Jack Kerouac Biography
Name:
Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac
Variant
Name:
Jack Kerouac
Birth Date:
March 12, 1922
Death Date: October 21, 1969
Place of
Death:
St. Petersburg, Florida, United
States
Nationality: American
Gender:
Male
Occupations: writer
Associated
Works:
On the Road (Novel)
Further Reading
• Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957-1958, features letters by
Kerouac and Joyce Johnson (2000). An exceptionally detailed Kerouac
biography is Barry Miles's Jack Kerouac--King of the Beats (2000). Tom
Clark's Jack Kerouac (1984) is an extremely thorough biography of the author's
life, but is short on criticism of Kerouac's work. Ellis Amburn also offers a
thoroughly researched, yet controversial biography in Subterranean Kerouac:
The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac (1998), documenting Kerouac's struggles
concerning his sexuality with evidence from Kerouac's unpublished journals
and diaries. Although critical of Kerouac's character, Barry Miles' Jack
Kerouac: King of the Beats; A Portrait (1998) gives a good exploration of
Kerouac's relationships with other Beat writers. A helpful package is On The
Road, Text and Criticism, edited by Scott Donaldson (1979). In addition to the
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novel, the package includes a number of insightful articles, including pieces by
Kerouac, John Clellon Holmes, Timothy Hunt, and the transcript of an
interview with the author by Ted Berrigan. Lonesome Traveler by Jack Kerouac
(1960) is a collection of autobiographical pieces, useful for their style as much
as for their content. Jack Kerouac by Harry Russell Huebel (1979) is a quick
biography, and Jack's Book, An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac by Barry
Gifford and Lawrence Lee (1978) is also interesting.
Dictionary of Literary Biography Biography
Jack Kerouac, once called "our most misunderstood and underestimated writer," is
gradually emerging from that limbo, though much about him remains obscure. The
obscurity results from a misreading of his books by critics who, borne along by Cold
War prejudices, saw in Kerouac a fomenter of anarchy of nearly all kinds: sexual,
psychological, political, and artistic. So possessed were these critics by the bogey they
had invented that they failed to perceive an important truth about Kerouac: that his
accomplishment was a complex and even a paradoxical one. A conservative in politics
and a sincere Roman Catholic, Kerouac was rebellious only in a traditional way, in the
tradition of the individualism of Emerson and Thoreau. He was no egocentric
romantic. His shyness and gift for admiration made him honor not his own
individuality so much as that of his friends, whom he referred to as members of the
Beat Generation. He honored them by telling their stories. But in order to tell their
stories with energy and accuracy he found that he had to invent a new prose style. This
style, which cost him considerable time, energy, and pain to develop and sustain, he
called "spontaneous prose," and by means of it he became known later as the
spokesman or "father" of the Beat Generation.
Kerouac's literary reputation was sacrificed to this role of spokesman. The Beat
Generation was quickly condemned as a gang of subversives, deviants, and juvenile
delinquents, a dubious sociological and political judgment that made any responsible
assessment of Kerouac's accomplishment as a writer impossible. Kerouac himself was
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unable to defend his work against the critics' hostility. So desperate was he to escape
the suspicion and derision of critics that he repudiated the term beat which he himself
had brought into common use. His desperation merely added fuel to the critics' scorn,
and his alcoholism, from which he died at the relatively early age of forty-seven, may
have been felt as a just retribution. Not even death itself could inspire a reversal of
critics' attitudes. Though many of his books are still in print and read avidly, his
literary reputation remains clouded. Kerouac is still consistently ignored in American
literature anthologies and is given only passing notice in critics' discussions of postwar
writers. Yet certain recent events--the reevaluation of his work by critics John Tytell
and Tim Hunt, the biographies by Ann Charters and Dennis McNally, the publication
of the Viking critical edition of On the Road, as well as the continuing appearance in
print of appreciative articles--give hope that a calm assessment of Kerouac's
achievement is at last becoming possible. Perhaps as a result of this assessment his
true position as a major figure in American literature will become clear.
Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, an old textile manufacturing town on the
Merrimac River. Kerouac's parents, both devout Roman Catholics, came from rural
communities in the French-speaking part of Quebec, and French was the language
spoken in the Kerouac home. Kerouac did not begin to learn to speak English until he
was six years old, a fact which, along with his Catholicism, has never been sufficiently
stressed by commentators. Kerouac's father, Leo Kerouac, a former insurance
salesman, opened a print shop in Lowell and for many years was able to support his
growing family comfortably. The first of his sons, Gerard, was born in 1917; his
daughter, Caroline, was born in 1919; and his second son and last child, Jean Louis
Lebris (or "Jack," as he came to be called later by his English-speaking friends), was
born on 12 March 1922.
