Beat Film: Jack Kerouac’s Writing and Reading for Pull My Daisy

Directed by photographer Robert Frank – author of the book The Americans (1958) – and painter Alfred Leslie, Pull My Daisy (1959) gathers some of the most important artists of the Beat Generation and their companions: poets Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Gregory Corso, painters Larry Rivers and Alice Neel, musician David Amram, art dealer Richard Bellamy, actress Delphine Seyrig, dancer Sally Gross, and Pablo Frank, Robert’s son. Jack Kerouac wrote and read the text that we hear in this short film. This literary composition was, in fact, adapted from the third act of his play, Beat Generation or The New American Church. The film’s title comes from the poem “Pull My Daisy,” written by Ginsberg, Kerouac and Neal Cassady in the late 1940s. Part of this original poem was used as a lyric in Amram’s jazz composition that opens the film. My aim in this paper is to analyse these elements and the aesthetic qualities of this cinematic work, by focusing on the film’s improvisational tone as well as the autobiographical elements of Kerouac’s text, such as his Catholic spirituality.

It is worth mentioning that, as with other pieces of writing by Kerouac, the film and the text were based on a real episode in the life of Beat poet Neal Cassady and his then-wife, the painter Carolyn Robinson. In the film, the wife of a railway brakeman called Milo invites a respected bishop over for dinner. However, the brakeman’s bohemian friends, three poets, are also present and this turns the evening into a surprising and often humorous event. Neal did not participate directly in the project, but he did work for the Southern Pacific Railroad for some time, and so he was the inspiration for Milo. He and Carolyn, interested as they were in spiritual explorations (much like Kerouac), often received visits from bishop Romano, a clergy of the Liberal Catholic Church, a group within the commonly referred to independent Catholic movement, unrecognised by and not in communion with the rest of the Catholic Church. Neal is, of course, represented in Kerouac’s On the Road as “Dean Moriarty” and Carolyn as “Camille.”

Opening credits, Pull My Daisy

Flipping Through

The initial credits inform the viewer that the film was “written and narrated by Jack Kerouac.” The song playing is “The Crazy Daisy,” performed by Anita Ellis, with the lyrics: “Pull my daisy, tip my cup, all my doors are open. Cut my thoughts for coconuts, all my eggs are broken. Hop my heart on, harp my height, seraphs hold me steady. Hip my angel, hype my light, lay it on the needy.” These lyrics come from a collaborative poem written by Ginsberg and Kerouac, inspired by the 17th-century “Tom o’Bedlam” song that celebrated the wisdom of madmen. If Pull My Daisy is interested in wisdom, this interest is inseparable from its religious elements and discussions. 

When Milo arrives with Peter (that is, Peter Orlovsky), he presents him to Alan and Gregory as “Peter, the saint.” A bit later comes a question regarding the expected Bishop: “Is he a saint?” The Bishop arrives earlier than expected, dressed in white, and accompanied by his mother and sister. In the film, it is left open whether he is a member from the Catholic Church or another Christian denomination. 

In a conversation about Buddhism, Gregory starts by goofing around. But being playful with words may lead to being playful with thoughts. Gregory then asks: “Is it true that we are in heaven now and don’t know it?” Followed by this statement: “Because we don’t know it we act just the way that we do when we know it.” In Buddhism, he tells us, you do not have to take one path or another and you can do what you really want. The question is ignorance, the Bishop explains. He adds that when we are not thinking about something in particular “perhaps we sit in some kind of quiet bliss.”

Later, the Bishop says: “I don’t know anything.” His sister retorts: “I thought you knew something that you could say.” He clarifies: “Well there is one thing that I don’t know what to say. And that is what to say what I really mean.” The conversation seems to have hit an insurmountable obstacle and so it turns to ordinary things. Responding to expressed curiosity, the Bishop confirms that he has played baseball and seen girls in tight dresses. “Is baseball holy?”, Peter asks. The Bishop repeats the question, creating a kind of echo, as if claiming the question as his own and thinking about it without reaching a conclusion. The shot of the Bishop’s face dissolves into a shot of a woman carrying a child and another woman in front of her. The Bishop is preaching now in the street. As he delivers his sermon, an American flag is held by Milo’s wife by the Bishop’s side and blows over his face. The camera tracks from left to right in medium close-ups over the faces of the street congregation, all of whom are speaking, although, crucially, there is no narration at this point in the film. Then Pull My Daisy cuts to a pan shot also from left to right, which continues the camera movement inside the apartment and evokes differences and similarities between the spaces and the scenes. Is the Bishop also preaching in the gathering with poets? “The angel of silence has flown over all their heads,” Kerouac’s voice utters. This may be an acknowledgment that some spiritual interchange is occurring.

Kerouac says “Empty rooms are holy?”

“Strange thoughts you young people have,” says the Bishop. Alan unwinds a series of questions: “Is everything holy? Is alligators holy, Bishop. Is the world holy? Is the basketball holy? Is the organ of man holy?” The Bishop says “why, holy, holy.” The Bishop’s mother walks to the organ and plays sacred music that transmutes into jazz as a merging of two ways of thinking through artistic creation. Alan multiplies the questions: “Are holy flowers holy? Is the world holy? Is glasses holy? Is time holy? Is moonlight holy? Empty rooms are holy? Neil holy? Toy holy? Byzantine holy?”

In general, as narrator, Kerouac is not a detached observer. He performs different voices when he ascribes lines to specific characters, regardless of gender. All of the voices are his, except for a young girl’s voice reciting “Humpty Dumpty.” At times, there is basic synchrony with someone who is talking. Other times, there is a deliberate asynchrony. His reading has been described as a type of “poetic trance” by Louis Marcorelles.¹ The narration was ad-libbed and recorded while Kerouac watched the film. His voice is so present throughout the film that it becomes the conduit of its tentative and unsettled energy. The camera frequently pans back and forth, simulating an attempt to catch the intense and unsettled action as it happens. It is actually Kerouac’s narration that allows us to make sense of what we are seeing.

