Jack Kerouac, Interviewed by Ted Berrigan - Part One

Jack Kerouac,

Interviewed by Ted Berrigan

Part One

The Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 41

Toughts about events in your own unchangeable way . . . Well, look, did you ever hear a guy telling a long wild tale to a bunch of men in a bar and all are listening and smiling, did you ever hear that guy stop to revise himself, go back to a previous sentence to improve it, to defray its rhythmic thought impact. . . . If he pauses to blow his nose, isn't he planning his next sentence? And when he lets that next sentence loose, isn't it once and for all the way he wanted to say it? Doesn't he depart from the thought of that sentence and, as Shakespeare says, “forever holds his tongue” on the subject, since he's passed over it like a part of a river that flows over a rock once and for all and never returns and can never flow any other way in time? Incidentally, as for my bug against periods, that was for the prose in October in the Railroad Earth, very experimental, intended to clack along all the way lThe Kerouacs have no telephone. Ted Berrigan had contacted Kerouac some months earlier and had persuaded him to do the interview. When he felt the time had come for their meeting to take place, he simply showed up at the Kerouacs's house. Two friends, poets Aram Saroyan and Duncan McNaughton, accompanied him. Kerouac answered his ring; Berrigan quickly told him his name and the visit's purpose. Kerouac welcomed the poets, but before he could show them in, his wife, a very determined woman, seized him from behind and told the group to leave at once.

   “Jack and I began talking simultaneously, saying 'Paris Review!' 'Interview!' etc.,” Berrigan recalls, “while Duncan and Aram began to slink back toward the car. All seemed lost, but I kept talking in what I hoped was a civilized, reasonable, calming, and friendly tone of voice, and soon Mrs. Kerouac agreed to let us in for twenty minutes, on the condition that there be no drinking.

   “Once inside, as it became evident that we actually were in pursuit of a serious purpose, Mrs. Kerouac became more friendly, and we were able to commence the interview. It seems that people still show up constantly at the Kerouacs's looking for the author of On the Road, and stay for days, drinking all the liquor and diverting Jack from his serious occupations.

    “As the evening progressed the atmosphere changed considerably, and Mrs. Kerouac, Stella, proved a gracious and charming hostess. The most amazing thing about Jack Kerouac is his magic voice, which sounds exactly like his works. It is capable of the most astounding and disconcerting changes in no time flat. It dictates everything, including this interview.

   “After the interview, Kerouac, who had been sitting throughout the interview in a President Kennedy-type rocker, moved over to a big poppa chair and said, 'So you boys are poets, hey? Well, let's hear some of your poetry.' We stayed for about an hour longer and Aram and I read some of our things. Finally, he gave each of us a signed broadside of a recent poem of his, and we left.”

INTERVIEWER

Could we put the footstool over here to put this on?

STELLA

Yes.

JACK KEROUAC

God, you're so inadequate there, Berrigan.

INTERVIEWER

Well, I'm no tape-recorder man, Jack. I'm just a big talker, like you. OK, we're off.

KEROUAC

Okay? [Whistles.] Okay?

INTERVIEWER

Actually I'd like to start . . . The first book I ever read by you, oddly enough, since most people first read On the Road . . . the first one I read was The Town and the City . . .

KEROUAC

Gee!

INTERVIEWER

I checked it out of the library . . .

KEROUAC

Gee! Did you read Doctor Sax? Tristessa?

INTERVIEWER

You better believe it. I even read Rimbaud. I have a copy of Visions of Cody that Ron Padgett bought in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

KEROUAC

Screw Ron Padgett! You know why? He started a little magazine called White Dove Review in Kansas City, was it? Tulsa? Oklahoma . . . yes. He wrote, “Start our magazine off by sending us a great big poem.” So I sent him “The Thrashing Doves.” And then I sent him another one and he rejected the second one because his magazine was already started. That's to show you how punks try to make their way by scratching down on a man's back. Aw, he's no poet. You know who's a great poet? I know who the great poets are.

INTERVIEWER

Who?

