that
little old head. This sounds boastful but a girl once told me I had a
steel-trap brain, meaning I'd catch her with a statement she'd made an hour ago
even though our talk had rambled a million light-years away from that point . .
. you know what I mean, like a lawyer's mind, say. All of it is in my mind,
naturally, except that language that is used at the time that it is used . . .
And as for On the
Road and The Subterraneans, no I can't
write that fast anymore . . . Writing The Subs in three nights
was really a fantastic athletic feat as well as mental, you shoulda seen me
after I was done . . .. I was pale as a sheet and had lost fifteen pounds and
looked strange in the mirror. What I do now is write something like an average
of eight thousand words a sitting, in the middle of the night, and another
about a week later, resting and sighing in between. I really hate to write. I
get no fun out of it because I can't get up and say I'm working, close my door,
have coffee brought to me, and sit there camping like a “man of letters” “doing
his eight hour day of work” and thereby incidentally filling the printing world
with a lot of dreary self-imposed cant and bombast, bombast being Scottish for pillow stuffing. Haven't you heard a politician use
fifteen hundred words to say something he could have said in exactly three
words? So I get it out of the way so as not to bore myself either.
SAROYAN
Do you usually try to see everything clearly and not think of any
words—just to see everything as clear as possible and then write out of the
feeling? With Tristessa, for example.
KEROUAC
You sound like a writing seminar at Indiana University.
SAROYAN
I know but . . .
KEROUAC
All I did was suffer with that poor girl and then when she fell on her
head and almost killed herself . . . remember when she fell on her head? She
was all busted up and everything. She was the most gorgeous little Indian chick
you ever saw. I say Indian, pure Indian. Esperanza Villanueva. Villanueva is a
Spanish name from I don't know where—Castile. But she's Indian. So she's a half
Indian, half Spanish . . . beauty. Absolute beauty. She had bones, man, just
bones, skin and bones. And I didn't write in the book how I finally nailed her.
You know? I did. I finally nailed her. She said, “Shhhhhhhhhh! Don't let the
landlord hear.” She said, “Remember, I'm very weak and sick.” I said, “I know,
I've been writing a book about how you're weak and sick.”
INTERVIEWER
How come you didn't put that part in the book?
KEROUAC
Because Claude's wife told me not to put it in. She said it would spoil
the book.
But it was not a conquest. She was out like a light. On M. M., that's morphine. And in fact I made a big run for her from way uptown
to downtown to the slum district . . . and I said, “Here's your stuff.” She
said, “Shhhhhh!” She gave herself a shot and I said, “Ah . . . now's the time.”
And I got my little no-good piece. But . . . it was certainly justification of
Mexico!
STELLA
Here kitty! He's gone out again.
KEROUAC
She was nice, you would have liked her. Her real name was Esperanza. You
know what that means?
INTERVIEWER
No.
KEROUAC
In Spanish, “hope.” Tristessa means in
Spanish, “sadness,” but her real name was Hope. And she's now married to the
police chief of Mexico City.
STELLA
Not quite.
KEROUAC
Well, you're not Esperanza—I'll tell you that.
STELLA
No, I know that, dear.
KEROUAC
She was the skinniest . . . and shy . . . as a rail.
STELLA
She's married to one of the lieutenants, you told me, not to the chief.
KEROUAC
She's all right. One of these days I'm going to go see her again.
STELLA
Over my dead body.
INTERVIEWER
Were you really writing Tristessa while you were
there in Mexico? You didn't write it later?
KEROUAC
First part written in Mexico, second part written in . . . Mexico.
That's right. Nineteen fifty-five first part, '56 second part. What's the
importance about that? I'm not Charles Olson, the great artist!
INTERVIEWER
We're just getting the facts.
KEROUAC
Charles Olson gives you all the dates. You know. Everything about how he
found the hound on the beach in Gloucester. Found somebody jacking off on the
beach at . . . what do they call it? Vancouver Beach? Dig Dog River? . . .
Dogtown. That's what they call it, “Dogtown.” Well this is Shittown on the
Merrimack. Lowell is called “Shittown on the Merrimack.” I'm not going to write
a poem called Shittown and insult my town. But if I were six foot six I could
write anything, couldn't I?