Kerouac's earliest years seem to have passed happily in an intimate family
atmosphere. But the first of what seem to have been four decisive and painful ruptures
in his life occurred just after his fourth birthday when his older brother Gerard died of
rheumatic fever. Gerard's death struck Kerouac's imagination violently. He had
become close to his brother during Gerard's illness, and the subsequent death shattered
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his security. But the death revealed a gift perhaps more precious than the happiness
that was lost. Gerard, at least in Kerouac's own perception of him (and there is no
conflicting evidence), was an unusual boy. He was bright and also very pious but in a
way that went deeper than his obedience to the religious teaching of the Catholic
Church and the Catholic parochial school he attended before his death. Like St.
Francis, Gerard seemed to possess a sincere compassion for all creatures, from mice to
birds to little brothers. This compassion did not desert Gerard during his illness; it
seemed rather to increase in intensity. More importantly for us, it stimulated a similar
response in the little brother, a response that lived on in the man. Years later, in
explaining the background of his writing, Kerouac reported that during his last illness
Gerard had urged on him a "reverence for life.... That we all wander thru flesh, while
the dove cries for us, back to the Dove of Heaven--So I was writing to honor that...."
Kerouac recounted the story of Gerard's last days in Visions of Gerard (1963), but his
guiding presence can be detected implicitly in all Kerouac's books. Kerouac, always a
firm believer in the afterlife, acquired his chief theme and his chief spiritual guardian
very early, even at the moment he lost that guardian as a brother in the flesh.
Though having many spiritual affinities with his older brother, Kerouac was his
opposite physically. Strongly built and well coordinated, he took part in the usual
roughhouse games of boyhood. He was never in any sense, however, a bully or even
an aggressive child. His earliest friends were French-speaking, many of them
attending local parochial grammar schools with him. He took his first communion in
1929 and in 1932 served occasionally as altar boy at St. Jean Baptiste Cathedral (the
same cathedral in which his funeral service was held in 1969). The devoutness of
Kerouac's early life was at odds with his rapidly developing love of physical activity
and sensation. In general, the apparent split between the spirit and the flesh was one
that troubled Kerouac throughout his life, and his efforts to close that gap are evident
in his later writings, both as an explicit subject and as an animating principle of his
style.
Though Kerouac had learned some English earlier, he did not speak the language
fluently or make English-speaking friends until he attended a public junior high
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school. By some accounts, he had some difficulties with English during this time.
Perhaps these difficulties contributed to the shyness which persisted as a character trait
throughout his life. Yet, intimidating as junior high may have been for him, it also
gave scope to his already evident love of reading and writing. It was Miss Mansfield,
Kerouac's eighth-grade English teacher, who first noticed and encouraged his talent.
Once encouraged, however, that talent had a life of its own. It was at about this time
that Kerouac began his life-long habit of carrying pocket-sized notebooks in which he
jotted down stories and observations. He made up elaborate horse-racing and baseball
games in which he played all the roles, including chief journalist and historian. He
also began to be aware of and to pay attention to an increasing variety of language
styles, in the books he was reading, in the mouths of gossiping friends of his father
and mother, in the voices of "The Shadow" and other radio heroes, and in the animated
mouths of film stars. It may be said of him that throughout his life he approached
language, and the English language particularly, with the avidity of one who is
learning it for the first time and for whom it is a rare gift. His eventual mastery of
English never led to complacence or indifference. To the day of his death he kept
experimenting with the immense resources of his adopted tongue.
This fascination with language soon extended itself to the literary classics. Kerouac
frequently skipped class at Lowell High School in order to go to the library to choose
his own reading, from the Harvard classics and from modern masters like Saroyan and
Hemingway. This pattern of making independent forays into books prevailed
throughout his short college career and into adult life. Kerouac became a very
well-read man, fluent in two languages and familiar with the main works not only of
French, English, and American literature, but of German, Russian, and Sanskrit
literature as well (though he had to depend on translations for his knowledge of these
literatures). Yet he never cared about appearing well read. He read books for the
inspiration they might give him to become a better writer himself. But he read them
critically also. He had the rare ability to set out a complex attitude toward a book in a
sentence or two. No one who reads Kerouac attentively can miss the evidence of this
vigorous apprenticeship to and critical knowledge of the classics. That evidence is
explicit in Kerouac's earlier books in which literary techniques and voices play a large
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role. But it is evident also by implication even in his later books, where his preference
for street and working-class voices over literary ones becomes predominant.