KEROUAC

Let's see, is it . . . William Bissett of Vancouver. An Indian boy. Bill Bissett, or Bissonnette.

SAROYAN

Let's talk about Jack Kerouac.

KEROUAC

He's not better than Bill Bissett, but he's very original.

INTERVIEWER

Why don't we begin with editors. How do you . . .

KEROUAC

OK. All my editors since Malcolm Cowley have had instructions to leave my prose exactly as I wrote it. In the days of Malcolm Cowley, with On the Road and The Dharma Bums, I had no power to stand by my style for better or for worse. When Malcolm Cowley made endless revisions and inserted thousands of needless commas like, say, “Cheyenne, Wyoming” (why not just say “Cheyenne Wyoming” and let it go at that, for instance), why, I spent five hundred dollars making the complete restitution of the Bums manuscript and got a bill from Viking Press called “Revisions.” Ha ho ho. And so you asked about how do I work with an editor . . . well nowadays I am just grateful to him for his assistance in proofreading the manuscript and in discovering logical errors, such as dates, names of places. For instance, in my last book I wrote Firth of Forth then looked it up, on the suggestion of my editor, and found that I'd really sailed off the Firth of Clyde. Things like that. Or I spelled Aleister Crowley “Alisteir,” or he discovered little mistakes about the yardage in football games . . . and so forth. By not revising what you've already written you simply give the reader the actual workings of your mind during the writing itself: you confess your thouike a steam engine pulling a one-hundred-car freight with a talky caboose at the end, that was my way at the time and it still can be done if the thinking during the swift writing is confessional and pure and all excited with the life of it. And be sure of this, I spent my entire youth writing slowly with revisions and endless rehashing speculation and deleting and got so I was writing one sentence a day and the sentence had no FEELING. Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.

INTERVIEWER

What encouraged you to use the “spontaneous” style of On the Road?

KEROUAC

I got the idea for the spontaneous style of On the Road from seeing how good old Neal Cassady wrote his letters to me, all first person, fast, mad, confessional, completely serious, all detailed, with real names in his case, however (being letters). I remembered also Goethe's admonition, well Goethe's prophecy that the future literature of the West would be confessional in nature; also Dostoyevsky prophesied as much and might have started in on that if he'd lived long enough to do his projected masterwork, The Life of a Great Sinner. Cassady also began his early youthful writing with attempts at slow, painstaking, and all-that-crap craft business, but got sick of it like I did, seeing it wasn't getting out his guts and heart the way it felt coming out. But I got the flash from his style. It's a cruel lie for those West Coast punks to say that I got the idea of On the Road from him. All his letters to me were about his younger days before I met him, a child with his father, et cetera, and about his later teenage experiences. The letter he sent me is erroneously reported to be a thirteen-thousand-word letter . . . no, the thirteen-thousand-word piece was his novel The First Third, which he kept in his possession. The letter, the main letter I mean, was forty thousand words long, mind you, a whole short novel. It was the greatest piece of writing I ever saw, better'n anybody in America, or at least enough to make Melville, Twain, Dreiser, Wolfe, I dunno who, spin in their graves. Allen Ginsberg asked me to lend him this vast letter so he could read it. He read it, then loaned it to a guy called Gerd Stern who lived on a houseboat in Sausalito, California, in 1955, and this fellow lost the letter: overboard I presume. Neal and I called it, for convenience, the Joan Anderson Letter . . . all about a Christmas weekend in the pool halls, hotel rooms and jails of Denver, with hilarious events throughout and tragic too, even a drawing of a window, with measurements to make the reader understand, all that. Now listen: this letter would have been printed under Neal's copyright, if we could find it, but as you know, it was my property as a letter to me, so Allen shouldn't have been so careless with it, nor the guy on the houseboat. If we can unearth this entire forty-thousand-word letter Neal shall be justified. We also did so much fast talking between the two of us, on tape recorders, way back in 1952, and listened to them so much, we both got the secret of LINGO in telling a tale and figured that was the only way to express the speed and tension and ecstatic tomfoolery of the age . . . Is that enough?

