Neal Cassady (2/8/26-2/4/68) died <a href=”http://www.todayinliterature.com/today-ct.asp?id=2/4/2003
“>on this day.
“. . .’keep a step ahead, keep your mind ahead’ — (I heard his insistent voice) — ‘don’t butt your dumb head against their walls, man! – look for doors, and then GO – Just leave them snarled up in their worries, their motives – it’s their kick man, it’s their dreary high – But, listen – never knock the way the other cat swings.'”
[Generally acknowledged to be the first Beat novel and preceding Kerouac’s On The Road by five years, it is also about Cassady.]
Related: Why did John Perry Barlow spell Cassady’s name wrong in his heartfelt paean?
While we’re at it, here’s more from Go:
‘Last week l got the idea that the one aim of my intercourse with other people is to prevent them from noticing how brittle and will-less l have become,” Paul Hobbes was writing. ‘l cant seem to dance without a piper. Would you believe ill of me? l actually yearn for life to be easy, magic, full of love. How wonderful (and simple) it would be if we were all naked on a plain, as Gene Pasternak says. You probably wouldn’t like him at all, but l can learn something from him because he’s written an annoyingly good novel. And anyway he believes in himself, and also in life…. As of this moment, l only believe in the spring outside the window on Lexington Avenue, and in you. Is there spring up there on Riverside Drive too? Let’s all go out and be naked on a plain. . . .”
Angrily, Hobbes stopped typing, surrendering to his feeling that the letter was basically aimless. He pulled the sheet out of the machine, looked it over for a moment, thrust it aside, and got up. He began to walk noisily up and down the floor. It was after five and Pasternak had been sleeping since nine that morning.
Everything in sight made Hobbes impatient: the shelves he had built for their books, the borrowed frameless paintings on the walls, the couches in need of a brush; everything that he and his wife, Kathryn, had collected and arranged so carefully in the last years. They were not enough somehow; nor were his desk, his manuscripts, and the novel upon which he had been biting his nails too long. Only the soft spring evening, which hung like some impossibly romantic water-color behind the towers of midtown Manhattan, escaped his dissatisfaction. He was filled with that heightened sense of excitement and restlessness that spring brings to New York, when evening becomes graceful and warm with promise. A joy without object or reason rose within him, but like all such joys ebbed into frustration almost immediately because he did not know how to express it.
He went to the phonograph, pulled out an album and put on a soft jazz record. He did not want to keep quiet, he wanted everything to begin; but an overly-developed sense of propriety prevented him from going to the bedroom, and waking Pasternak with cruel brightness so they could talk. Instead he sat down again and began to re-read what he had written.
