Pottsville was only a little out of the way en route to the house in Vosburg — about five miles west of Tunkhannock — where my wife and I spent the last couple of weeks. So we stopped and spent a night in Pottsville, where novelist John O'Hara was born a century ago. While there I read “The Girl on the Baggage Truck,” the first of the three novellas that comprise Sermons and Soda-Water, one of his best books, published in 1960, a decade before his death.
O’Hara was pretty much persona non grata in Pottsville while he was alive, but now there are markers around and about the town indicating sites that served as the originals for those in O’Hara’s “Gibbsville.” The model for the John Gibb Hotel is right at the corner of Centre Street and Mahantongo (which O’Hara renamed Latenengo). Next door is the office of the Pottsville Republican, O’Hara’s Gibbsville Standard. Across the street is the Reading Iron and Coal Co., a few doors away is the building O’Hara was born in, and where his physician father’s office remained after the family moved up the street (on the other side, across from the mansions). Not too far up, right next to the Yuengling brewery, is St. Patrick’s Church, which O’Hara reconsecrated as SS. Peter and Paul.
These places are a matter of yards apart. It seems an extremely small space to have a fictional world from. But maybe not. I suppose we’ve all had the experience of revisiting a place we knew only as small children and being surprised at how small it is compared to how large it loomed in our memory. But we were small when we experienced and that is what we remember. A person sensitive enough while still young might later on easily construct in imagination an entire world out of so large a piece of memory.
Welcome back, Frank!
ReplyDeleteYes, welcome back, Frank. It's an amusing process, this rehabilitation in death of authors who were persona non grata in life. Follow the money. Towns or regions that once hated writers because they felt the writers had held them up to ridicule now try to make money off their reputations. Some succeed. Monterey, Calif., certainly has with John Steinbeck. Sauk Centre, Minn., tries with Sinclair Lewis, but it's a struggle; still, its thoroughfares include The Original Main Street and Sinclair Lewis Avenue. Oak Park, Ill. (which Ernest Hemingway reportedly said had "broad lawns and narrow minds"), seeks to trade on his name. As for fictional spaces, my own experience is that in my mind I transfer to Upstate New York (my native ground) any place that I read about in fiction. Does a wolf creep about the Russian steppes? In my head it's prowling through fields Upstate. Does a detective walk the mean streets of L.A.? In my head he's schlepping up the dirty, gritty sidewalks of an industrial town Upstate.
ReplyDeleteOnce again, welcome back.
Sincerely,
Willis Wayde
What about Lowell, Mass. (I think that's the place) that casts Jack Kerouac as just a good Catholic boy made good!
ReplyDeleteHi Frank:
ReplyDeleteLowell, Mass., was indeed Kerouac's hometown, but off the top of my head the only one iof his books that I think takes place there -- or in a fictional version of there -- is "Visions of Gerard." But I am relying entirely on dimming memory.
A number of Kerouac's novels take place in Lowell. My Kerouac stash resides in my office, so I'm doing this from a dimming memory as well, but Maggie Cassidy, Dr. Sax, Visions of Gerard, and Vanity of Duluoz spring to mind. His first, The Town and The City, opens with an evocative description of the Merrimac that is quintessentially Lowell, though he calls it Galloway. Against objections, the city put up a memorial tribute that was dedicated in 1988. The last remaining councilman vote back then against the tribute, which is striking sculpture (complete with Kerouac quotes) and a must-see in Lowell, registered his opposition this way: "To me, it's rather ironic, and also hypocritical, for people to be saying we should be fighting against drugs, that we should say 'no' to drugs and here we are memorializing a person whose lifestyle was exactly that." For some time now, coinciding with an academic conference, there's a Lowell Celebrates Kerouac festival. Emotions run high all around Kerouac.
ReplyDeleteSteve
Hi Steve:
ReplyDeleteThanks very much for the info. They'll have reason to celebrate especially in a couple of years, when the anniversary of "On the Road" arrives.
All right, let's strike a spark here. My own feeling/judgment about Kerouac and the Beats runs along the lines of Capote's snippy, "That's not writing, that's typing." Or, as I think someone else said (or should have), the Beats were known more for who they were rather than what they accomplished. Not the only group of writers or artists that could be said about, of course, but few with such accuracy.
ReplyDeleteWell, Melville, I'm inclined to respond with H.L Mencken's famous stock answer to irate letter writers: "There is much is what you say."
ReplyDeleteI'm afraid it is true that the Beats' literary impact may have been less than their impact as Bohemian celebrities. Ginsberg wrote a lot of poems, but I think the number that continues to be worth reading is rather small. "Supermarket in California" is one such. "Howl" has a great opening.
As for Kerouac, I think an argument can be made that "Visions of Gerard" is his best book. But I was 16 when "On the Road" hit the best-seller lists and it's the only time I can remember an author being lionized like a rock star. Jack was still a darkly handsome guy then. But he wasn't at all suited for celebrity. And no one seemed to get that he was celebrating America.
But the Beat Genration made a lot of people think about poetry not just as a kind of writing but as a way of looking at life. The Hippies who came later gave us songs, hairstyles, and goofy clothes. But no literature that I can think of. Then there was Corso. He wrote some good stuff from time to time.
As I say, emotions run high around Kerouac. The same's true about the nebulous grouping we call "the Beats." Regardless of who makes our Beat cut, the impact has been considerable. Yes, conspicuous lifestyles can become the focus of our attention. Kerouac expended quite a bit of energy both in his books and in his magazine articles (many of them collected in Lonesome Traveler) promoting and commodifying the Beat lifestyle as the place to be and to be free, to create better art and better social relations. His art led to and fed the art of musicians (Dylan, Jerry Garcia, Jim Morrison, etc.) and writers (Ginsberg, Burroughs, Pynchon, etc.) alike. Visions of Gerard, a particularly idiosyncratic Kerouac novel (yes, even for Kerouac), did well in my last Kerouac class. My three favorite Kerouac novels are Visions of Cody, The Subterraneans, and Desolation Angels, but most Kerouac novels appeal on some level. That is, they appeal to me. Just as "Howl," "Kaddish," and "Sunflower Sutra" do. They needn't register power or appreciation or feeling (whatever you want to call it) with everyone to have worth as literature separable from the notorious lives that produced them. Taste is taste. When I teach Kerouac, I teach the books and it isn't long before Kerouac On-the-Roaders (the kids who romanticize the lifestyle) see complexity and artful intent and execution. They also see failure and sadness. And as it should be, some students just don't dig it. I can't think of any writer's work that everyone should revere.
ReplyDeleteMy two cents, Steve
I'm not sure where this response to your O'Hara column should go, but since this thread started out with O'Hara, I'll put it here. That is an excellent piece, Frank. Right on the money. Except it was Yale, not Princeton, that he salivated for -- almost all his life, apparently. He WAS, as you say, vain and prickly, by all accounts, including Geoffrey Wolff's lackluster bio of a couple years ago, "The Art of Burning Bridges." Your mention that his sensibility in "Sermons and Soda-Water" was of someone much older -- what a terrific insight. I think it is true even when he was a young man writing his first novel, "Appointment in Samarra." How could he understand and capture that little patch of time and place so well?
ReplyDeleteSincerely,
Willis Wayde