INTERVIEWER

How do you think this style has changed since On the Road?

KEROUAC

What style? Oh, the style of On the Road. Well as I say, Cowley riddled the original style of the manuscript there, without my power to complain, and since then my books are all published as written, as I say, and the style has varied from the highly experimental speed-writing of Railroad Earth to the ingrown toenail packed mystical style of Tristessa, theNotes from Underground (by Dostoyevsky) confessional madness of The Subterraneans, the perfection of the three as one in Big Sur, I'd say, which tells a plain tale in a smooth buttery literate run, to Satori in Paris, which is really the first book I wrote with drink at my side (cognac and malt liquor) . . . and not to overlook Book of Dreams, the style of a person half-awake from sleep and ripping it out in pencil by the bed . . . yes, pencil . . . what a job! Bleary eyes, insaned mind bemused and mystified by sleep, details that pop out even as you write them you don't know what they mean, till you wake up, have coffee, look at it, and see the logic of dreams in dream language itself, see? . . . And finally I decided in my tired middle age to slow down and did Vanity of Duluoz in a more moderate style so that, having been so esoteric all these years, some earlier readers would come back and see what ten years had done to my life and thinking . . . which is after all the only thing I've got to offer, the true story of what I saw and how I saw it.

INTERVIEWER

You dictated sections of Visions of Cody. Have you used this method since?

KEROUAC

I didn't dictate sections of Visions of Cody. I typed up a segment of taped conversation with Neal Cassady, or Cody, talking about his early adventures in LA. It's four chapters. I haven't used this method since; it really doesn't come out right, well, with Neal and with myself, when all written down and with all the ahs and the ohs and the ahums and the fearful fact that the damn thing is turning and you're forced not to waste electricity or tape . . . Then again, I don't know, I might have to resort to that eventually; I'm getting tired and going blind. This question stumps me. At any rate, everybody's doing it, I hear, but I'm still scribbling. McLuhan says we're getting more oral so I guess we'll all learn to talk into the machine better and better.

INTERVIEWER

What is that state of “Yeatsian semi-trance” which provides the ideal atmosphere for spontaneous writing?

KEROUAC

Well, there it is, how can you be in a trance with your mouth yapping away . . . writing at least is a silent meditation even though you're going a hundred miles an hour. Remember that scene in La Dolce Vita where the old priest is mad because a mob of maniacs has shown up to see the tree where the kids saw the Virgin Mary? He says, “Visions are not available in all this frenetic foolishness and yelling and pushing; visions are only obtainable in silence and meditation.” Thar. Yup.

INTERVIEWER

You have said that haiku is not written spontaneously but is reworked and revised. Is this true of all your poetry? Why must the method for writing poetry differ from that of prose?

KEROUAC

No, first; haiku is best reworked and revised. I know, I tried. It has to be completely economical, no foliage and flowers and language rhythm, it has to be a simple little picture in three little lines. At least that's the way the old masters did it, spending months on three little lines and coming up, say, with:

In the abandoned boat,

The hail

Bounces about.

That's Shiki. But as for my regular English verse, I knocked it off fast like the prose, using, get this, the size of the notebook page for the form and length of the poem, just as a musician has to get out, a jazz musician, his statement within a certain number of bars, within one chorus, which spills over into the next, but he has to stop where the chorus pagestops. And finally, too, in poetry you can be completely free to say anything you want, you don't have to tell a story, you can use secret puns, that's why I always say, when writing prose, “No time for poetry now, get your plain tale.”

[Drinks are served.]

INTERVIEWER

How do you write haiku?

KEROUAC

Haiku? You want to hear haiku? You see you got to compress into three short lines a great big story. First you start with a haiku situation—so you see a leaf, as I told her the other night, falling on the back of a sparrow during a great big October wind storm. A big leaf falls on the back of a little sparrow. How you going to compress that into three lines? Now in Japanese you got to compress it into seventeen syllables. We don't have to do that in American—or English—because we don't have the same syllabic bullshit that your Japanese language has. So you say: “Little sparrow”—you don't have to say little—everybody knows a sparrow is little because they fall so you say”

Sparrow

with big leaf on its back—

windstorm

No good, don't work, I reject it.

