The First Third

At Shakespeare and Co. in Paris I bought Neal Cassady's The First Third. It seems to be a partial memoir that covers from about age 7 thru 10 (or thereabouts). For those not sure, Neal was friend and hero to Jack Kerouac.

Neal (left) and Jack

His memories of being young are much better than mine. I've always wondered that about memoirs. There's so much detail. How much is fact and how much is embellishment? Or do these authors just have much better memories than me? If I were to write what I actually remember, my memoir would be very sketchy.

Neal grew up in Denver. If there's anything wrong with his writing, it's that he overdoes setting description. But that's part of what I liked about the book. Being from Denver, reading what it looked like in the 1930s was very cool. As great prose, however, it was too much. In the foreword, the editor pretty much apologizes for Neal's writing. I don't see why. It might not be great, but it was certainly solid.

To pad out the book, the publisher added a prologue that Neal wrote, which detailed his dad (Neal, Sr.) growing up (again, a lot of detail for information that could have only been provided to him as sketchy oral history from his dad, right? Is it just assumed that memoirs and biographies are mostly fiction?). And in the back are letters written to Jack and to Ken Kesey as well as prose fragments. In all, it's an interesting bit of personal history about a man so integral to the Beat Generation.