He was scheduled to begin his new job in late June. On 18 June, Kerouac left McCorckle’s cabin and hiked to Marblemount, California. The publication of these books and others would shatter his bliss once and for all.
All of this was in motion with or without him. He had completed Tristessa (1960), a candlelight-written tome scribbled, he told Cowley, “in a stone hovel”. Though he had just completed a fine run of daring, uncompromising prose and poetry, he felt he was “up shit creek, there’s just no commercial person that understands what I’m doing.” He had hoped for Visions of Gerard to be published, defending the book’s Buddhist overtones that were criticized by editor Malcolm Cowley (it was published in 1963).
There was a batch of manuscripts in the hands of his agent. On 7 February, he wrote Whalen, suggesting that he would live in Mill Valley for a few weeks. “Something,” Kerouac wrote Snyder, “will happen to me on Desolation Peak.” If words weren’t enough, it was the map he studied of Mount Baker National Forest, and a photo of Mount Hozomeen mailed to him from Snyder. Wolfe’s descriptive powers urged him to move anywhere beyond New York’s concrete cage of skyscrapers. Jack was inspired by reading Thomas Wolfe’s 1951 posthumous notebook, A Western Journal, about his travels to the American northwest. There Kerouac found himself, or maybe lost himself, for over 63-days of isolation. When he was made aware of an opportunity to work as a fire lookout at Washington Park’s Mount Baker National Forest, he applied and was accepted. Previously, Kerouac spent 15 days in New York, writing to Whalen that he had had a “miserable” time of it. In this rustic setting, the poets and practicing Buddhists luxuriated in the serenity Kerouac had craved for the past few years. There he lived, for a few weeks, with poets Gary Snyder and Philp Whalen, in an unfinished shack set in a perfumy cluster of eucalyptus and evergreen trees. In March 1956, 34-year-old Jack Kerouac hitchhiked to Mill Valley, California (about 40 minutes from San Francisco).
0 kommentar(er)