A little sparrow

when an autumn leaf suddenly sticks to its back

from the wind.

Hah, that does it. No, it's a little bit too long. See? It's already a little bit too long, Berrigan, you know what I mean?

INTERVIEWER

Seems like there's an extra word or something, like when. How about leaving out when? Say:

A sparrow

an autumn leaf suddenly sticks to its back—

from the wind!

KEROUAC

Hey, that's all right. I think when was the extra word. You got the right idea there, O'Hara! “A sparrow, an autumn leaf suddenly”—we don't have to say suddenly do we?

A sparrow

an autumn leaf sticks to its back—

from the wind!

[Kerouac writes final version into a spiral notebook.]

INTERVIEWER

Suddenly is absolutely the kind of word we don't need there. When you publish that will you give me a footnote saying you asked me a couple of questions?

KEROUAC

[writes] Berrigan noticed. Right?

INTERVIEWER

Do you write poetry very much? Do you write other poetry besides haiku?

KEROUAC

It's hard to write haiku. I write long silly Indian poems. You want to hear my long silly Indian poem?

INTERVIEWER

What kind of Indian?

KEROUAC

Iroquois. As you know from looking at me. [Reads from notebook.]

On the lawn on the way to the store

forty-four years old for the neighbors to hear

 hey, looka, Ma I hurt myself. Especially

with that squirt.

What's that mean?

INTERVIEWER

Say it again.

KEROUAC

Hey, looka, Ma, I hurt myself, while on the way to the store I hurt myself I fell on the lawn I yell to my mother hey looka, Ma, I hurt myself. I add, especially with that squirt.

INTERVIEWER

You fell over a sprinkler?

KEROUAC

No, my father's squirt into my Ma.

INTERVIEWER

From that distance?

KEROUAC

Oh, I quit. No, I know you wouldn't get that one. I had to explain it. [Opens notebook again and reads.]

Goy means joy.

INTERVIEWER

Send that one to Ginsberg.

KEROUAC

[Reads.]

Happy people so called are hypocrites—it means

the happiness wavelength can't work without

necessary deceit, without certain scheming and lies and

hiding. Hypocrisy and deceit, no Indians. No smiling.

INTERVIEWER

No Indians?

KEROUAC

The reason you really have a hidden hostility towards me, Berrigan, is because of the French and Indian War.

INTERVIEWER

That could be.

SAROYAN

I saw a football picture of you in the cellar of Horace Mann. You were pretty fat in those days.

STELLA

Tuffy! Here Tuffy! Come on, kitty . . .

KEROUAC

Stella, let's have another bottle or two. Yeah, I'm going to murder everybody if they let me go. I did. Hot fudge sundaes! Boom! I used to have two or three hot fudge sundaes before every game. Lou Little . . .

INTERVIEWER

He was your coach at Columbia?

KEROUAC

Lou Little was my coach at Columbia. My father went up to him and said, “You sneaky long-nosed finagler . . .” He says, “Why don't you let my son, Ti Jean, Jack, start in the Army game so he can get back at his great enemy from Lowell?” And Lou Little says, “Because he's not ready.” “Who says he's not ready?” “I say he's not ready.” My father says, “Why you long nose banana nose big crook, get out of my sight!” And he comes stomping out of the office smoking a big cigar. “Come out of here Jack, let's get out of here.” So we left Columbia together. And also when I was in the United States Navy during the war—1942—right in front of the admirals, he walked in and says, “Jack, you are right! The Germans should not be our enemies. They should be our allies, as it will be proven in time.” And the admirals were all there with their mouths open, and my father would take no shit from nobody—my father didn't have nothing but a big belly about this big [gestures with arms out in front of him] and he would go POOM! [Kerouac gets up and demonstrates, by puffing his belly out in front of him with explosive force and saying “POOM!”] One time he was walking down the street with my mother, arm in arm, down the Lower East Side. In the old days, you know, the 1940s. And here comes a whole bunch of rabbis walking arm in arm . . . tee-dah tee-dah tee-dah . . . and they wouldn't part for this Christian man and his wife. So my father went POOM! And he knocked a rabbi right in the gutter. Then he took my mother and walked on through.

