‘The Beatles spelled their band name with an “a” because of John Lennon’s affinity for the Beat Generation’

There are plenty of books sitting on my coffee table I could write about, but every time I pick one up my gut tells me it’s not quite good enough for a review. Almost, but not quite. So that’s why on a sunny weekday morning I’m malling, wading through gangs of teenagers, dodging trolleys and breathing aircon—the horror. I’m ready for the long haul, good books don’t tend to jump out at me in bookstores, it usually takes a good hour of leafing through half-baked books—mostly debut novels with great promise and little delivery. After a couple of minutes the best I’ve found is another story about a Muslim man living with prejudice in post 9/11 America. Too done. I want something different. And then, five minutes into my quest, I see it. I pick it up and pay for it, without hesitating or asking the price. It’s my ticket out of here.

It’s not every day you discover a novel like this. Written by two of the leaders of the Beat Generation a good ten years before they found fame with their respective novels (William Burroughs with Naked Lunch and Jack Kerouac with On the Road) and only published now for the very first time.

You remember the Beat Generation? It challenged mainstream American values in the 1950s, encouraged experimentation with drugs and alternate sexuality and sought meaning through Eastern spirituality. But whether you’re a fan of the Beats or not, you have to appreciate their contribution to literature and their influence on modern culture (for good or for bad). In fact, the Beatles spelled their band name with an ‘a’ because of John Lennon’s affinity for Jack Kerouac. Other musicians that cite the Beats as influences are Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Paul Simon and Mick Jagger. More recently, William Burroughs has worked closely with pop stars Michael Stipe, Kurt Cobain and Bono. Novelists such as Tom Robbins (Even Cowgirls Get the Blues), Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) and Thomas Pynchon (V), among others, were also greatly influenced. That’s quite a CV for a small group of non-conformist writers and poets.
Long before they were famous, in 1944, William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac were arrested in connection with a murder of one of their friends, David Kammerer. He had in fact been killed by another friend of theirs, Lucien Carr. Kammerer was in love with Carr and had been stalking him from city to city, constantly making advances on the much younger man for several years. Eventually Carr could take it no longer and stabbed Kammerer in the chest with a pocketknife before dumping his body in the Hudson River—with rocks in his jacket pockets to weigh his body down. Carr, still blood-smeared, confessed the murder to Kerouac and Burroughs independently and a day later handed himself in to the police. Kerouac and Burroughs were held in custody as material witnesses to the crime and were questioned as to why they hadn’t reported the murder immediately. Burroughs was released on bail and Kerouac got out in due course. Their inconvenience however was not without reward. The murder had all the ingredients for a Beat-style drama—and so the pair wrote their fictionalised version of the events, each penning alternate chapters.

But they struggled to find a publisher—with the Second World War having just ended, publishers were in search of more uplifting works. Eventually Burroughs and Kerouac shelved the novel and continued with their writing careers. It sat unpublished for decades. All the while Kerouac remained quite fond of the novel, in a letter to a San Francisco based publisher, he referred to it as a “sensational 200-page novel”. But Burroughs felt very differently, referring to it as “not a distinguished work”. The disagreement resulted in a lawsuit over the authorship of the novel and so it remained unpublished. Only now, several years after the death of Burroughs (he died in 1997) and many years after the death of Kerouac (1969) has an agreement been reached between the estates of Burroughs and Kerouac—and the book has finally seen the light of day.

The novel follows a small group of friends and their daily lives in New York—the story doesn’t rush to the murder, but takes time to build a great depth to its characters. Most of the names have been changed—Kerouac is Mike Ryko, Burroughs is Will Dennison, Lucien Carr is Philip Tourian and David Kammerer is Ramsay Allen. Along with the names a few other facts have been altered, but most of it seems quite accurate to the time and place. It offers a fascinating glimpse into New York as it was then—vibrant and full of promise but also quaint in a way. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the styles of the two writers but it is engaging and easy to read and conveys the charming innocence of this group of Beatniks.

This novel is a truly lovely discovery—a classic unpublished for over sixty years that has suddenly sprung to life. It’s up to you to decide who was right about it, but I think I’m going to side with Jack on this one.

Our class at school only ever studied one Shakespeare play. In Standard 6 we were introduced to the cryptic Elizabethan English of Macbeth and even the smartest kids in the class were left wondering what the heck was going on. In Standard 7, the teachers thought they’d better at least finish what they’d started – and so with the help of a small TV high up on a wall in the media centre and a stretched VHS of Macbeth, things began to get a little clearer. In Standard 8, they figured that we still weren’t getting it – so it was Macbeth again. In Standard 9, the teachers must have had a meeting and realised that starting any other Shakespeare play would take at least another three years, and they only had two left to work with. There was only one thing for it – teach Macbeth again and hold thumbs that in our final exams we wouldn’t get Hamlet or A Mid Summer Night’s Dream. In Matric everyone’s eggs were in one basket, it was Macbeth or bust. So when we finally did write our English exam there was an audible sigh of relief from both scholars and teachers when we saw questions about the three hags, the ghost of Banquo and a forest moving to Dunsinane. To external markers, we must have seemed like the smartest bunch of Shakespeare nerds ever to walk the planet. On the contrary. But I know that we weren’t alone – Shakespeare has been a curse upon school-goers for centuries. And I can only guess what kind of mind-bending torture it must be for second language English speakers. So who was this cruel mastermind?