INTERVIEWER
How do you get along now with other writers? Do you correspond with
them?
KEROUAC
I correspond with John Clellon Holmes but less and less each year; I'm
getting lazy. I can't answer my fan mail because I haven't got a secretary to
take dictation, do the typing, get the stamps, envelopes, all that . . . and I
have nothing to answer. I ain't gonna spend the rest of my life smiling and
shaking hands and sending and receiving platitudes, like a candidate for
political office, because I'm a writer—I've got to let my mind alone, like
Greta Garbo. Yet when I go out, or receive sudden guests, we all have more fun
than a barrel of monkeys.
INTERVIEWER
What are the work-destroyers?
KEROUAC
Work-destroyers . . . work-destroyers. Time-killers? I'd say mainly the
attentions which are tendered to a writer of “notoriety” (notice I don't say
“fame”) by secretly ambitious would-be writers, who come around, or write, or
call, for the sake of the services that are properly the services of a bloody
literary agent. When I was an unknown struggling young writer, as the saying
goes, I did my own footwork, I hot-footed up and down Madison Avenue for years,
publisher to publisher, agent to agent, and never once in my life wrote a
letter to a published famous author asking for advice, or help, or, in Heaven
above, had the nerve to actually mail my manuscripts
to some poor author who then has to hustle to mail it back before he's accused
of stealing my ideas. My advice to young writers is to get themselves an agent
on their own, maybe through their college professors (as I got my first
publishers through my prof Mark Van Doren), and do their own footwork, or
“thing” as the slang goes . . . So the work-destroyers are nothing but certain people.
The work-preservers are the solitudes of night, “when the whole wide
world is fast asleep.”
INTERVIEWER
What do you find the best time and place for writing?
KEROUAC
The desk in the room, near the bed, with a good light, midnight till
dawn, a drink when you get tired, preferably at home, but if you have no home,
make a home out of your hotel room or motel room or pad: peace. [Picks up harmonica and plays.] Boy, can I play!
INTERVIEWER
What about writing under the influence of drugs?
KEROUAC
Poem 230 from Mexico
City Blues is a poem written purely on
morphine. Every line in this poem was written within an hour of one another . .
. high on a big dose of M. [Finds volume and reads.]
Love's multitudinous boneyard of decay,
An hour later:
The spilled milk of heroes,
An hour later:
Destruction of silk kerchiefs by dust storm,
An hour later:
Caress of heroes blindfolded to posts,
An hour later:
Murder victims admitted to this life,
An hour later:
Skeletons bartering fingers and joints,
An hour later:
The quivering meat of the elephants of kindness
being torn apart by vultures,
(See where Ginsberg stole that from me?) An hour later:
Conceptions of delicate kneecaps.
Say that, Saroyan.
SAROYAN
Conceptions of delicate kneecaps.
KEROUAC
Very good.
Fear of rats dripping with bacteria.
An hour later:
Golgotha Cold Hope for Gold Hope.
Say that.
SAROYAN
Golgotha Cold Hope for Cold Hope.
KEROUAC
That's pretty cold.
An hour later:
Damp leaves of autumn against the
wood of boats,
An hour later:
Seahorse's delicate imagery of glue.
Ever see a little seahorse in the ocean? They're built of glue . . . Did
you ever sniff a sea horse? No, say that.
SAROYAN
Seahorse's delicate imagery of glue.
KEROUAC
You'll do, Saroyan.
Death by long exposure to defilement.
SAROYAN
Death by long exposure to defilement.
KEROUAC
Frightening ravishing mysterious beings concealing
their sex.
SAROYAN
Frightening ravishing mysterious beings concealing their sex.
KEROUAC
Pieces of the Buddha-material frozen and sliced
microscopically
In Morgues of the North.
SAROYAN
Hey, I can't say that. Pieces of the Buddha-material frozen and sliced
microscopically in Morgues of the North.
KEROUAC
Penis apples going to seed.
SAROYAN
Penis apples going to seed.
KEROUAC
The severed gullets more numerous than sands.
SAROYAN
The severed gullets more numerous than sands.
KEROUAC
Like kissing my kitten in the belly.
SAROYAN
Like kissing my kitten in the belly.
KEROUAC
The softness of our reward.
SAROYAN
The softness of our reward.