Now, if you don't like that, Berrigan, that's the history of my family. They don't take no shit from nobody. In due time I ain't going to take no shit from nobody. You can record that.

Is this my wine?

INTERVIEWER

Was The Town and the City written under spontaneous composition principles?

KEROUAC

Some of it, sire. I also wrote another version that's hidden under the floorboards, with Burroughs.

INTERVIEWER

Yes, I've heard rumors of that book. Everybody wants to get at that book.

KEROUAC

It's called And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. The hippos. Because Burroughs and I were sitting in a bar one night and we heard a newscaster saying “ . . . and so the Egyptians attacked blah blah . . . and meanwhile there was a great fire in the zoo in London and the fire raced across the fields and the hippos were boiled in their tanks! Goodnight everyone!” That's Bill, he noticed that. Because he notices them kind of things.

INTERVIEWER

You really did type up his Naked Lunch manuscript for him in Tangier?

KEROUAC

No . . . the first part. The first two chapters. I went to bed, and I had nightmares . . . of great long bolognas coming out of my mouth. I had nightmares typing up that manuscript . . . I said, “Bill!” He said, “Keep typing it.” He said, “I bought you a goddamn kerosene stove here in North Africa, you know.” Among the Arabs . . . it's hard to get a kerosene stove. I'd light up the kerosene stove, and take some bedding and a little pot, or kef as we called it there . . . or maybe sometimes hashish . . . there, by the way, it's legal . . . and I'd go toke toke toke toke and when I went to bed at night, these things kept coming out of my mouth. So finally these other guys showed up like Alan Ansen and Allen Ginsberg, and they spoiled the whole manuscript because they didn't type it up the way he wrote it.

INTERVIEWER

Grove Press has been issuing his Olympia Press books with lots of changes and things added.

KEROUAC

Well, in my opinion Burroughs hasn't given us anything that would interest our breaking hearts since he wrote like he did in Naked Lunch. Now all he does is that “breakup” stuff; it's called . . . where you write a page of prose, you write another page of prose . . . then you fold it over and you cut it up and you put it together . . . and shit like that . . .

INTERVIEWER

What about Junky, though?

KEROUAC

It's a classic. It's better than Hemingway—it's just like Hemingway but even a little better too. It says: “Danny comes into my pad one night and says, ‘Hey, Bill, can I borrow your sap.’” Your sap—do you know what a sap is?

SAROYAN

A blackjack?

KEROUAC

It's a blackjack. Bill says, “I pulled out my underneath drawer, and underneath some nice shirts I pulled out my blackjack. I gave it to Danny and said, ‘Now don't lose it, Danny’—Danny says, ‘Don't worry I won't lose it.’ He goes off and loses it.”

Sap . . . blackjack . . . that's me. Sap . . . blackjack.

INTERVIEWER

That's a haiku: Sap, blackjack, that's me. You better write that down.

KEROUAC

No.

INTERVIEWER

Maybe I'll write that down. Do you mind if I use that one?

KEROUAC

Up your ass with Mobil gas!

INTERVIEWER

You don't believe in collaborations? Have you ever done any collaborations, other than with publishers?

KEROUAC

I did a couple of collaborations in bed with Bill Cannastra in lofts. With blondes.

INTERVIEWER

Was he the guy that tried to climb off the subway train at Astor Place, in Holmes's Go?

KEROUAC

Yes. Yeah, well he says, “Let's take all our clothes off and run around the block” . . . It was raining you know. Sixteenth Street off Seventh Avenue. I said, “Well, I'll keep my shorts on”—he says, “No, no shorts.” I said, “I'm going to keep my shorts on.” He said, “All right, but I'm not going to wear mine.” And we trot-trot-trot-trot down the block. Sixteenth to Seventeenth . . . and we come back and run up the stairs—nobody saw us.

