Kudos to How to be A Retro­naut for find­ing this great clip of Jack Ker­ouac play­ing pool in ear­ly 1967. We bet he was the coolest play­er in that par­tic­u­lar room (at the Paw­tuck­etville Social Club, in Low­ell, Mass). But we’d also bet that he copied that cool, taut per­sona from Paul New­man’s turn as “Fast Eddie” Fel­son in the clas­sic movie The Hus­tler filmed six years ear­li­er.

For more great moments in Beat his­to­ry, check out Ker­ouac and Gore Vidal meet­ing William F. Buck­ley, Alan Gins­berg’s Tug­boat Ride and William S. Bur­roughs Shoot­ing Shake­speare, all oth­er­wise found in our col­lec­tion of 275 Cul­tur­al Icons.

Sheer­ly Avni is a San Fran­cis­co-based arts and cul­ture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Week­ly, Moth­er Jones, and many oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low her on twit­ter at @sheerly.

The nar­ra­tor of this rare clip describes James Joyce — arguably the great­est nov­el­ist of the 20th cen­tu­ry — as a “small, thin, unath­let­ic man with very bad eyes.” Ouch. And it gets worse. Accord­ing to the voiceover, when Joyce and drink­ing bud­dy Ernest Hem­ing­way faced a poten­tial brawl, Joyce would hide behind his more impos­ing com­rade and shout “Deal with him, Hem­ing­way, deal with him!!!’

But we bet they were both just hid­ing behind Gertrude Stein.

For more on Hem­ing­way’s adven­tures in fight­ing, see our post Ernest Hemingway’s Delu­sion­al Adven­tures in Box­ing: “My Writ­ing is Noth­ing, My Box­ing is Every­thing.”

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

James Joyce Read­ing from Finnegans Wake

Ernest Hem­ing­way Reads “In Harry’s Bar in Venice”

James Joyce, With His Eye­sight Fail­ing, Draws a Sketch of Leopold Bloom (1926)

James Joyce’s Ulysses: Down­load the Free Audio Book

Sheer­ly Avni is a San Fran­cis­co-based arts and cul­ture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Week­ly, Moth­er Jones, and many oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low her on twit­ter at @sheerly.