The End is Just a Beginning
I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead.
Jack Kerouac was a young man when he wrote that—younger than I am. No matter, I feel the same way at 64.
No, I won’t ping-pong off the coasts wishing I was young again.
The opening sentences of On the Road resonate with me because I can clearly see my life's disaster for the past eight years.
Not all of it, of course. But the feeling that everything is dead has stuck with me since I was nearly dead myself with a serious illness. Then, a miserable, overly long breakup. Then, unemployment and the inevitable thoughts of suicide that come with all of it.
Things are better now. I have a good, though not well-paying job. I am going to earn a pension that the fascists can’t steal, though I would still starve to death without the Social Security I have paid all my life.
No one loves me romantically, and I don’t love anyone, either, and that’s made for a separate peace with life that I generally never felt in the previous 50 or so years.
I miss the intimacy, of course. I don’t miss the worry and heartache.
I am halfway through Journey, American, and have decided, with the guidance of my friend Robert, to go back to the beginning and rewrite much of what I have done.
When I began writing nearly two years ago, I was like a wagon master determined to continue no matter what deserts and blizzards might lie ahead.
There have been plenty.
Halfway is like a way station.
The book is set in a bar where an old man named Journey Seeger tells his story to a group of California kids. It’s 1966, and he has had the quintessential American life of adventure, love and failure.
The things that makeup truly living.
I am facing the issue that the book's first eight chapters are not written in that style. They were written more like a novelist telling the story of a man telling a story.
Why did it come out this way?
A lack of courage explains it. When anyone begins writing, it is extremely difficult to ignore the tide of the present: do this, don’t do that, that won’t sell, no one will read it.
Or, worse, if you write it as you should, you are aping past styles that have served the dead past.
The dead past ain’t dead.
It is out of style.
Dialogue is the culprit. No man drinking the afternoon away and telling stories in a bar will remember many exact quotes.
Why use quotation marks at all?
Why not more interior monologue?
Yes, both have been done by masters. The best ideas, however, are stolen ones that are morphed and twisted into something new.
The journey will begin again.