KEROUAC
Is he really William Saroyan's son? That's wonderful! Would you mind
repeating that?
INTERVIEWER
We should be asking you a lot of very straight serious questions. When
did you meet Allen Ginsberg?
KEROUAC
First I met Claude.* And then I met Allen and then I met Burroughs.
Claude came in through the fire escape . . . There were gunshots down in the
alley—Pow! Pow!—and it was raining, and my wife says, “Here comes Claude.” And
here comes this blond guy through the fire escape, all wet. I said, “What's
this all about, what the hell is this?” He says, “They're chasing me.” Next day
in walks Allen Ginsberg carrying books. Sixteen years old with his ears
sticking out. He says, “Well, discretion is the better part of valor!” I said,
“Aw shutup. You little twitch.” Then the next day here comes Burroughs wearing
a seersucker suit, followed by the other guy.
INTERVIEWER
What other guy?
KEROUAC
It was the guy who wound up in the river. This was the guy from New
Orleans that Claude killed and threw in the river. Stabbed him twelve times in
the heart with a Boy Scout knife.
When Claude was fourteen he was the most beautiful blond boy in New
Orleans. And he joined the Boy Scout troop . . . and the Boy Scout master was a
big redheaded fairy who went to school at Saint Louis University, I think it
was.
And he had already been in love with a guy who looked just like Claude
in Paris. And this guy chased Claude all over the country; this guy had him
thrown out of Baldwin, Tulane, and Andover Prep . . . It's a queer tale, but
Claude isn't a queer.
INTERVIEWER
What about the influence of Ginsberg and Burroughs? Did you ever have
any sense then of the mark the three of you would have on American writing?
KEROUAC
I was determined to be a “great writer,” in quotes, like Thomas Wolfe,
see . . . Allen was always reading and writing poetry . . . Burroughs read a
lot and walked around looking at things. The influence we exerted on one
another has been written about over and over again . . . We were just three
interested characters, in the interesting big city of New York, around
campuses, libraries, cafeterias. You can find a lot of the details in Vanity . . . in On the
Road, where Burroughs is Bull Lee and Ginsberg is Carlo
Marx, and in Subterraneans, where they're Frank Carmody and Adam Moorad, respectively. In other
words, though I don't want to be rude to you for this honor, I am so busy
interviewing myself in my novels, and have been so busy writing down these
self-interviews, that I don't see why I should draw breath in pain every year for
the last ten years to repeat and repeat to everybody who interviews me
(hundreds of journalists, thousands of students) what I've already explained in
the books themselves. It begs sense. And it's not that important. It's our work
that counts, if anything at all, and I'm not too proud of mine or theirs or
anybody's since Thoreau and others like that, maybe because it's still too
close to home for comfort. Notoriety and public confession in the literary form
is a frazzler of the heart you were born with, believe me.
INTERVIEWER
Allen once said that he learned how to read Shakespeare, that he never
did understand Shakespeare until he heard you read Shakespeare to him.
KEROUAC
Because in a previous lifetime, that's who I was.
How like a winter hath my absence been from thee?
The pleasure of the fleeting year . . . what
freezings
have I felt? What dark days seen? Yet Summer with
his
lord surcease hath laid a big turd in my orchard.
And one hog after another comes to eat
and break my broken mountain trap, and my mousetrap
too! And here to end the sonnet, you must make sure
to say, tara-tara-tara!!!!!!
INTERVIEWER
Is that spontaneous composition?
KEROUAC
Well, the first part was Shakespeare . . . and the second part was . . .
INTERVIEWER
Have you ever written any sonnets?
KEROUAC
I'll give you a spontaneous sonnet. It has to be what, now?
INTERVIEWER
Fourteen lines.
KEROUAC
That's twelve lines with two dragging lines. That's where you bring out
your heavy artillery.
Here the fish of Scotland seen your eye
and all my nets did creak . . .
Does it have to rhyme?
INTERVIEWER
No.
KEROUAC
My poor chapped hands fall awry
and seen the Pope, his devilled eye.
And maniacs with wild hair hanging about my room
and listening to my tomb
which does not rhyme.
Seven lines?
INTERVIEWER
That was eight lines.
KEROUAC
And all the orgones of the earth will crawl
like dogs across the graves of Peru
and Scotland too.
