BOOKS

BOOKS

BURIED ALIVE: The Biography of Janis Joplin by Myra Friedman (Morrow)

Buried Alive is more than a biography; it is an act of passion. No one could have failed to recognize the posthumous pathos of Janis Joplin, but at least two other writers (David Dalton, with the sloppy Janis and Peggy Caserta, who was apparently one of Janis" lovers and shooting partners, in the despicably filthy rip-off, Going Down With Janis) have tried and failed to make us believe that Janis" unhappiness was anything more than a whim the particular Sunday morning on which she died.

Unfortunately, Buried Alive is not a very good book. Friedman, who was Janis" publicist and friend for the last three years of the ill-fated singer's life, comes close to the essence of Joplin's problems — her terrible insecurity, her constant battle with depression, her feelings of rejection and lacklove — but she doesn't capture at all the brilliance and vitality with which Janis Joplin won our hearts. Indeed, Friedman seems to be engaged in such an act of self-justifi-' cation that one often feels, while reading her book, that it was the audience, not Janis" own problems, which drove "Pearl" to commit the awful act which killed her. i

Buried Alive simply promises more than it is capable of delivering. The early passages on Janis" school days and late adolesence (the years in Texas) are wonderful, though marred by the bad writing which cripples much of the book. (Friedman likes to write in inverted sentences, Time-style — Janis and she didn't just go shopping; as often as not, shopping went Janis and she — which may make her feel more literary but makes me want to climb walls.).In the opening passages, in fact, we are; led to believe that Friedman will take the notion of Janis" lack of beauty, which I think was central to her appeal and to the great impact she had on her fans, somewhere, will shape the unifying notion of the book from it.

Janis Joplin was, after all, not a very pretty woman. She looked the part she played, tough, brassy and hard; when Friedman tries to make us believe that underneath it all — if only she hadn't been dragged down by those awful rock companions of hers — lay a simple, pretty country girl, one wants to laugh. It is acceptable, at this juncture, to find Janis ravishing, though I think that is over-compensation. If Janis was physically attractive, she was desirable just because she defied our notions of glamour. Like Bette Midler, Janis Joplin made a group of women who could never have achieved sexual self-confidence feel more secpre — and perhaps, during Janis" reign, they actually were the most desirable, in a strictly chauvinist sense. In any case, that redefinition seems to me to be more — or just as — important as whether or not Janis could learn to accept that new definition of beauty herself. In a way, since she broke the pattern, Joplin may have had to be the last to suffer the terrible consequences of the old alienation which the old standards of loveliness forced upon big homely women.

Then, too, there are the long-winded passages of murky Freudianism with which Friedman tries to explain Janis" penchant for mad-hattery. I am skeptical of an over-reliance on Freud, in the first place, but more than that, I think Myra's over-emphasis causes a shift in perception from Janis as a media figure, as which she is interesting, to Janis" personality, which I fail to believe is very deep. (Which is not necessarily an insult to Janis — most musicians are hardly threats to David Halberstam, Gay Talese or the country wisdom of Sam Ervin, whatever the conventional counter-cult conceit.)

Yet I think it Would be truly unfair to dismiss Myra Friedman's book. There is more of what I presume to be the real Janis here than anywhere else. Even if the writing bothered me sometimes, it is head-and-shoulders above either Dalton's rock-hack or Caserta's porn-hack prose.

Indeed, Friedman's is one of the few rock books I've read which is deeper than it seems, though not so rich as it tries to be. I had not made the connection between beauty and Joplin so strongly before reading the book, and anyone who writes a rock book with the honesty and nerve to call Jerry Garcia "addle-brained" can't be all bad.

Certainly, this book is indispensable for the Joplin fan, and in many ways, it is necessary for those of us who only liked her music a lot. Chances are Buried Alive will not storm the bestseller charts, but buying it would certainly not be a waste of money — which is far more .than can be said of the competition.

Dave Marsh

KENTUCKY HAM By William S. Burroughs Jr. (Dutton)

VISIONS OF CODY By Jack Kerouac (McGraw-Hill)

The Beat Generation really ended before most people knew it had begun. The only really significant tiling that happened was that Kerouac, Burroughs Sr., Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady and a bunch of other misfits got together in Times Square around V-J Day and, heated up on bop tenors and Benzedrine, catalysed each other til the friction launched most of "em straight outa their pads into literary history.

After which, almost incidentally, they inspired two whole generations of American youth to go and blow likewise.

The only trouble was that, just like any other pack of artists, none of the beats knew when to quit, even after years of ebbing inspiration. If you ever needed any proof, it's here right now in the form of two new tomes. One's by one of the grandest daddies of the whole phenomenon, the other's by the son of one of said daddy's buddies, who is himself at least as eminent, though greying. Neither of the books is particularly good, but both have a lot to say about turning the last page -of this particular chapter of American cultural history.