INTERVIEWER

What time of day?

KEROUAC

But he was absolutely naked . . . about three or four A.M. It rained. And everybody was there. He was dancing on broken glass and playing Bach. Bill was the guy who used to teeter off his roof—six flights up, you know? He'd go, “You want me to fall?” We'd say, “No, Bill, no.” He was an Italian. Italians are wild, you know.

INTERVIEWER

Did he write? What did he do?

KEROUAC

He says, “Jack, come with me and look down through this peephole.” We looked down through the peephole, we saw a lot of things . . . into his toilet.

I said, “I'm not interested in that, Bill.” He said, “You're not interested in anything.” Auden would come the next day, the next afternoon, for cocktails. Maybe with Chester Kallman. Tennessee Williams.

INTERVIEWER

Was Neal Cassady around in those days? Did you already know Neal Cassady when you were involved with Bill Cannastra?

KEROUAC

Oh yes, yes, ahem . . . he had a great big pack of pot. He always was a pot happy man.

INTERVIEWER

Why do you think Neal doesn't write?

KEROUAC

He has written . . . beautifully! He has written better than I have. Neal's a very funny guy. He's a real Californian. We had more fun than five thousand Socony Gasoline Station attendants can have. In my opinion he's the most intelligent man I've ever met in my life. Neal Cassady. He's a Jesuit by the way. He used to sing in the choir. He was a choirboy in the Catholic churches of Denver. And he taught me everything that I now do believe about anything that there may be to be believed about divinity.

INTERVIEWER

About Edgar Cayce?

KEROUAC

No, before he found out about Edgar Cayce he told me all these things in the section of the life he led when he was on the road with me—he said, “We know God, don't we Jack?” I said, “Yessir boy.” He said, “Don't we know that nothing's going to happen wrong?” “Yessir.” “And we're going to go on and on . . . and hmmmmm ja-bmmmmmmm . . .” He was perfect. And he's always perfect. Every time he comes to see me I can't get a word in edgewise.

INTERVIEWER

You wrote about Neal playing football in Visions of Cody.

KEROUAC

Yes, he was a very good football player. He picked up two beatniks that time in blue jeans in North Beach, Frisco. He said, “I got to go, bang bang, do I got to go?” He's working on the railroad . . . had his watch out . . . “Two-fifteen, boy I got to be there by two-twenty. I tell you boys drive me over down there so I be on time with my train . . . So I can get my train on down to”—what's the name of that place—San Jose? They say, “Sure kid” and Neal says, “Here's the pot.” So—“We maybe look like great beatniks with great beards . . . but we are cops. And we are arresting you.”

So, a guy went to the jailhouse and interviewed him from the New York Post and he said, “Tell that Kerouac if he still believes in me to send me a typewriter.” So I sent Allen Ginsberg one hundred dollars to get a typewriter for Neal. And Neal got the typewriter. And he wrote notes on it, but they wouldn't let him take the notes out. I don't know where the typewriter is. Genet wrote all of Our Lady of the Flowers in the shithouse . . . the jailhouse. There's a great writer, Jean Genet. He kept writing and kept writing until he got to a point where he was going to come by writing about it . . . until he came into his bed—in the can. The French can. The French jail. Prison. And that was the end of the chapter. Every chapter is Genet coming off. Which I must admit Sartre noticed.

INTERVIEWER

You think that's a different kind of spontaneous writing?

KEROUAC

Well, I could go to jail and I could write every night a chapter about Magee, Magoo, and Molly. It's beautiful. Genet is really the most honest writer we've had since Kerouac and Burroughs. But he came before us. He's older. Well, he's the same age as Burroughs. But I don't think I've been dishonest. Man, I've had a good time! God, man, I rode around this country free as a bee. But Genet is a very tragic and beautiful writer. And I give them the crown. And the laurel wreath. I don't give the laurel wreath to Richard Wilbur! Or Robert Lowell. Give it to Jean Genet and William Seward Burroughs. And to Allen Ginsberg and to Gregory Corso, especially.

