SANDWICH MEN (AND WOMEN)

I used to say, and it’s become an ever less impressive boast as the years have gone by, that I thought I’d read every word Jack Kerouac ever published. Unfortunately, at a certain point, if your reading career has been as long as mine has, you start to forget as much as you remember.  

 

Even so, picking up Jack’s Book: an oral biography of Jack Kerouacby Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee, I was surprised to see an interview with Carolyn Cassady, wife of Neal Cassady and lover of Kerouac, who appears in On the Road as"Camille,"and she was talking about sandwiches.

 

Kerouac and his girlfriend Luanne Henderson (Marylou in the novel) were in San Francisco and things weren’t going well between them, and Carolyn Cassady writes, “So then he went off on the bus with his fifteen sandwiches.”

Now, I’ve always been interested in literary depictions of food – “Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls” and all that kind of thing, but I had no memory of Jack Kerouac and his sandwiches. 

 

And so I returned to On The Road and sure enough there are sandwiches galore.  This is in Part Two, Chapter 12,  “What I accomplished by coming to San Francisco I don’t know. Camille wanted me to leave; Dean didn’t care one way or the other. I bought a loaf of bread and meats and made myself ten sandwiches to cross the country with again; they were all going to go rotten on me by the time I got to Dakota … 

“At dawn I got my New York bus and said good-by to Dean and Marylou. They wanted some of my sandwiches. I told them no. It was a sullen moment. We were all thinking we’d never see one another again and we didn’t care.” 

It does seem that Carolyn Cassidy miscounted the number of sandwiches.

 

And this is earlier, Part One, Chapter 13, when the fictionalized Kerouac is in Los Angeles, “With the bus leaving at ten, I had four hours to dig Hollywood alone. First I bought a loaf of bread and salami and made myself ten sandwiches to cross the country on. I had a dollar left. I sat on the low cement wall in back of a Hollywood parking lot and made the sandwiches. As I labored at this absurd task, great Kleig lights of a Hollywood premiere stabbed in the sky, that humming West Coast sky. All around me were the noises of the crazy gold-coast city. And this was my Hollywood career-this was my last night in Hollywood, and I was spreading mustard on my lap in back of a parking-lot John.”

         I’m not sure I ever saw a public toilet in a parking lot in Los Angeles, but if I had I don’t think I’d have wanted to make sandwiches there.

 

There are various other mentions of sandwiches in On the Road, including hot roast beef sandwiches eaten in a diner in Denver, and also of course mentions of other food too, most of it all-American – hamburgers, cherry pie with ice cream, blue fish, popcorn - but it’s the sandwiches that stay with me now.

I’ve tried to find a picture of Kerouac with a sandwich, and I’ve failed, but there’s no shortage of pictures of him drinking. 

 

 

 

THE BELLS ARE RINGING

 

When I was a young man, I crossed the Americas on foot.  By which I mean 

that I hitchhiked (as was the style at the time) from Toronto to Santa 

Barbara.

 

I had read and half-digested a lot (arguable too much) of Jack Kerouac’s work.  And although I had no Neal Cassady in my life, at least there was no Allen Ginsburg either.

 

This is Jack Kerouac in a diner in New York in the 1950s.

Anyway the point of my story is that the final lift, the one that got me to Santa Barbara was with a very slightly older woman who said, ‘I’ll take you out for dinner tomorrow evening.’  I thought I had arrived in California heaven.

 

Next night she took me to eat at a Taco Bell.  This is a Taco Bell in Santa Barbara but it almost certainly isn’t the one we went to.

 

Now, I was not a exactly a food sophisticate at that time but I was sophisticated enough to realize that a meal at a Taco Bell was not exactly ‘going out for dinner.’

 

Even so I enjoyed myself – I’d never had Mexican food before and I thought it was great.  I seem to recall it was the refried beans that I liked best of all.

 

Well the years pass, and I was in Gloucester last weekend and imagine the thrill of discovering that Gloucester has a Taco Bell.  So obviously we went.

In the intervening years I’ve had a fair bit of good Mexican food, much of it in California, and Taco Bell is nobody’s idea of good Mexican food, whether in California or Gloucestershire. The food looked like this - not a refried bean in sight – and it tasted just as good as it looks.