Jack Kerouac was a genius. One of the greatest American writers of our time, with a passion for language matching his totally uncontrollable output, he dropped lotsa speed, then whammed off a boxcar Proust saga that rolled through close to 20 books. Kerouac's "novels" were nothing more thana compulsively detailed and helplessly subjective autobiography; nothing, that is, but the paternal mold-setting biography of twodecades of you and me.

Like bop and rock, Kerouac's art was predicated on the willful abdication of control and discrimination on the most basic level. When he first hit the stalls with roundhouses like On the Road and The Subterraneans, all the academic nannies functioning as book critix poured curdled lox on his masterpieces. Now the tides have turned — Kerouac is dead, so no one minds giving him his due, and it's* become apparent how much he fathered. Thus, every last exhumable dribble from his pen will be slapped between covers and marketed. And the overcompensation for his initial cold-shouldering is so strong that nobody wants to say bad word one about any of his work, even if they're incomprehensible wino coinages arranged in the wrong order.

Visions of Cody is not a good book, and you're hearing that from somebody who teethed on Kerouac and thought he and Burroughs were gods. Maybe if you were just starting high school and stumbling fresh into all those wildoat prosody crosscountry raggedawn freeyawp notions it'd be different, but if that's the case, you'd be better off starting with On the Road anyway.

Cody is the kind of speedfreak journal everybody writes one week or another, frothing with pages-long, onesentence paragraphs reeling out'n"out through transcendental excesses of descriptive detail that never seem to loop back to home plate. Verbal brilliance ain't enough to hold your ass in any armchair, and all that dweet about expressionistic buckshots of real life insight caught as random jumbled experience — you know, the standard college cop-out — doesn't amount to a hill of Spiral pads, either.

This is Kerouac's most self-indulgent book, as well as one of his longest. When he*s not wanking redbrick-rawAmerica cliches or running through his Holiday magazine travel jottings for the 33rd time or drooling/through countless pages about how he loves Neal Cassady even though they never had relations (incidentally, all the high-toned pontificating on the subject of represso Manly Love being indulged in by other reviewers of this book is so much Sunday Supplement baloney), he's filling out the pages with exact transcriptions of tapes he and Neal made those many "50s nights. Which is abdut a follicle more profound than Jerry Garcia's cosmo-blather in The Dead Book, except that Jack and Neal occasionally fill our endless prurience for history by reminiscing about Burroughs, Ginsberg and the others.

The publication of two books by William Burroughs, Junior is a symptom of the same disease. Once you read Naked Lunch, you're hooked; you've gotta know everything about this Burroughs (Sr.) character even though he writes about almost nothing but himself (or his fantasies) and is damned redundant to boot.

Pop mangled Bill Jr."s brain even more firsthand than he did the rest of us vicariously, so naturally the bubba's 1971 debut scrawl was called Speed. All about his methed-up youth. That didn't have much about his old man so he published an article in Esquire called "Life with Father," and now that and a long dreary account of his experiences at Lexington junk hospital culled from a quickie anthology have been snupped tight with play-do and a passel of ancillary scribbles. It hangs together slightly better than a high-school avantgarder's first fold-in.

W.B. Jr. does have talent. Both Speed and, to a lesser extent, Kentucky Ham are fast and readable, with a knuckly style cribbed from his old man' that keeps you in there most of the time. Junior's flying highest when he's rhapsodizing his speed mems, or when he sticks to Dad and the Family, which have enough built-in fascination no hack could mess it up.

Unfortunately, Little Willie has also inherited the beatoffnik's worst habit — petered down from Kerouac to a Paul (Crawdaddy/) Williams: he never edits himself, and he thinks absolutely anything that crosses his mind is worthy of equal representation.

After W.B., Jr. gets out of Lexington, it really falls apart. The last section of the book is a long, pointless journal of a hunting trip he took to Alaska with some friends. (Maybe he copped that part from Mailer - Ed.) Besides, you read about one junk cure, you read M about "em all. And, anyway, this kid iff wasn't even a junkie when he sloped into Lex! That makes him a dilettante Q no matter what he parentage. M

Kentucky Ham may be the end of R the line for what's left of beat literature. ^ Sometimes it is healthy when things end, particularly when they've outlived their prime. So let the Beat Tombstone be an inspiration to you, kid scribes of America: all them old farts've had the biscuit, it's time tween renaissances now — ripe for you to barge in and grab the scimitar. So GET DOWN to it and get that next big wall to wall firebrandishing littachop renaissance cooking!

Lester Bangs