DOCTOR SAX —Jack Kerouac —Grove Press . The decade's most celebrated banger of mystical ashcans has written a
fictional account of his childhood, and surprisingly, while the lad he
describes is no Penrod, neither is he Little Boy Beat. Jack
Duluoz, the author's alter-Kerouac, is exuberantly profane and
comfortably delinquent—a kind of city-bound Tom Sawyer who at one
point seems ready to go rafting down New England's flood-swollen
Merrimack River on a henhouse roof. But like Sawyer, young Duluoz is a fair-weather rebel, and he generally
rambles home in time for dinner. The book, some of its pages all but
yellowed with nostalgia, is an elegy to the warm, safe smells of a
tenement kitchen and the dark mysteries of a city neighborhood. Yakking in the Blue. At the outset, Kerouac warns what he is up to:
“The other night I had a dream that I was sitting on the sidewalk on
Moody Street. Pawtucketville, Lowell, Mass., with a pencil and paper in
my hand saying to myself 'Describe the wrinkly tar of this sidewalk,
also the iron pickets of Textile Institute, or the doorway where Lousy
and you and G.J.'s always sittin and dont stop to think of words when
you do stop, just stop to think of the picture better—and let your
mind off yourself in this work.' ” Despite its irritating quality, the
formless formula works well enough in evoking the often simultaneous
boyhood moods of scorn, fear, sentimentality, barefootedness and
gleeful obscenity. Writes Kerouac at wild random: “A young and silly
dove is yakking in the blue, circling the brown and slushy river with
yaks of pipsqueak joy,” and “the mystery which I now see hugens, huger,
into something beyond my Grook.'' “Grook,” the keyword of the novel, always refers to something ominously
exciting, not fully understood, worthy of a boy's wonder and solemn
respect. Dr. Sax. the hawk-faced, silent, evil-battling spook whom Jack
Duluoz invents , gets
from place to place by grooking. Dr. Sax plays poker incessantly, has a
high, fiendish laugh . And when his stalking of
the evil Great World Snake makes it necessary, he pulls a rubber boat
out of his slouch hat, pumps it up and paddles across the Merrimack. Turf in the Tenement. Perhaps the book's most appealing episode is the
horse-racing fantasy—for Jack Duluoz, like any right-thinking
Massachusetts twelve-year-old, is a track addict. In the Duluoz
tenement, on dark winter mornings, Jack scribbles out racing forms,
plays the call to colors on the Victrola, stages elaborate handicap
races with marbles . Pinball prose, grookish goofiness and all, Kerouac's book is a pleasant
boyhood novel. Doctor Sax, which was written in 1952, comes from the
apparently bottomless hopper that the author had filled before his
bestselling On the Road was published. Perhaps because it contains no
such adult concerns as marijuana, Zen Buddhism or women to dull his
exuberance, it is Kerouac's best book.
