PARTISAN
REVIEW
303
can materialism. Cassady's careening escapades became the wild accom–
plishments of legend: ten arrests, several years
in
jails, irmumerable car–
thefts; a supposeclJly irresistJible attraotiveness to both men and women,
a Pan complete with ,the flute he loved to play; incongruously reading
Proust, or wondeI1ing whether poets were more important than phil–
osophers while recapping automobile tires!
Cassady wrote his story in lost letters to Kerouac, and in the post–
humous
The First Third,
an autobiographical account of his early Den–
ver years that 'seems flat and uninspired when compared to
Visions
O'f
Cody.
Kerouac's magic emerges as he evokes elegiac memories of popu–
lar culture as a backdrop by which to measure the Cassady legend:
radio and The Shadow, comics and the Katzenjammer Kids, movies and
the Three Stooges, burlesque shows and boxing matches. Cassady's un–
tutored imagination responded to such forces; like Gatsby, he was the
sort of primal force for whom a neon sign might represent hope and
accomplishment ,instead of vulgarity.
The First Third
is straight narra–
tive, brief, brutal, with the kind of antiliterary tougthness so many
Ameri–
can writers strain so hard to attain.
Visions Of Cody
offers endless elab–
oration,
is
Kerouac's most literary composition, full of the formal play
with fictional dimension that most of his work rather blatantly ex–
cludes.
Visions Of Cody
is an exultation of Kerouac's best long-line
sequences, passages combining 'the density of poetry with the compressed
intensity of haiku, including at least two of his
Scattered Poems
run as
prose. Digressively crowding impressions, anecdotes, tall-tales and cons,
Kerouac's line approaches his own ideal of the jazz saxophonist, pur–
suing the ineluctable ultimate note, always furthering his sound with
another association, always reaching and extending an oceanic continuum,
secretly knowing that to cease is to die. A Shandyean profusion is com–
pounded by a variety of means to enrich the texture: drawings and let–
ters, imitations of Torn Sawyer and Bloom's trial tin
Ulysses,
superbly
rendered discontinuities and drug fantasies. The book becomes a reali–
zation of Kerouac's most apt mode - a kind of diary notation in which
distinctions between fact and fancy, prose and poetry are deliberately
blurred for the sake
of
imaginative recall.
In stark stylistic contrast, almost as relief from such complexities,
stands the famous tape, a series of conversations between Kerouac and
Cassady while inhaling benezedrine, smoking marijuana, and consuming
quantities of alcohol. The tape - whioh is probably what prevented the
book from appearing for so long - is valuable as <the record of how the
Beats sustained their friendships on an axis of drugs, sex, and jazz. The
hipster scene is authentically detailed: the Times Square underground,
the lower East Side Henry Street flat that Burroughs maintained and