That's ten.
Yet do not worry, sweet angel of mine
That hast thine inheritance
imbedded in mine.
INTERVIEWER
That's pretty good, Jack. How did you do that?
KEROUAC
Without studying dactyls . . . like Ginsberg . . . I met Ginsberg . . .
I'd hitchhiked all the way back from Mexico City to Berkeley, and that's a long
way baby, a long way. Mexico City across Durango . . . Chihuahua . . . Texas. I
go back to Ginsberg, I go to his cottage, I say, “Hah, we're gonna play the
music.” He says, “You know what I'm going to do tomorrow? I'm going to throw on
Mark Schorer's desk a new theory of prosody! About the dactylic arrangements of
Ovid!” [laughter.]
I said, “Quit, man. Sit under a tree and forget it and drink wine with
me . . . and Phil Whalen and Gary Snyder and all the bums of San Francisco.
Don't you try to be a big Berkeley teacher. Just be a poet under the trees . .
. and we'll wrestle and we'll break holds.” And he did take my advice. He
remembered that. He said, “What are you going to teach . . . you have parched
lips!” I said, “Naturally, I just came from Chihuahua. It's very hot down
there, phew! You go out and little pigs rub against your legs. Phew!”
So here comes Snyder with a bottle of wine . . . and here comes Whalen,
and here comes what's his name, Rexroth, and everybody . . . and we had the
poetry renaissance of San Francisco.
INTERVIEWER
What about Allen getting kicked out of Columbia? Didn't you have
something to do with that?
KEROUAC
Oh, no . . . he let me sleep in his room. He was not kicked out of
Columbia for that. The first time he let me sleep in his room, and the guy that
slept in our room with us was Lancaster who was descended from the White Roses
or Red Roses of England. But a guy came in . . . the guy that ran the floor and
he thought that I was trying to make Allen, and Allen had already written in
the paper that I wasn't sleeping there because I was trying to make him, but he
was trying to make me. But we were just actually sleeping. Then after that he
got a pad . . . he got some stolen goods in there . . . and he got some thieves
up there, Vicky and Huncke. And they were all busted for stolen goods, and a car
turned over, and Allen's glasses broke, it's all in John Holmes's Go.
Allen Ginsberg asked me when he was nineteen years old, “Should I change
my name to Allen Renard?” “You change your name to Allen Renard I'll kick you
right in the balls! Stick to Ginsberg . . .” and he did. That's one thing I
like about Allen. Allen Renard!!!
INTERVIEWER
What was it that brought all of you together in the fifties? What was it
that seemed to unify the Beat generation?
KEROUAC
Oh the Beat generation was just a phrase I used in the 1951 written
manuscript of On the
Road to describe guys like Moriarty who run around the
country in cars looking for odd jobs, girlfriends, kicks. It was thereafter
picked up by West Coast Leftist groups and turned into a meaning like “Beat
mutiny” and “Beat insurrection” and all that nonsense; they just wanted some
youth movement to grab on to for their own political and social purposes. I had
nothing to do with any of that. I was a football player, a scholarship college
student, a merchant seaman, a railroad brakeman on road freights, a script
synopsizer, a secretary . . . And Moriarty-Cassady was an actual cowboy on Dave
Uhl's ranch in New Raymer, Colorado . . . What kind of beatnik is that?
INTERVIEWER
Was there any sense of “community” among the Beat crowd?
KEROUAC
That community feeling was largely inspired by the same characters I
mentioned, like Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg; they are very socialistically minded
and want everybody to live in some kind of frenetic kibbutz, solidarity and all
that. I was a loner. Snyder is not like Whalen, Whalen is not like McClure, I
am not like McClure, McClure is not like Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg is not like
Ferlinghetti, but we all had fun over wine anyway. We knew thousands of poets
and painters and jazz musicians. There's no “Beat crowd” like you say . . .
What about Scott Fitzgerald and his “lost crowd,” does that sound right? Or
Goethe and his “Wilhelm Meister crowd”? The subject is such a bore. Pass me
that glass.
INTERVIEWER
Well, why did they split in the early sixties?