INTERVIEWER

Jack, how about Peter Orlovsky's writings. Do you like Peter's things?

KEROUAC

Peter Orlovsky is an idiot!! He's a Russian idiot. Not even Russian, he's Polish.

INTERVIEWER

He's written some fine poems.

KEROUAC

Oh yeah. My . . . what poems?

INTERVIEWER

He has a beautiful poem called “Second Poem.”

KEROUAC

“My brother pisses in the bed . . . and I go in the subway and I see two people kissing . . .”

INTERVIEWER

No, the poem that says “it's more creative to paint the floor than to sweep it.”

KEROUAC

 That's a lot of shit! That is the kind of poetry that was written by another Polish idiot who was a Polish nut called Apollinaire. Apollinaire is not his real name, you know.

There are some fellows in San Francisco that told me that Peter was an idiot. But I like idiots, and I enjoy his poetry. Think about that, Berrigan. But for my taste, it's Gregory.

Give me one of those.

INTERVIEWER

One of these pills?

KEROUAC

Yeah. What are they? Forked clarinets?

INTERVIEWER

They're called Obetrol. Neal is the one that told me about them.

KEROUAC

Overtones?

INTERVIEWER

Overtones? No, overcoats.

SAROYAN

What was that you said . . . at the back of the Grove anthology . . . that you let the line go a little longer to fill it up with secret images that come at the end of the sentence.

KEROUAC

He's a real Armenian! Sediment. Delta. Mud. It's where you start a poem . . .

As I was walking down the street one day

I saw a lake where people were cutting off my rear,

17,000 priests singing like George Burns

and then you go on . . .

And I'm making jokes about me

and breaking my bones in the earth

and here I am the great John Armenian

coming back to earth

now you remember where you were in the beginning and you say . . .

Ahaha! Tatatatadooda . . . Screw Turkey!

See? You remembered the line at the end . . . you lose your mind in the middle.

SAROYAN

Right.

KEROUAC

That applies to prose as well as poetry.

INTERVIEWER

But in prose you are telling a story . . .

KEROUAC

In prose you make the paragraph. Every paragraph is a poem.

INTERVIEWER

Is that how you write a paragraph?

KEROUAC

When I was running downtown there, and I was going to do this, and I was laying there, with that girl there, and a guy took out his scissors and I took him inside there, he showed me some dirty pictures. And I went out and fell downstairs with the potato bags.

INTERVIEWER

Did you ever like Gertrude Stein's work?

KEROUAC

Never interested me too much. I liked “Melanctha” a little bit.

I should really go to school and teach these kids. I could make two thousand bucks a week. You can't learn these things. You know why? Because you have to be born with tragic fathers.

INTERVIEWER

You can only do that if you are born in New England.

KEROUAC

Incidentally, my father said your father wasn't tragic.

SAROYAN

I don't think my father is tragic.

KEROUAC

My father said that Saroyan . . . William Saroyan ain't tragic at all . . . he's fulla shit. And I had a big argument with him. The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze is pretty tragic, I would say.

SAROYAN

He was just a young man then, you know.

KEROUAC

Yeah, but he was hungry, and he was on Times Square. Flying. A young man on the flying trapeze. That was a beautiful story. It killed me when I was a kid.

INTERVIEWER

Do you remember a story by William Saroyan about the Indian who came to town and bought a car and got the little kid to drive it for him?

STELLA

A Cadillac.

KEROUAC

What town was that?

SAROYAN

Fresno. That was Fresno.

KEROUAC

Well, you remember the night I was taking a big nap and you came up outside my window on a white horse . . .

SAROYAN

“The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse.”

KEROUAC

And I looked out the window and said, “What is this?” You said, “My name is Aram. And I'm on a white horse.”

SAROYAN

Mourad.

KEROUAC

“My name is Mourad,” excuse me. No, my name is . . . I was Aram, you were Mourad. You said, “Wake up!” I didn't want to wake up. I wanted to sleep. My Name Is Aram is the name of the book. You stole a white horse from a farmer and you woke up me, Aram, to go riding with you.