Mulling Over 

Pull My Daisy is arguably the most realised example of the Beat movement’s encounter with cinema. No wonder Jack Sargeant chose to open his volume Naked Lens: Beat Cinema with a chapter on it, with critical notes on the film and interviews with Alfred Leslie and Robert Frank.²

The first public screening of Pull My Daisy occurred at Cinema 16 in New York City on 11 November 1959, a year after the publication of Kerouac’s novel The Dharma Bums. The film was lauded by critics, in particular by independent filmmaker Jonas Mekas, and is sometimes regarded as a founding work of the New American Cinema. The New American Cinema was an experimental, avant-garde movement radically opposed to mainstream Hollywood films. In one of the movement’s initial statements, it asserted, 

The official cinema all over the world is running out of breath. It is morally corrupt, aesthetically obsolete, thematically superficial, temperamentally boring. (…). We don’t want false, polished, slick films — we prefer them rough, unpolished, but alive; we don’t want rosy films — we want them the color of blood.³

To the admirers and followers of the New American Cinema, Pull My Daisy’s apparent spontaneity seemed to represent an ode to freedom and improvisation, values reinforced by the Beat actors and their anarchic foolish behaviour.

Notice that I wrote “apparent spontaneity.” The effect of spontaneity in the film is carefully constructed and performed. Despite Mekas’s reading of Pull My Daisy as an example of “spontaneous cinema,” careful planning went into the staging and shooting of the film.⁴ Much of it, in fact, was carefully rehearsed. After all, improvisation does not have to mean complete disorganization or unrestrained action. Rather, as Blaine Allan notes, it means establishing shared rules or limitations or protocols “broad enough to permit and encourage free play in production.”⁵ The film’s actors certainly engaged in free play of this sort on set, and Kerouac’s narration revels in “goofing” and idiosyncratic verbal excess. Yet as Allan argues, “in terms of pictorial quality, editing, structure, and performance, Pull My Daisy demonstrates control, not loss of control.”⁶ This is perhaps the great accomplishment of Beat literary texts and this Beat film: the way it models a new mode of organisation that balances preparation and spontaneity, liberty and control.

Milo (Larry Rivers) jams on the saxophone, Allen Ginsberg listens to him, while Kerouac jazzes up his narration around actions and words saying “Doing something and saying goodbye and saying goodbye and doing something are both the same.”

Nine years after the production, in 1968, Leslie revealed to the Village Voice that the movie was thoroughly scripted.⁷ Later, both directors admitted that the movie had not been shot in Leslie’s apartment as was previously claimed, but had instead been filmed on a professional film set with a budget of 15 thousand dollars.⁸ This shows that the film was not quite what it appeared to be. Ultimately, while it had been implied that Pull My Daisy was basically the best-filmed record of the Beat Generation as it naturally existed, instead it was a carefully constructed piece of fiction. Many hours of film were shot and edited down into the 28-minute film. Additionally, Kerouac’s lines had been recorded as many as four times as Amram tinkled on the piano and the movie played silently in front of him. Does this put into question Kerouac’s adherence to spontaneous prose and his reputation as a literary jazzman? It is up for debate, but spontaneity is not a one-time occurrence and jazz musicians often improvise from the same musical basis, creating different pieces of music. For this singular film project, Kerouac created and performed, wrote and read or said for the screen, both at the same time, more than once.

Why, Holy, Holy

Returning to the film and to its themes, holiness appears as central. Many writers of the Beat Generation were attracted to Buddhism and dabbled in it. Kerouac was one of them, but we cannot say in the same way that Kerouac dabbled in Catholicism. He was Catholic. He was raised as Catholic and the Catholic faith accompanied him throughout his personal and creative life, whether he was practicing or not. How can a Catholic or some other Christian be a member of a countercultural movement? A book published in 2000 in a series on popular culture and political change, The Church as Counterculture, explores this issue.⁹ The Church is a complex and dynamic organisation that can legitimate as well subvert existing secular relations of power, influence, and privilege. When Christians become part of the counterculture, they reclaim their roles as disciples of Jesus in order to challenge the status quo and confound conventional divides, for example, between liberal and conservative or between the sacred and the profane. 

“Is baseball holy?” Kerouac seemed to think so. As a recent study by Gregory Stephenson suggests, baseball was for the Beat writer “a ‘sacred space’ — a solace and a sanctuary, a source of insight and inspiration.”¹⁰ At the core of On the Road, and at the heart of all his work (including his work for Pull My Daisy), is the Catholic and Beat insistence upon an underlying spirituality that inhabits all creation. Kerouac saw the world, and everything in it, as holy. In the months before his death,

he rediscovered prayer, particularly the short Catholic Marian prayers of his youth. Every little prayer he offered to Mary kept him, he believed, from his destructive behaviors. He often went to Catholic churches, just to pray or kneel quietly. He might very well have fully embraced the Church again, though in some ways he had never really left it.¹¹

Prayer was for Kerouac a form of self-preservation and a gateway to wisdom as he approached death from an uncontrollable hepatic haemorrhage. His funeral Mass was held in Lowell, MA, where he was born, at St. Jean Baptiste Cathedral. As David A. King elegantly puts it, 

Father Armand “Spike” Morisette, who celebrated the Mass, beautifully linked the mystery of Kerouac’s life to Emmaus, saying of him the words from St. Luke’s Gospel, “Wasn’t it like a fire burning in us when he talked to us on the road?”¹²

Endnotes