 

Still, I’m glad we went - they did have this very fancy sign above the door to the unisex toilet.  

 

SWIGGING WITH SCRIBBLERS: WHY DRINKERS WRITE

While looking for something completely different, I happened to find this wonderful picture of Samuel Beckett. 

There’s something about that untouched glass of red wine that looks utterly inviting and enticing, and you know it’s in Paris, and looking at it, I think it might be the best-tasting, most inspiring glass of wine in the whole history of the world.  You think I’m exaggerating?

And I began to wonder if I could find pictures of my other “favorite” authors with a drink in front of them.  Since my favorite (and I know it’s a dodgy term) authors include Borges, Kafka and Pynchon this was clearly not going to be an absolute easy task.  Since the list also includes Chandler, Kerouac, Burroughs, Ballard and Christopher Hitchens, it might in part seem like shooting drunken fish in a barrel, but all in all, it wasn’t quite as straightforward as I’d expected.  Hitchens admittedly was easy:

But Kerouac was surprisingly hard.  OK, I was just image-searching the Internet, not trawling through library archives, but I had the feeling I’d seen loads of pictures of Jack with a drink in his hand.  Maybe so, but I can’t find them now.  The best I can do is the one below.  I guess it’s hard liquor in that little cup.  And note the pipe.

Raymond Chandler proved surprisingly difficult too.  He’s seldom photographed without a pipe or cigarette, and quite often he’s holding a cat (a good standby prop for author portraits), but no sign of the office bottle, a martini or a gimlet.  However, there is this scarcely improvable one, sitting between Mr. and Mrs. Anthony Blond, a position in which you’d definitely need a drink.

No problem with finding a picture of Burroughs holding a drink, though it’s rather easier to find one of him holding gun.  And we all know how well guns and drink went together in Burroughs's life.  

And I did find this gorgeous picture of Borges and Ballard; plenty of bottles in the background, and Ballard clearly has a drink in his hand, though admittedly Borges doesn’t.

I can see why certain authors might think it’s bad for their image to be seen with a drink in their hand, though others of course think it’s more than fine.  Ernest Hemingway ran the gamut of guns, drink and cats, sometimes more than one at a time.

And what about female authors?  I imagine they might might be even less willing to be photographed booze in hand, even if they have some reputation for enjoying a drink, even for writing about it.  Dorothy Parker for instance, always looks amazingly prim in her photographs.  This is the best I can come up with:

Although whenever an actress plays Dorothy Parker on screen or stage, a drink is a ubiquitous prop.  Here’s Jennifer Jason Leigh in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle.

As for some of my other fave raves: Joan Didion – no, she looks like she’d keel over if she ever had so much as a glass of sherry, though there are many, many pictures with cigarettes.  Angela Carter, Renata Adler, Lydia Davis: no boozy picture that I can find.  No cigarettes or guns either, though Lydia Davis is often seen with a cat.  So thank heavens (in so many ways) for Deborah Eisenberg. I can’t say that I’ve found zillions of pictures of the divine Ms. E staggering around, gin bottle in hand, but there is this deeply wonderful picture of her: drink in one hand, Wallace Shawn in the other (so to speak), he in turn being a writer who’s obviously unafraid to be seen with a drink in his own hand.  Hurrah. 

               Is this connection between booze and writing important?  Well, it does seem that many a writer likes a drink.  Of course many a plumber or carpenter likes a drink too, but writers get to write about it, and then their biographers write about it again.  There’s a new book out by Olivia Laing, titled The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink;  it's about  Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Carver, Cheever, Berryman and Fitzgerald.  

As for why writers drink, well a million words probably won’t answer the question, but there are some fairly wise one here from Blake Morrison writing about the book in the Guardian:  “Why do writers drink? Why does anyone drink? From boredom, loneliness, habit, hedonism, lack of self-confidence; as stress relief or a short-cut to euphoria; to bury the past, obliterate the present or escape the future. If Olivia Laing's entertaining book fails to come up with a simple answer, that's because there isn't one.”