SAROYAN

Mourad was the crazy one who stole the horse.

KEROUAC

Hey, what's that you gave me there?

INTERVIEWER

Obetrol.

KEROUAC

Oh, obies.

INTERVIEWER

What about jazz and bop as influences rather than . . . Saroyan, Hemingway, and Wolfe?

KEROUAC

Yes, jazz and bop, in the sense of a, say, a tenor man drawing a breath and blowing a phrase on his saxophone, till he runs out of breath, and when he does, his sentence, his statement's been made . . . That's how I therefore separate my sentences, as breath separations of the mind . . . I formulated the theory of breath as measure, in prose and verse, never mind what Olson, Charles Olson says, I formulated that theory in 1953 at the request of Burroughs and Ginsberg. Then there's the raciness and freedom and humor of jazz instead of all that dreary analysis and things like “James entered the room, and lit a cigarette. He thought Jane might have thought this too vague a gesture . . .” You know the stuff. As for Saroyan, yes I loved him as a teenager, he really got me out of the nineteenth-century rut I was trying to study, not only with his funny tone but also with his neat Armenian poetic—I don't know what . . . he just got me . . . Hemingway was fascinating, the pearls of words on a white page giving you an exact picture . . . but Wolfe was a torrent of American heaven and hell that opened my eyes to America as a subject in itself.

INTERVIEWER

How about the movies?

KEROUAC

Yes, we've all been influenced by movies. Malcolm Cowley incidentally mentioned this many times. He's very perceptive sometimes: he mentioned that Doctor Sax continually mentions urine, and quite naturally it does because I had no other place to write it but on a closed toilet seat in a little tile toilet in Mexico City so as to get away from the guests inside the apartment. There, incidentally, is a style truly hallucinated, as I wrote it all on pot. No pun intended. Ho ho.

INTERVIEWER

How has Zen influenced your work?

KEROUAC

What's really influenced my work is the Mahayana Buddhism, the original Buddhism of Gautama ´Sàkyamuni, the Buddha himself, of the India of old . . . Zen is what's left of his Buddhism, or Bodhi, after its passing into China and then into Japan. The part of Zen that's influenced my writing is the Zen contained in the haiku, like I said, the three-line, seventeen-syllable poems written hundreds of years ago by guys like Basho[WITH FLAT LINE ON TOP PLEASE!!], Issa, Shiki, and there've been recent masters. A sentence that's short and sweet with a sudden jump of thought in it is a kind of haiku, and there's a lot of freedom and fun in surprising yourself with that, let the mind willy-nilly jump from the branch to the bird. But my serious Buddhism, that of ancient India, has influenced that part in my writing that you might call religious, or fervent, or pious, almost as much as Catholicism has. Original Buddhism referred to continual conscious compassion, brotherhood, the dana paramita(meaning the perfection of charity), don't step on the bug, all that, humility, mendicancy, the sweet sorrowful face of the Buddha (who was of Aryan origin by the way, I mean of Persian warrior caste, and not Oriental as pictured) . . . in original Buddhism no young kid coming to a monastery was warned that “Here we bury them alive.” He was simply given soft encouragement to meditate and be kind. The beginning of Zen was when Buddha, however, assembled all the monks together to announce a sermon and choose the first patriarch of the Mahayana church: instead of speaking, he simply held up a flower. Everybody was flabbergasted except Ka´syapiya [FLAT THINGIES OVER FIRST A AND I], who smiled. Kásyapiya [DITTO!!] was appointed the first patriarch. This idea appealed to the Chinese, like the sixth patriarch Hui-Neng who said, “From the beginning nothing ever was,” and wanted to tear up the records of Buddha's sayings as kept in the sutras; sutras are “threads of discourse.” In a way, then, Zen is a gentle but goofy form of heresy, though there must be some real kindly old monks somewhere and we've heard about the nutty ones. I haven't been to Japan. Your Maha Roshi Yoshi is simply a disciple of all this and not the founder of anything new at all, of course. On The Johnny Carson Show he didn't even mention Buddha's name. Maybe his Buddha is Mia.