'The Beats: A Graphic History' http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/20/RVGS1650K8.DTL
Gerald Nicosia, Special to The Chronicle Sunday, March 22, 2009 The Beats A Graphic History By Harvey Pekar, Nancy J. Peters, Penelope Rosemont, Joyce Brabner, Trina Robbins and Tuli Kupferberg (Hill and Wang; 199 pages; $22) In some respects, Harvey Pekar is today what Jack Kerouac was to the America of the '50s and '60s - a gadfly, a voice of the working class, an honest eye on the world and a prophet very much unappreciated in his own time. So a book by Harvey Pekar on the Beats ought to be a natural sequel to the underground American Splendor comics for which the Cleveland file-clerk-turned-author became famous. Unfortunately, the early part of "The Beats: A Graphic History," especially the section about Kerouac, is a pure disaster. I have no problem with the variation in graphic representations of Kerouac, ranging, for example, from Ed Piskor's schlumpy John Garfield look-alike, to Jay Kinney's James Dean-style matinee idol, to Summer McClinton's rather dufus-looking Jack, a sort of slightly better-looking Ernest Borgnine. The diversity of cartoon styles, in fact, helps keep the book moving. But facts cannot be altered with the same impunity. On the very first page there is a mistake. We're told that Kerouac "developed a love for literature and wanted to become a professional writer" while at Horace Mann prep school in New York. Actually Kerouac, though the son of blue-collar workers in Lowell, Mass., had read his way through the public library before he ever left his depressed mill town. His heroes were already Jack London, William Saroyan and Thomas Wolfe, and the only reason he went to the Big Apple was to follow in their footsteps. Truth vs. fiction After two dozen errors, I stopped counting. But I couldn't help asking myself what reason there can be to retell these stories yet again if one can't bring something new to them. Some might say there's no harm in Pekar turning a legitimate real daughter (Jan Kerouac) into an illegitimate fake one, or turning an unattractive older lady (Stella Sampas) married as a caretaker for Kerouac's mother into a beautiful, sexy bride, but a lot of Pekar's misrepresentations go deeper, and truly change what the Beat movement stood for and what forces opposed and undermined it. Kerouac was not "hampered in trying to capitalize on his new fame ... by booze and drugs," as Pekar claims. Think of all the famous drunken writers, from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Charles Bukowski. Rather, Kerouac was viciously attacked by the media - called a "black spot on America" and a "spokesman for thugs" - for a full decade after his belated success with his novel "On the Road" in 1957. And Kerouac wasn't mainly seeking publicity anyway, so it's an even further insult when Pekar suggests Kerouac didn't visit his friend Neal Cassady in San Quentin, where Neal spent two years for a minor pot bust, because he feared "bad publicity." The real reason Kerouac didn't visit Cassady in prison was Jack's shame and fear that by using his friend to create a figurehead of revolutionary personal freedom, he'd made Cassady a target of the police, and thus destroyed his friend's career and family life. But just when I began to give up on it, the book picked up, primarily because Pekar's understanding of the minor Beat figures is far sharper than his take on the famous ones. Considering that Pekar is an everyman's everyman, it makes perfect sense that he'd feel more kinship with figures like the indigent, invalid poet and painter Kenneth Patchen, who spent most of his life at home being cared for by his wife, Miriam, or Cleveland's first working-class rebel poet, d.a. levy, who was busted so many times for obscenity that he committed suicide just after his 26th birthday. Lesser-known names When we get to the array of Beat fringe artists and poets, the book takes on a personality and voice of its own. In the section titled "The Janitor," about the first "hobohemian," Slim Brundage, the founder of Chicago's College of Complexes cafe, Pekar finally begins to inhabit some of his characters enough to let his celebrated humor kick in. We learn, for instance, that Brundage once ran a beatnik for president on a platform calling for "the abolition of money, government, and work," and that he was "the kind of guy who could sit on a barrel of scotch in a harem and complain." Pekar also clearly feels the tragedy of others like Patchen and levy. He writes that Patchen "was in constant pain" and that levy was "depressed because he was poor" and couldn't make a living from his poetry. I also liked Pekar's personal definition of Beat as "tough, funny, pissed-off and ecstatic." Toward the end, the book starts to feel like a successful jazz ensemble, with Pekar's own performance enhanced by virtuoso solos from a variety of writers. Poet Nancy Peters offers a lively history of the City Lights bookstore and its championing of First Amendment rights, as well as a touching reminiscence of her late husband, the visionary surrealist poet Philip Lamantia. Trina Robbins gives a moving account of Beat painter Jay DeFeo, who unknowingly poisoned herself by licking white leaded paint off her brush as she spent years completing her 11-by-8-foot masterpiece, "The Rose." Not just men Pekar's wife, Joyce Brabner, makes a strong case for the importance of "beatnik chicks," whose "cleavage didn't spill out of their clothes," but who - mostly unnoticed by their famous husbands and boyfriends - "spent long nights writing or making art." For my money, though, the best sequence in the book is by 86-year-old Fugs co-founder, performer and poet Tuli Kupferberg. In great detail, aided by the often hilarious drawings of Jeffrey Lewis (who gets my vote for best cartooning in the book as well), Kupferberg lays out something I'd never seen explained so clearly before - how "the consciousness that started in a few minds as the 'Beat' scene [began] exploding into a nationwide 60's counter-culture." All in all, "The Beats: A Graphic History" is notable for the completeness of its portrait of that magical era - an achievement that, whether in comics or literary biographies, is as impressive as it is rare. -- Gerald Nicosia is the author of "Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac." E-mail him at bo...@sfchronicle.com. . --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. To post to this group, send email to sixties-l@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sixties-l+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
