To Wed An Author, Part II

They choose to walk on, rather than staying within the confines of morality, a safety net seen through the rose colored lens of night. There is the standard beat imagery:

"Monday morning was dreary and cold. I humed to Victoria's shop through the bone-chilling November sleet, ran up the steps onto the loading platform, and through the back door to the little room with its' three sewing machines." (p. 98)

Or, in this vision as the book begins with the mournful wailing of an old beat poem, facing the darkness of loneliness inside the self.

"I opened my eyes in darkness, and my mind was tangled between the haziness of a dream, the warmth of memory and the whisper of a voice from the future. I lay in my small bed, in my mother's house just outside Albany, working around the images and trying to separate the dream from the memory from the vision." (p. 1)

Around this tone of sadness that seemed to give the beat prose and poetry its strength, resembling some reassertion of the Gothic darkened imagery of Victorian prose, which at times also seemed to linger in the boundaries of the morose, resting beneath the shadows of death for too long, until the beauty of ivy and stone grew the chain-linked couplets of an age. These couplets grown from heart and voice seem to waltz in the ever-fading light of dawn, where the fire in the hearth burns in the wake of an eternal morning. There are the normal scenes running through the pages of the book, the humorous dialogue of parties and nights grown wild.

"Jack was still standing and Herb was still sitting when I returned with the tray and set it down on a small table. Two folding chairs leaned against the wall and I went to get them. Jack immediately, chivalrously, rushed to take them from me.

"What do you do, Jack ?" Herb asked.

"Oh, well I ..." He spread his hands as though whatever he did wasn't of much importance.

"I wrote a book." He looked down at this feet and then up again, grinning slightly, almost bashfully.

"I'm writing another one," he added, sitting down.

"What about?"

"Well, this one's about my travels. All over the country. And Mexico too!"

Neal wanders through with the carefree essence of moment:

"If we could have found the elusive way of being, a graceful blend of give and take, we might've had the basic understanding of all that was important to us, together, and separately. But each of us had our unrelenting self-assertion. If Herb and I were meant to be together in some lifetime or other it wasn't this one. The most we were capable of now was just working the other well." (p. 216)

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