During the years in which Kerouac's literary interests were forming, his world began
to show the beginnings of a second great strain and rupture (Gerard's death being the
first). In 1936, the Merrimac River flooded, causing much destruction to the town's
buildings, including the building housing Leo Kerouac's print shop and press. The
flood seemed to reimpress on Jack Kerouac's imagination the idea of the
indiscriminate violence of nature. Most directly, the flood was a major factor, along
with the Depression, in shaking the stability of the Kerouac family life. Leo Kerouac,
in debt, sold his business and began to take odd jobs that forced him to leave Lowell
for long periods of time. The family had to move to tenement housing. Bitter at what
he regarded as the bad deal life had given him, Leo Kerouac began to place the burden
of the family's pride upon his surviving son. Much was expected of him. In particular,
Kerouac's prowess as a football player seemed to his father to promise a turnabout in
the family's fortune. The boy now felt the pressure of family responsibility. Yet he
seems never to have resented that responsibility, not even on the frequent occasions in
later life when he accused himself of having failed to fulfill it. Kerouac, the
conservative Catholic, considered family life a blessing even in its most painful
moments of obligation and trial.
Kerouac's senior year at Lowell High in 1938-1939 allowed him to feel the
corresponding pleasures of that life. It was perhaps the first time since early infancy
when the various claims of his nature and of his environment upon him were in
something like a balance. Leo Kerouac was gladdened by the fact that his son, a star
halfback on the football team, was offered football scholarships at Boston College and
Columbia. Also during this year Kerouac met the first friend who shared his love of
words. This friend was Sebastian Sampas, the brother of Kerouac's third wife Stella.
He met Mary Carney as well, with whom he had his first serious love affair, an affair
he used aspects of in writing Maggie Cassidy (1959). Thanks to these
accomplishments, he had achieved public success and had revived his family's pride,
and he had done so by exercising his considerable athletic gifts. He had found a friend
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who could ease his loneliness as a lover of reading and writing. He had found a girl
friend who promised to satisfy his vivid romantic and sexual longings. One is tempted
to pause here in Kerouac's biography and linger over the constellation of satisfactions
soon to be driven asunder.
The initial split occurred when Kerouac had to decide between Mary Carney and the
football scholarships. He could marry her, but then he must stay in Lowell. Kerouac
decided to accept the scholarships. But which one? Boston College was nearby, but by
deciding on Columbia, Kerouac distanced himself from the site of his least equivocal
achievements in athletics, friendship, and love--a distance he tried many times
afterwards to bridge, but never successfully. At the time, however, the decisions
probably did not seem as climactic as they do now. Kerouac might console himself
with the thought that he would see his family, Mary Carney, and Sebastian Sampas on
vacations. After all, he was a local-boy-made-good, and though he found that he
would have to have a year of prep school at Horace Mann in New York before
actually entering Columbia, this delay did not dampen Leo Kerouac's hopeful
enthusiasm for his son's chances. Besides, two other aspects of Kerouac's nature had
begun to assert themselves: his desire to travel and his curiosity about great cities.
New York seemed more commensurate with his romantic expectations than did the
relatively familiar Boston.
Kerouac did well at Horace Mann. His grades were good, and he led the football team
to a championship. He continued to write and read extensively. He had stories and
articles accepted in school publications and even made pocket money ghost-writing
term papers for his wealthy friends. Just as important for his education was the
acquaintance he was making with jazz. He wrote articles on white swing bands for the
school paper, but he heard black jazz too during weekend visits to Harlem ballrooms.
He seems to have developed at this time a keen and discriminating interest in jazz
free-association or improvisation. Something like an aesthetic was beginning to take
form, one closely related to Kerouac's already established attraction to and practice of
intellectual independence. When the day of his graduation from Horace Mann found
Kerouac not attending ceremonies but lying in the grass of an adjoining quadrangle
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reading Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, there was more to behold in the scene than
mere truancy or the inability to pay for the graduation outfit. A statement was being
made about the nonconformity of American writing to institutional standards and its
preference for natural environments over civilized ones. But the statement was
conformist in one respect. Kerouac was making his bid for artistic freedom under the
auspices of Whitman's metaphors, as he would later make it in his first published
novel under the auspices of Thomas Wolfe's sentences. His final gesture of freedom
would come only when he had freed himself from his liberators. But this gesture
would not be made for another ten years.
Though Kerouac's year at Horace Mann from 1939 to 1940 was a successful one, there
did occur during it premonitions of new ruptures. Hitler's invasions of Norway and
Denmark made Americans uneasy. War seemed imminent. Meanwhile, many people
went about their normal occupations warily, as if anticipating the moment when they
would have to drop them. This general attitude of distrust in the continuity of things
may have aggravated the breakup in the spring of 1940 of Kerouac's romance with
Mary Carney. It may have aggravated also the ruptures that began to occur in
Kerouac's life as a college student at Columbia. The first of these ruptures, a literal
one, could, however, have occurred at any time. Kerouac broke his leg during a
football game during that first fall of 1940. But with his leg in a cast, he took only
intermittent interest in his studies. Though he received an A in Mark Van Doren's
Shakespeare class, he failed chemistry, and he spent most of his time reading Thomas
Wolfe and writing in his notebooks. Allen Ginsberg once stated that by the time
Kerouac read Wolfe "he had already written nearly a million words of prose." A
rupture in place occurred when Leo Kerouac, having gotten what seemed like a steady
job in New Haven, moved his family there early in 1941. But the most serious of these
ruptures occurred that fall, after Kerouac returned to Columbia and to football
practice. When war was declared in September, he walked away from both the school
and the sport. Kerouac's balancing of the conflicting claims upon him had begun to
come apart under the pressure of events.
