Hemingway = Paris
Beats = Greenwich
Village and San Francisco
Please.
Famous
writers aren’t famous because of where they live. And they don’t always live
where they were famous for living.
Ernest
Hemingway lived and wrote in Paris, Key West and lots of other places. Jack
Kerouac started writing his novel On
the Road
at his parents’ home in Ozone Park, Queens. And though my fictional character Ruby thinks he wrote
it on toilet paper, Jack’s manuscript was actually tracing paper that he pasted
into a roll so he could write without paragraph breaks.
We
like to think of artists living in little artists’ “pockets” and hanging out
with other artists all the time. But how boring would that be, especially for
the artist? The truth is that artists need to get out into the world if they’re
going to write about it. That’s why Kerouac went across the country to write On the Road.
He
said he was looking for God and found Him in the sky above San Francisco. He
also found people of all sorts doing all sorts of things and wrote about them
too. Jack Kerouac was not a Hollywood stereotype of someone in the Beat
Generation, though he may have invented the term. Books about him say he was
deeply connected to his Catholic roots, adored his mother and joined the
military. He is also supposed to have smoked weed and drank but approved of Senator Joe McCarthy, the senator
who created a rabidly anti-communist crusade in the 1950s.
So
who was Kerouac? Does it matter? Who knows? I believe the only way to learn
anything about an artist is to look at what he or she puts out into the world
for you. My favorite Kerouac book is a slim novel called The
Subterraneans,
which I favor more than anything else he’s ever done. It’s about a failed
romance, but it’s really about jazz and language; the words dance like song
lyrics, and if I’m ever having trouble with songwriting, I open up The Subterraneans and read.
Kerouac
was supposed to have originated the term “Beat” with a few friends and it was
said to be about being beaten by the world and the rat race wheel of success;
it’s also about withdrawing from the world. The hippie “movement” of the 1960s
was supposed to have grown out of the Beat Generation and was also supposed to
be about withdrawal— focusing on art, music and relationships more than
material things.
I
think both generations were really about locating the internal worlds we create
in our heads—but that doesn’t mean people withdrew into Greenwich Village or
San Francisco and hung out all day barefoot and did drugs. (Well, maybe
sometimes). They also got up every day and wrote or sang or worked at jobs they
hated so they could write or sing or paint or create something. They traveled
all over the country and world to meet people who drove trucks, worked on farms
or led strikes. They weren’t trying to be artists or heroes or any kind of
Generation. They just wanted to be.
What
is Ruby looking for throughout The Beat
on Ruby’s Street? I don’t think she knows, exactly, but she loves the way
poets in her neighborhood use language. I think that’s because she’s learning
what all artists know; that art isn’t good for anything, it can’t be used for
anything, it isn’t practical or helpful and it doesn’t owe anything to anyone.
If it’s important at all, it’s because it might, possibly, maybe help viewers and readers save time when trying to figure out
their own feelings or perceptions.
Being
an artist, though, isn’t tied to any one place or time. (By the time I was
tooling around Greenwich Village it was the post-punk era and God knows what
that was.) I also don’t think artists think all that much about being in any special
place or living any certain way. It’s about what you see, what you want, and
what you do with it. Anywhere, anytime.
Minnesota.
Paris.New York.
Maine.
Rockford, Illinois.
Wherever
you are. You’re out there.
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