Criminal History from Kerouac to Kinsey

Criminal History from Kerouac to Kinsey Jeffrey R. Di Leo Malcolm & Jack: (and Other Famous American Criminals) Ted Pelton Spuyten Duyvil Press http://spuytenduyvil.net 262 pages; paper, $14.00 The party game question "Which five figures from American history would you most like to invite to dinner?" is always an interesting thought experiment, and a good indicator of the interests and values of a new acquaintance. It's intriguing to imagine F. Scott Fitzgerald in conversation with Abbie Hoffman or an exchange between Henry James and Henry Miller. In his new novel, Malcolm & Jack: (and Other Famous American Criminals), Ted Pelton takes this notion of our reliance on cultural and historical icons for inspiration and a sense of origin, and develops it into an insightful study of American identity and values. "History," writes Pelton. "Do you ever think about history brothers and sisters? I find myself dunking of it more and more. I look down a street like this one and see not what is today but what it has been. History. The streets are paved no more once the vision comes upon me. No automobiles or electric lights but lanterns and muddy paths and signs with arrows pointing to the auction grounds." The act of viewing the streets of New York City today and seeing slave auction grounds typifies the temporal motions ofPelton's fascinating, fast-moving criminal history of the contemporary American psyche. Pelton's novel continuously strives to unearth the seeds ofthe present in creative, criminal histories of the past. For him, "Much of what we call the 60s was bom in the 1940s." To help us to see this better, Pelton takes us back to the 40s through the eyes of a cast of characters that played a key role in setting up the radical questioning ofdie dominant values of American society that came about in the 60s. While the characters Malcolm X and Jack Kerouac are the focal points of the novel, the novel is populated by many other famous and infamous figures, primarily from the literary and musical worlds. The literary world is that of the pre-Beat and Beat generations, which, in addition to Kerouac, includes William S. Burroughs, Lucien Carr, Neal Cassady, and Allen Ginsberg, among others. The musical world of the novel, while largely dominated by Billie Holiday, the subject ofthe entire second chapter, is that ofAmerican jazz from Count Basie to Charlie Parker. While many of the characters named in the novel actually existed, Pelton only irregularly situates them in documentable, factual events. He notes that while, for example, "Lucien Carr killed David Kammerer in August, 1944, in New York City" and that "Billie Holiday was sentenced to a year in Alderson Federal Reformatory for Women in 1947," no statement in the novel "should be taken as a simple statement of fact." Rather, Pelton challenges you to step out of the present into the past, such that "you find yourself transported back a life-time ago, to when things were wilder, more unsure in certain ways than they are today." To a time in New York City when "Bums hanging out on the street comer are poets and jazz musicians who'll someday be famous. After diey're dead." To a time when cultural heroes like Kerouac, Malcolm X, and Billie Holiday are challenging the line between criminality and creativity. Consequently, Malcolm & Jack is a moving, hip, and complex journey into not only American cultural, social, and political history, but also into the meaning of history in itself. One senses the latter most profoundly when knowing that Malcolm X never met Jack Kerouac, but finding it difficult to resist Pelton's compelling scene with Kerouac buying a drink for Malcolm X in a Detroit blues bar. Pelton freely interweaves the lives of his characters in a way that mirrors the complex development of ideas in a jazz composition. Just as a great piece of jazz music can make us forget about the mies of composition and revel in the free-flow development of ideas, Pelton's novel makes us want to believe in the possibility of a friendship between these two figures. Pelton describes the appeal of these possibilities as another kind...