Ultimately Kerouac finds himself somewhere in the middle ground between Cassady, who wants to embrace the darkness, and Burroughs, who is out to kill all these goddamn bugs. He has to figure out how to properly thread the needle between these two to prevent the world from ending. Where that, ultimately, leaves Kerouac is the subject of the Epilogue. By keeping the world from going to hell, as it turns out, he may have simply chosen a different, more personal form of hell.
Move Under Ground is, in addition, a scalpel-sharp demythologizing of On the Road and of Kerouac in general. It has a similar maddened carnivalesque feel to it as Robert Coover’s The Public Burning, in which Richard Nixon is buggered by Uncle Sam, or A Political Fable, in which the Cat in the Hat runs for president, to be eventually skinned alive and eaten. But Move Under Ground is a darker carnival, its ribald touches rarer. That’s not to say that if you’re a fan of Lovecraft or Kerouac you won’t find a lot to enjoy here: you will. One of the joys of the book is that bi-focused reading, the remembering and reconsideration of the stories and authors behind this book as you see how Mamatas is playing with them. The thrust of that is essentially metafictional: as well as having an engaging and crazed plot, this is a book about how Lovecraft and Kerouac’s writing works, about how they both succeed and fail, about how to both acknowledge them and move beyond them.
All in all, Move Under Ground is a smart critique of two writers who are too often not subject to real, informed critique. It ends up ricocheting off both of them to get somewhere entirely different than either of them manages to get on their own. It’s a radical book very much ahead of its time, strange and highly original, and well worth the read. Enjoy.
Brian Evenson
CONTENTS
Chapter Six
For Oliver
BOOK ONE
CHAPTER ONE
I WAS in Big Sur hiding from my public when I finally heard from Neal again. He had had problems of his own after the book came out and it started being carried around like a rosary by every scruffy party boy looking for a little cross-country hitchhiking adventure. They’d followed him around like they’d followed me, but Neal drank too deeply of the well at first, making girls left and right as usual, taking a few too many shots to the face, and eating out on the story of our travels maybe one too many times. Those boozy late-night dinners with crazy soulless characters whose jaws clacked like mandibles when they laughed are what got to him in the end, I’m sure. They were hungry for something. Not just the college boys and beautiful young things, but those haggard-looking veterans of Babylon who started shadowing Neal and me on every street corner and at every dawn-draped last call in roadside bars; they all wanted more than a taste of Neal’s divine spark, they wanted to extinguish it in their gullets. Neal was the perfect guy for them as he always walked on the edge, ever since the first shiv was held to his throat at reform school when he was a seven-year-old babe with a fat face and shiny teary cheeks. He wanted to eat up the whole world himself like they did, I knew from my adventures on the road with him, but I didn’t learn what was eating him ’til I got that letter that drove me to move under ground.
The letters had become more infrequent while I was out on Big Sur living in Larry’s little cabin, due to me at first, I thought. I was working on my spontaneous writing, which sounds a bit contradictory but discoveries need to be plumbed, not just noted, and I was turning out roll after roll of pages about the stark black cliffs and how it felt that the world wasn’t just shifting under my feet but how I was sure one day I’d end up standing still while the big blue marble just rolled out from under me to leave me hanging over the inky maw of the universe. I didn’t take breaks except to pick my way into town every week or ten days to get some supplies: potatoes and beans, some cooking oil, whiskey, chaw, more rolls of paper which came in special just for me thanks to Larry, and stamps and my mail. Letters, only three were from Neal, most from mother and my aunt and one or two from my agent with checks so big I couldn’t even cash them but instead had to sell them for a dime on the dollar to the one-eyed shopkeeper at the general store that held my mail for me. By that time I could hardly stand to hear anyone’s voice so I never spent more than a few hours in town, just enough to do my errands, get my socks washed by the old unsmiling Chinaman and wolf down some cherry pie with ice cream. Even the great belly laughs of the old-timers who had shuffled up from Los Angeles when the strawberry crops had turned black on the vine grated on me when I heard them now, but those curlicue swirls on Mémère’s letters were soothing and stainless like the sky. I’d read them as I’d hike back up to the cabin, smoking a great Cuban just to have some light to read by if I didn’t get home before dark.
Neal’s letters were something else altogether, and he was still something else, too, as the kids say. The first letter was typical Neal, full of big plans to play connect-the-dots between girls and writers. “Oh dearest Jack,” he wrote to me, “once you’re all settled and have ironed up after your latest crack-up I’ll come down from San Fran in Carolyn’s father’s great old battleship of a car, then drive right back up the coast in reverse through Oregon where the trees hold up the vault of the sky. Then we can tour Vancouver; it’s a wet warm pocket of life up in those frozen wastes and I know Carolyn has a friend named Suzette you might like as she is very deep into Spengler . . .” and he’d spin more and more of his golden grift. I’d read his old letters over and over ’til the ink ran off the wrinkled page but only once got around to writing him back. It was too hard to think, being lost in the words of his letters, but they were the only things that