SOURCE: “Kerouac's Sound,” in Evergreen Review, Vol. 4, No. 11, January-February, 1960, pp. 153-169.

In the following excerpt, Tallman identifies jazz elements in the fiction of Jack Kerouac.

It is always an implicit and frequently an explicit assumption of the Beat writers that we live, if we do at all, in something like the ruins of our civilization. When the Second World War was bombed out of existence in that long-ago '45 summer, two cities were in literal fact demolished. But psychically, all cities fell. And what the eye sees as intact is a lesser truth than what the psyche knows is actually in ruins. The psyche knows that the only sensible way to enter a modern city is Gregory Corso's way, very tentatively, “two suitcases filled with despair.” This assumption that the cities which live in the psyche have all gone smash is one starting point of Beat.

But if...