Sanity of Kerouac

Sanity of Kerouac VANITY OF DULUOZ by Jack Kerouac. 280 pages. Coward-McCann. $5.50.

How in the name of all the past and present editors of the Partisan Review did Jack Kerouac, cult leader of post-World War II intellectual vagrants, ever attain standing as a member (let alone chieftain) of the avantgarde? Vanity of Duluoz, his best book, is a picaresque novel in a tradition as old as Tristram Shandy and about as avant-garde as Laurence Sterne--a man in holy orders, puckish though he was.

Actually an autobiography, the book tells of Kerouac's rise (in Lowell, Mass.), his fall (on the high seas), and his moral death and resurrection in Manhattan. As a story, it is nothing much. Growing up, Kerouac accepts his household gods (Breton ancestry and Roman Catholic religion), goes to school, plays football, goes to sea, and comes home shorn of vanity and, one is given to hope, restored to sanity and innocence. The one touch of melodrama is provided by Kerouac's pal Claude who murders an obstreperous pansy.

Waifs & Strays. This is fundamentally the story of all prodigals, and through it the book attempts to get to the heart of America as a country of wanderers --or as Evelyn Waugh put it, "a nation of waifs and strays."

Norman Mailer is a novelist of essentially the same ail-American genre, but Mailer has developed a narcissistic devotion to his own quirks of mind; Kerouac a far less talented man, nevertheless compels more respect for his dogged and humble concern to tell a plain tale and to explain himself, rather than demonstrate the wickedness or folly of others. Nor is Kerouac capable of the brutal vulgarity of a writer such as James Jones, whose books strike anyone of any sensitivity as weary, stale, flat--and profitable.

Unfortunately, Kerouac lacks the verbal talent to match his passionate commitment to the truth in himself. He suffers from a breathless style and the frequent burble of "fine writing." His book must be reluctantly put down with the thought that here is another monument brave in conception but botched by clumsy chisels.

Like Galileo. It is probably unfair to quote a slab of his prose to show what is unsatisfactory about his work; to quote anything less is even more unfair because his prose comes in great untrimmed slabs. Sample: "But the mysterious beautiful thing of going to sea occurred that night: just a few hours after all that junk of bars, fighting, streets, subways, boom, there I am standing by the whipping shrouds and snapping lines in the Atlantic Ocean in the night off New Jersey, we're sailing south to Norfolk to load on for Italy, everything is washed away by the clean sea . . . The stars are big, they rock side by side like Galileo drunk and Kepler stoned and Copernicus thinking, like Vasco da Gama in his bunk in thought, the wind, the cleanness, the dark, the quiet blue light in the bridge where hand holds wheel and course is set. The sleeping seamen below."

Whew! Anyone can see that there are far too many scientists, navigators and Great Names in this sentence and far too few punctuation marks; even the sleeping seamen below would walk in their sleep for the nearest editor. The strange thing is that through the dreadful indiscipline of the prose, or perhaps because of it, the innocence of Kerouac is established beyond question. Alas, in literature, as in all other secular endeavors, innocence is not enough. The reader is left with the uneasy feeling that Kerouac's pilgrimage should have brought him to an understanding more profound than the discovery that "all is vanity."

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