''Ce film biographique est sorti en 2007 et a été écrit et dirigé par Noah Buschel. Le rôle principal, celui de Neal Cassady est joué par l'acteur Tate Donovan.Le film se focalise en grande partie sur l'année 1962 où Neal rencontre Ken Kesey qui lui propose de tenir le volant du bus des Merry Pranksters pour un voyage hallucinatoire dans l'Amérique des années 1960 en pleine découverte de l'acide, drogue aux multiples visages...Ce film, c'est aussi principalement l'histoire de ce personnage atypique de la Beat Generation qui inspira Jack Kerouac pour son personnage Dean Moriarty dans son livre "Sur la route".On découvre donc dans ce biopic un Neal Cassady pris au piège avec son alter ego fictif, Dean Moriarty...''
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| Frise extraite du magazine 3 Couleurs |
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| Sam Riley et Garrett Hedlund dans On The Road (C) MK2 |
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| Extract from One & Only,p.230, authorization given to Ontheroad-themovie by Viva Editions (C) |
Tel est l'incipit du tout premier roman de Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), l'écrivain américain pionnier de la beat generation.
The sea is my brother (littéralement, La mer est mon frère) a été édité et mis en vente, vendredi 24 novembre, par l'éditeur habituel des œuvres de l'auteur de Sur la route, la maison d'édition Penguin. C'est la première fois que le premier roman de Jack Kerouac est édité dans son intégralité, précise la préface. Une surprise puisque ses biographes comme ses admirateurs pensaient que ce premier roman était définitivement perdu dans les limbes de la littérature.
Ecrit en 1943, le roman raconte l'histoire d'un jeune homme, qui à 20 ans prend la mer et parcourt le monde, en tant que matelot pour la marine marchande. Jack Kerouac n'a pas cherché bien loin, c'est en fait l'adaptation de son journal de bord : il s'était lui-même engagé dans la marine marchande à l'été 1942, alors qu'il n'avait que 20 ans.
Des années avant Sur la route, Kerouac y décrit son alter ego comme "en révolte contre la société telle qu'elle est". Tous les thèmes favoris de la littérature de la beat generation y sont déjà largement évoqués : The sea is my brother laissetransparaître l'amour de Kerouac pour les voyages, les grands espaces et les pérégrinations sans objectif précis.
Ce n'est pas la première fois que des éditeurs exhument des manuscrits de Jack Kerouac. En mai 2010, une nouvelle édition de son roman phare Sur la route avait ainsi été publiée, après qu'on avait retrouvé le manuscrit original rédigé sur un rouleau de papier. (article du journal Le Monde.fr)
''Chaque automne depuis 9 ans, les bibliothécaires des quatre communes de Bassens, Lormont Cenon et Floirac, concoctent une programmation originale autour de contes, de rencontres et lectures en musique, de projections-débat, de conférences, de spectacles, d’expositions et de jeux. Autant d’occasions de s’immerger dans d’autres cultures, qui ne nous sont pas toujours si étrangères.
Depuis 2003, Souffles nomades a parcouru terres et mers : l’Algérie d’abord, puis les pays francophones en 2004, l’Asie en 2005, les Îles en 2006, l’Afrique, l’Amérique latine et les terres extrêmes en 2007, la Méditerranée en 2008, les pays nordiques en 2009 et l’Ouest avec les Amérindiens en 2010. En 2011, Souffles nomades ne quitte plus la route.
Souffles nomades, manifestation culturelle et littéraire du Grand Projet des Villes de la Rive Droite invite cette année le public à prendre la route : de la marche au pèlerinage, du voyage lointain à l’exil, de la contestation à l’introspection… Sur la Rive Droite cet automne, toutes les routes mènent à la littérature et au conte.''
She was Marylou in Jack Kerouac’s classic On The Road, the gal who drove Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady) mad. He married her when she was 15; divorced her a year later; and then did what he had to do to keep her within his orbit for the rest of his life. She was either there alongside Dean/Neal for many of the miles covered in Kerouac’s book or was often the reason he was driving like a man possessed in any given chapter: to rejoin her, either on the other side of town or the other end of the country.
On The Road’s narrator, Sal Paradise (Kerouac), loved Marylou in his own way; not with the wild passion of Dean, but in a manner that was both innocent and dark/deep at the same time. It was complicated; it was simple; it was a love story; it was utter Beat madness.
It was no secret that the character Marylou was a woman named Lu Anne Henderson in real life, but her side of the miles, the towns, the blurry-eyed sundowns/sunups/moons/stars and kicks has never been told until now. Author Gerald Nicosia happened to cross paths with Henderson back in 1978: he was researching his Kerouac bio Memory Babe ; she was in San Francisco General Hospital in a period of hard life and bad health.
At that point Henderson was already weary of journalists and Beat-wannabes: “She told me that too many people wanted to learn about her life and the lives of her friends,” writes Gerald Nicosia, “but it didn’t seem like anybody really wanted to know why she and her friends had done the things they did.” But there was something about Nicosia, the questions he asked, and the manner in which he asked them, that inspired Henderson to talk: “When I met Neal, he had six books under one arm, a pool cue in the other hand, and started necking with me at the same time.”
They actually had two interview sessions: the first with Nicosia taking notes at her bedside; the second a few days later, when Henderson invited Nicosia to a friend’s house where she was recuperating. Eight hours later he left with “cassette tape after cassette tape” of true never-heard-before Beat history. By Nicosia’s own admission, “a lot of Lu Anne was beyond me then, due to my own inexperience and the limits to my understanding imposed by a Catholic, middle-class upbringing. I only knew how grateful I was for the interview, and I sensed how great it was.” No one would record the story of “Marylou” with this kind of depth again (Henderson passed away in 2008).
Nicosia’s recordings went into archived limbo for many years until recently unearthed for purposes of research for the upcoming film version of On The Road. It wasn’t until then (30 years after the original interviews took place) that Nicosia realized just what he had in terms of a document of the Beats. And, working with Henderson’s daughter Anne Marie Santos, he has produced a great read.
One And Only offers the reader the complete (I’m talking 34,000-word complete) transcription of Nicosia’s interview with Henderson, formatted as a running dialogue broken into six portions, with an intro by Nicosia to set the stage for each. Also included is an essay by the author reflecting on “Lu Anne’s Role in Beat History/Cultural History”; an interview with Al Hinkle (“Big Ed Dunkel” in the pages of On The Road ); a lovely chapter written by daughter Santos; and a copy of a letter written by Henderson to Cassady (but never sent) in 1957.
Readers may be tempted to haul out their dog-eared copies of On The Road and compare Kerouac’s narrative to Henderson’s recollections along the way. And beyond the road years, Henderson’s memories and reflections of Cassady and Kerouac later on in their lives makes for interesting reading as well. (Her last visit with Neal Cassady was in the fall of ’67, shortly before he left for Mexico. He died there in February of 1968.)
One And Only isn’t a book of dirt-dishing or corpse-poking; this is another view of a much-studied but also much misunderstood period in American culture, told by someone who was there. In the end, the point is made that Henderson provided the “necessary estrogen” that helped birth the Beats – although neither Nicosia or Santos (or Henderson herself, for that matter) try to make the trio of Cassady, Kerouac, and Lu Anne into heroes and heroine.
But they are allowed to be humans, which is a point often missed.
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| Rolling Thunder Revue tour, fall 1975—Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg at the grave of writer Jack Kerouac. - (C) Ken Regan |
''But there are also shots like the one he captured of Dylan and beat poet Allen Ginsberg sitting at Jack Kerouac’s grave during the Rolling Thunder tour.''