Bill Bryson’s latest book Shakespeare is an in-depth investigative biography of William Shakespeare – the most well known English writer of all time. Strangely, there exists about as much personal information about Shakespeare as there does about The Loch Ness Monster. Most of what is known about Old Will is in brief legal records – his baptism, his marriage, a couple of references to him as witness in the odd lawsuit (which were quite common in the day), his will and his date of death. (At least we have pictures of Nessie.) The rest is basically guesswork based on shreds on inconclusive evidence. In fact, the face that so often appears on his plays and sonnets may not even be Mr. Shakespeare at all. No one today knows what he was like as a person – we know as much about the personal life of Shakespeare as we do about Moses, even though Shakespeare lived a mere 400 years ago.

But that’s not to say that a biography of the man is a complete waste of time. There is a lot to know about the Bard besides what he may have looked like, what he had for breakfast or his favourite sonnet. Most interesting to me, is the detailed picture of life and customs in the 16th and 17th centuries and the amazing footprint Shakespeare’s work has left on modern society and modern language. For example, Shakespeare coined a few, now common, English words – words such as critical, frugal, dwindle, extract, horrid, vast, excellent, assassination, lonely, well-read and countless to name only a few. And a few common phrases too – vanish into thin air, budge an inch, flesh and blood, salad days, be cruel to be kind, with bated breath were all his doing, as well as a host of others.

Through his research, Bryson addresses three of the most common accusations leveled at Shakespeare. The first and most dreadful to our modern ears is the notion that William plagiarised most of his best work. The fact is that Hamlet was preceded by an earlier Hamlet, King Lear by and earlier King Leir and Romeo and Juliet was preceded by a poem about two lovers named Romeus and Juliet. Coincidence? Not at all. Their lack of disguise shows that Shakespeare wasn’t ashamed of his techniques. Bryson in fact shows that plots and even characters were common property in Elizabethan times – to lift a character straight from another writer’s manuscript and use him or her in yours was fair practice. What it really meant was that whoever was able to collect and assemble the best plots and characters in the most engaging and entertaining way, would succeed. As Bryson puts it, “What Shakespeare did, of course, was take pedestrian pieces of work and endow them with distinction and, very often, greatness.” One might even consider that if the same practice was accepted today, there might be a lot more spectacular books and a lot less mediocre ones.

The second accusation, which is one of the few hooks that teachers still use to get school children interested in Shakespeare – and something that might have made it into Heat magazine had it existed four centuries ago – is the suggestion that Shakespeare was gay. A good deal of his love sonnets were directed at a male figure, rather than a female one. And of course, every Shakespeare historian has a factually unsupported solution to the matter. Some argue that Shakespeare was commissioned to write the love poems by a woman, or that he was practicing using a woman’s voice so that he could write female roles better in his plays. Some argue that 16th century sexuality was very different from its modern form – and that it was perfectly acceptable and no sign of homosexuality for a man to write love poems to another man. The least far-fetched solution is that Shakespeare – although married to a woman, was gay. If that means that certain religious sects have to burn their copies of The Tempest – so be it. But what we do know for certain is that whatever William’s sexual orientation – it can’t detract from genius of his writing.

The third allegation is that Shakespeare didn’t write any of the works attributed to him. Some suggest that the high level of expertise in such a wide range of fields, as reflected in his work is too far above a mildly educated son of a glove-maker from Snitterfield (the family moved to Stratford-upon-Avon just in time for William’s birth). The theory goes that Shakespeare was merely the front man for a real genius who, for whatever reason, was unable or unwilling to sign his own name on his manuscripts. Most of the conspiracy theorists that upheld this belief, as they so often are, were completely mad. One particularly colourful American lady, Delia Bacon, decided that her namesake Sir Francis Bacon was that real man behind the writing and so went to Britain to investigate. Her investigation involved sitting in a room and ‘absorbing the atmosphere’ – a kind of Ouija method reserved for only the most un-scientific historians. She wrote extensively about her findings and was eventually committed to a mental asylum where she died believing she was the Holy Ghost (an ironically Shakespearean ending). It is a theory without any proof or likelihood at all – but as with most of Shakespeare’s life, proof for either side of the argument is hard to find.

Bill Bryson has an amazing way of translating highbrow intellectual topics into language that us commoners can understand. Having written A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bryson can now focus on the details. Shakespeare is a valuable read, as well as an entertaining one. And perhaps if it had been written fifteen years earlier, our class might have taken more of an interest in the famous Bard’s work.

-Published in Good Taste magazine, SA

After finishing this review, I searched the Internet for Bill Bryson’s email address and sent him this review and the one I wrote of his previous book. This was his response:

Dear Alex — Thank you so much. I am very grateful for your kind reviews and no less grateful to you for taking the time trouble to send them. I hope I get a chance to thank you in person one day. Until then, thanks again and all best wishes. — Bill Bryson