Jack's Book by Barry Gifford & Lawrence Lee

Author:Barry Gifford & Lawrence Lee [Gifford, Barry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101580462
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2012-04-23T16:00:00+00:00

The little notebooks provided raw material of two kinds: diaristic details, like a reporter’s notes, about events at hand and an endless retracing in memory of all the events of his life, reaching back to his earliest childhood memories in Lowell.

The following year, 1952, Jack adopted the sketching form to record his dreams. A selection of these notes, published in 1961 as Book of Dreams, shows the depth of the psychological forces that enrich his novels begun after sketching gave him a way to mine the material. But these dreams, which actually mix dreams with waking recollection, are presented as a patient might recall them for an analyst, without theoretical interpretation of any kind.

In a significant entry in the dream journal police are searching for Jack as an exhibitionist and he is running from them without a pair of trousers. His search for something to cover himself with leads him to a room crowded with his manuscripts and poems, all of them embarrassingly revealing. The dream makes him feel like “a sheepish guilty idiot turning out rejectable, unpublishable manuscripts.”

In another dream Leo rises from the dead again and again to wander the streets of Lowell in search of work, but his ghost never comes home in the evening to Jack and Mémêre.

Late in 1951, utilizing this new technique, Jack had begun to expand his early notes on Neal, which had gone unused in the first draft of On the Road, into the eventual Visions of Neal.

Henri Cru wrote from California with another promise of a berth on a merchant ship, but as before, when Jack arrived in San Francisco there was no shipping job to be had. The trip did give Jack a chance to continue writing about Neal with the model before him.

“You going to write another book, huh?” Neal had written, referring to the embryonic On the Road. “I’m trying to write one, right? You love me, don’t you? I love you, don’t I? If we’re so all-fired good, then think of the funny times historians of the future will have in digging up period in last half of ’51 when K lived with C, much like Gauguin and Van Gogh, or Neitche [sic] and Wagner, or anybody…”

Neal, as a patron, offered Jack the garret of the Cassadys’ rented house on Nob Hill. This visit was Jack’s first lengthy contact with Carolyn. With Neal’s consent and implicit urging the two became lovers.

Matters became strained the night of Neal’s twenty-sixth birthday, February 8, 1952, which was to be a quiet dinner at home for the three of them. Jack never appeared, and late at night, after Carolyn and Neal had gone to bed and made love, Jack telephoned “from the police station,” as Neal told Carolyn. Cassady dressed and left. Hours passed, and neither returned.

Finally, after dawn, Jack and Neal reappeared, drunk, and Jack had with him a prostitute he led to his room in the attic. Carolyn was infuriated. Later Jack added a fresh inscription to the Cassadys’ copy of The Town and the City and laid it on her dressing table.

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