Once I was young and had so much more orientation and could talk with nervous intelligence about everything and with clarity and without as much literary preambling as this; in other words this is the story of an unself-confident man, at the same time of an egomaniac, naturally, facetious won’t do—just to start at the beginning and let the truth seep out, that’s what I’ll do—.
Once again the narrator of a Kerouac tale is really just a thinly disguised, barely fictionalized version of himself. Leo is Jack, Jack is Sal Paradise, Sal Paradise is Leo and Leo is Jack, taking us back to where we began. And, also as in the work for which he is most famous, On the Road, other characters in the story are based on real life friends, acquaintances, and fellow travelers. Just in case one could not glean from this opening line of the book, though clocking in about two-hundred pages shorter, the writing style is also not too different from that which made Kerouac famous. As with all things done to excess, some will find that The Subterraneans most definitely gains an advantage over the longer work when it comes to dealing with the hipster Beatnik vernacular of 1950’s American prose.
..and for the first time she opened her mouth and spoke to me communicating a full thought and my heart didn’t exactly sink but wondered when I heard the cultured funny tone of part Beach, part I. Magnin model, part Berkeley, part Negro highclass, something, a mixture of langue and style of talking and use of words I’d never heard before except in certain rare girls of course white…
It may not be easy to parse through the jazzy rhythms, hipster terminology, self-conscious lack of proper punctuation and just general vernacular miasma to get at, but what is going on here is the description of the love interest of the narrator as a young black woman. The story is a recounting of the author’s real-life love affair with a biracial woman at a time when such things were not exactly common. Of course, in the subculture in which a cool cat like Kerouac is eyeballing a doll with a shade of difference pigment-wise would be something those around him would had easily dug rather than being wigged out about. But for the rest of the world who didn’t listen to jazz and sport beards not covering the fullness of the face, even dating a girl of mixed racial heritage would have been off the boards for a white guy.
“Lissen Percepied do you believe in freedom?-then say what you want, it's poetry, poetry, all of it is poetry, great prose is poetry, great verse is poetry.”
The words are Yuri’s and Leo fights back with traditional argument that prose is prose and verse is verse, but it is an empty argument that Leo is bound to lose. Yuri will convince him of the truth and really, it hardly even needs to be stated. By the point in the narrative at which this quote is expressed, the language used by the narrator—Leo—has already manifested a state of mind in which prose and verse is confused at best and intentionally mingled at most. The prose of the narration is even more of an expressive be-bop for literature than would be demonstrated in On the Road. Kerouac would be inspired to write “The Essential of Spontaneous Prose” by the reception of the book on the part of fellow Beat legends Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. For the record, the character spouting this quote, Yuri, is based on yet another real life Beat poet, Gregory Corso.
