Ill Start With Me (Star Dazzlers Book 3)

Chatwin said he was trying to make a cubist portrait. It is paradoxical, in content and in style. The syntax is snappy but the vocabulary is orchidaceous. Chatwin was often accused of being a fantasist. He was certainly not through-and-through rational, but he was often shrewd, often prescient. Chatwin was a traveller, an art expert, a connoisseur of the extraordinary. He had not set out to be an author.

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He was also set to charm clients into buying and selling. He bolted from Edinburgh after two years without taking his degree. In his 30s, he was taken on at the Sunday Times Magazine and, encouraged by Francis Wyndham , wrote sharp-edged, vivid, ingenious pieces: He bolted from the Sunday Times to Patagonia. By the time I came across Chatwin, he was 36 and had done all these things. He had also accrued a reputation that, had I known about it, would have made me quail.

He was celebrated for his looks: He was known for being particular about his outfits: He was famous for his sudden disappearances, his unexpected arrivals and for the whirling discourses that magnetised his audiences but which no one could quite summarise. His riff on red asked if the colour of revolution was inspired by blood or by fire, and took in the bonnet rouge of the French Revolution, Garibaldi, Uruguayan butchers, bullfighters and Buddhism.

All too much, you might think, too exquisite. Yet he could capture convinced sceptics with his talk. Martin Amis had developed a rugged resistance to Chatwin before meeting him. I first met Chatwin in the drought summer of He was carrying that calfskin haversack.

Starfish by Akemi Dawn Bowman

It had dazzled and worried me. I became his editor, with the task of making the book speed along. Every night, the author went home merrily to hack away his stuff: Every morning, he arrived having cut — but often having also added another episode; stories kept spilling out of him.

Nevertheless, judging by the sums I scrawled in the margins, I reckon we eventually cut between a quarter and a third of the typescript. The result was a swifter and consistently sleek volume: Not much that went was wasted. Some of the cut material bobbed up in later work, in The Songlines , his baggiest and probably most famous book, and in On the Black Hill.

That novel he wrote, he said, to escape the label of travel writer: Chatwin, who had married at 25, had had male lovers. For me, his great gift — on the page and in person — was visual generosity. He made you see different things and look at things differently. It was not works of art in galleries that interested him so much as objects, particularly those from which a story could be extracted.

In the small Eaton Place flat designed by John Pawson — pleated like origami to hide his books — he hung pictures he had made by cutting coloured drawings from the catalogue of a broom manufacturer: In all his houses, he kept a prayer inscribed in Latin by the artist-poet David Jones: He later told his wife, Elizabeth, that he had immediately thought this applied to him. Robert Frank, who became his close friend - Kerouac wrote the introduction to The Americans - and Stephen Shore, who set out on an American road trip in the Seventies with Kerouac's book as a guide. Remarkably, On the Road was actually written in when, so the story goes, Kerouac typed the words over three uninterrupted weeks on to a ft scroll of teletype paper, fuelled by Benzedrine and strong coffee.

The novel recounts, in a breathless and impressionistic style, his travels to and fro across America, often in the company of his friend and prime influence, Neal Cassady, renamed Dean Moriarty in the book. In the six years it took for On the Road to be published, American culture changed dramatically: Elvis Presley altered the course of popular music; James Dean and Marlon Brando emerged as a new breed of brooding teenage icon; the painter Jackson Pollock came and went, his action paintings and the intense way he lived some kind of precursor to the 'nowness' that the Beats strived for in both art and life.

The alienation, the restlessness, the dissatisfaction were already there waiting when Kerouac pointed out the road. Though undoubtedly ambitious, Kerouac was utterly unprepared for the fame, notoriety and controversy that followed On the Road. He was hurt by the many negative reviews of the book, and by the parodies of the Beat generation that suddenly started appearing on mainstream televison chat shows.

In interviews from the time, he is palpably ill at ease, sometimes inebriated.

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In the most recent biography of the writer, Kerouac: His Life and Work, Paul Mather writes: Twelve years later, Kerouac was dead. The physical cause was cirrhosis of the liver, brought on by years of alcohol abuse. Many of those who knew him intimately, though, suspected that he also died of disillusionment. He had the thin skin of the artist as well as the guilt that his Catholic upbringing had instilled in him.