KEROUAC
Ginsberg got interested in left wing politics . . . Like Joyce, I say,
as Joyce said to Ezra Pound in the 1920s, “Don't bother me with politics, the
only thing that interests me is style.” Besides I'm bored with the new
avant-garde and the skyrocketing sensationalism. I'm reading Blaise Pascal and
taking notes on religion. I like to hang around now with nonintellectuals, as
you might call them, and not have my mind proselytized, ad infinitum. They've
even started crucifying chickens in happenings, what's the next step? An actual
crucifixion of a man . . . The Beat group dispersed as you say in the early
sixties, all went their own way, and this is my way: home life, as in the
beginning, with a little toot once in a while in local bars.
INTERVIEWER
What do you think of what they're up to now? Allen's radical political
involvement? Burroughs's cut-up methods?
KEROUAC
I'm pro-American and the radical political involvements seem to tend
elsewhere . . . The country gave my Canadian family a good break, more or less,
and we see no reason to demean said country. As for Burroughs's cut-up method,
I wish he'd get back to those awfully funny stories of his he used to write and
those marvelously dry vignettes in Naked Lunch. Cut-up is
nothing new, in fact that steel-trap brain of mine does a lot of cutting up as
it goes along . . . as does everyone's brain while talking or thinking or
writing . . . It's just an old Dada trick, and a kind of literary collage. He
comes out with some great effects though. I like him to be elegant and logical
and that's why I don't like the cut-up which is supposed to teach us that the
mind is cracked. Sure the mind's cracked, as anybody can see in a hallucinated
high, but how about an explanation of the crackedness that can be understood in
a workaday moment?
INTERVIEWER
What do you think about the hippies and the LSD scene?
KEROUAC
They're already changing, I shouldn't be able to make a judgment. And
they're not all of the same mind. The Diggers are different . . . I don't know
one hippie anyhow . . . I think they think I'm a truck-driver. And I am. As for
LSD, it's bad for people with incidence of heart disease in the family [knocks microphone off footstool . . . recovers it].
Is there any reason why you can see anything good in this here
mortality?
INTERVIEWER
Excuse me, would you mind repeating that?
KEROUAC
You said you had a little white beard in your belly. Why is there a
little white beard in your mortality belly?
INTERVIEWER
Let me think about it. Actually it's a little white pill.
KEROUAC
A little white pill?
INTERVIEWER
It's good.
KEROUAC
Give me.
INTERVIEWER
We should wait till the scene cools a little.
KEROUAC
Right. This little white pill is a little white beard in your mortality
which advises you and advertises to you that you will be growing long
fingernails in the graves of Peru.
SAROYAN
Do you feel middle-aged?
KEROUAC
No. Listen, we're coming to the end of the tape. I want to add something
on. Ask me what Kerouac means.
INTERVIEWER
Jack, tell me again what Kerouac means.
KEROUAC
Now, kairn. K (or C) A-I-R-N. What is a cairn? It's a heap of stones. Now Cornwall, cairn-wall. Now, right, kern, also K-E-R-N,
means the same thing as cairn. Kern. Cairn. Ouacmeans “language of.” So, Kernouac means the
language of Cornwall. Kerr, which is like
Deborah Kerr. Ouack means language of water. Because Kerr, Carr, etc., means water. Andcairn means heap of stones. There is no language in a heap of stones. Kerouac. Ker-(water),ouac-(language of). And it's related to the old Irish name, Kerwick, which
is a corruption. And it's a Cornish name, which in itself means cairnish. And
according to Sherlock Holmes, it's all Persian. Of course you know he's not
Persian. Don't you remember in Sherlock Holmes when he went down with Dr. Watson
and solved the case down in old Cornwall and he solved the case and then he
said, “Watson, the needle! Watson, the needle . . .” He said, “I've solved this
case here in Cornwall. Now I have the liberty to sit around here and decide and
read books, which will prove to me . . . why the Cornish people, otherwise
known as the Kernuaks, or Kerouacs, are of Persian origin. The enterprise which
I am about to embark upon,” he then said, after he got his shot, “is fraught
with eminent peril, and not fit for a lady of your tender years.” Remember
that?
MCNAUGHTON
I remember that.
KEROUAC
McNaughton remembers that. McNaughton. You think I would forget the name
of a Scotsman?
* “Claude,” Kerouac's pseudonym for Lucien Carr, is also used in Vanity of Duluoz.
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