In the end, he was just so depressed about how he was being misrepresented, how his great and beautiful book was being blamed for all the excesses of the Sixties. He just couldn't take it. Had Kerouac lived on into old age, he would have been even more appalled at the ways in which his legacy is currently being misrepresented. Two years ago, a range of Jack Kerouac clothing was launched in America. Later this year, the BBC will mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of On the Road by sending the comedian, presenter and self-styled dandy, Russell Brand, and his Radio 2 co-presenter, Matt Morgan, on a road trip.

Thankfully, the anniversary will also be marked in a more reverent manner by the book's publishers, Penguin, who on 5 September will publish On the Road: The Original Scroll, the full, uncensored text that Kerouac famously wrote in those three frantic weeks.

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The cast of characters - Allen Ginsberg, Burroughs, the Cassadys - are no longer hidden behind Kerouac's often wonderful pseudonyms, and that famous opening line, 'I first met Dean not long after my wife and I had split up,' now reads, 'I first met Neal not long after my father died.

Many of the sex scenes, straight and gay, removed at his publishers' insistence, have been reinstated too, though they are tame by today's standards.

The Ill-Made Mute

The attraction that Ginsberg felt for Neal Cassady, briefly reciprocated, is now acknowledged in the first few pages, though in an almost offhand manner: I heard them across the darkness and mused and said to myself, "Hmm, now there's something started but don't want anything to do with it. Kirsten Dunst will star as Carolyn Cassady. Nearly 40 years after his premature death, then, Kerouac lives on - though in some odd and often contradictory ways. As is the case with Guevara, his legacy is contested, his cultural meaning blurred.

At the Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, for instance, where the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics is housed, they will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of On the Road with a three-day Kerouac festival. The last remnants of the Beat generation, or at least those fit enough to travel, will be in attendance. One of the organisers, Junior Burke, chair of writing at Naropa, recently described On the Road as 'one of the truly defining works of American fiction', comparing it to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but adding: I think it's something that young people still relate to.

For many young people in America, though, the name Jack Kerouac means nothing at all. In an age where youth culture is increasingly defined by consumerism, where the road trip has been replaced by the gap year, and where it is considered radical to be cool but not cool to be radical, whither Jack Kerouac and his beatific vision?

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The great adventure that was travelling overland in the Sixties and Seventies has become a middle-class ritual. The notion that you would throw yourself at the mercy of the road, and by doing so, gain some self-knowledge or even maturity, is long gone. Carolyn Cassady, the last surviving member of Kerouac's closeknit coterie of friends and fellow Beats, now 84 and exiled in deepest Berkshire, is even more scathing about Noughties youth. I often thank God that Jack and Neal did not live long enough to see what has become of their vision'.

When I was a teenager, though, On the Road was the bible for any aspiring bohemian, a book that was passed on from one generation to the next almost as a talismanic text. I was given a battered copy by an older friend and, even before I read it, knew that it carried within its pages some deep, abiding truth about youth, freedom and self-determination. On the Road instilled in me a belief that, in order to find oneself, one had to throw caution to the wind and travel long distances with no real goal and very little money.

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A few years later, I passed the same copy on to my younger brother, and was incensed when he passed it on to a friend who left it on a bus. I can see the irony now but back then I felt that something bigger than just a battered paperback had been lost. It was in this word-of-mouth way that On the Road, even long after its initial publication, became one of those rare novels that was often read by people who do not read novels as a rule.

It may be that this is still the case, but I doubt it. Harry Potter is today's zeitgeist book. The Beats and their wild adventures seem light years away. And yet, for all that, On the Road continues to be read. What was once a zeitgeist book, though, and one that defined a transformative moment in postwar culture, has become a historical artefact. It may even be the case that today's teenagers read On the Road in much the same way that my generation read Laurie Lee's picaresque rites-of-passage novel As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning - as a glimpse into an already distant past when things seemed simpler.

When I asked my year-old niece, Lucy, if she had read it, she nodded. What was that something, though? It's set in a time when travelling across America and smoking weed or whatever meant something.