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The next few years, and indeed the rest of his life, were marked by a restless search
for that lost balance. His first searching, after abandoning Columbia and football, was
a purposeless bus ride to Washington, as if the very purposelessness were a
compensation for the conflicting purposes of his other obligations and inner
promptings. After briefly rejoining his family in New Haven, he worked as a grease
monkey in Hartford. Later that year when Leo Kerouac moved back to Lowell,
Kerouac went with the family and got a job as a sports reporter on the Lowell Sun. But
writing sports took only a small part of his time. His major energies were directed to
writing an autobiographical novel called "Vanity of Duluoz" (never published, though
the last book published in his lifetime bore the same title) and to reading Dostoevski,
the book of Job, and Goethe. In March 1942 he journeyed again to Washington where
he worked briefly on the construction of the Pentagon. Then he joined the U.S.
Merchant Marine, signing on as a scullion aboard the S.S. Dorchester on an
ammunition run to Greenland--its last mission before being torpedoed. In October,
after the Dorchester returned to Boston, Kerouac, now oscillating from one pole of
responsibility to another, returned to Columbia to play football. Yet, predictably, this
option was no more sustaining the third time around than it was the first. He quit the
team, returned to Lowell to await the draft, but instead enlisted in the U.S. Navy in
February 1943.
It was on the drill field of Newport Naval Base, shortly after his enlistment, that
Kerouac had his first serious conflict with institutional authority. Characteristically,
the conflict was not a violent one. Kerouac was not a violent person, either in his
behavior or in the attitudes he expressed in his writings. His true nature was exactly
the opposite: shy, fastidious, and compassionate. He simply put down the rifle and
walked over to the base library, where he took up Boswell's Life of Johnson , as if
anticipating the literary role he was to play later with Neal Cassady, Gary Snyder, and
his other heroes. Brought quietly to the psychiatric ward by the military guard,
Kerouac was honorably discharged from the navy in March 1943 as an "indifferent
character." He returned to civilian life not so much "indifferent," however, as
bewildered. There was no obvious next step for him to take. His family had moved
from Lowell for the last time, settling in an apartment in Ozone Park, Queens. Both
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Jack Kerouac Biography
parents were working, Leo Kerouac in a print shop and Kerouac's mother in a shoe
factory, and both--Leo particularly--regarded their surviving son as a failure, a
judgment which Kerouac himself did not dispute. His sister, Caroline, who had joined
the WACS, offered no refuge. Events and his own independent nature had thrown him
on his own resources. Whatever steps he next took would have to be ones he invented
for himself, not ones provided for him by family or society, both of which were
displaced and in turmoil.
The steps which Kerouac then took had the look of habitual movements. Only later
did their importance in his establishing a new direction for himself become evident.
The first of these steps was his seeking out his old haunts and old friends in
Manhattan. One of these old friends was Edie Parker, an art student from a wealthy
family in Michigan who later became Kerouac's first wife and the means of his
meeting William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Then in June 1943 Kerouac
shipped out once again in the merchant marine, this time as an ordinary seaman on an
ammunition vessel headed for Liverpool. Kerouac continued to work on a novel called
"The Sea is My Brother" (never published) during the crossing. But it was while
reading John Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga in his bunk that he conceived the idea of
writing a connected series of stories about his adventures: Then, leaving Liverpool for
the sail home, he had a vision of his true role in life, that of what Dennis McNally
calls "divine scribe." The events that had rent his familiar world in pieces had also
revealed his true purposes and were about to reveal the friends who would help him
clarify those purposes further.
Edie Parker's apartment on the Upper West Side became the meeting ground of those
friends, among whom were Lucien Carr, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg. The
full complexity of Kerouac's friendships with Burroughs and Ginsberg developed
about a year later. During the spring of 1944, however, Kerouac's closest friend seems
to have been Carr, whose intellectual perversity and aestheticism Kerouac both
admired and was skeptical of. Carr venerated Rimbaud and was fascinated by the
surrealist notion of the acte gratuit (a deliberately unmotivated action, a conscious
cultivation of impulse). Kerouac's interest in the acte gratuit was guarded. Always an
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Jack Kerouac Biography
astute observer of behavior, he was suspicious of the way that people who cultivated
the acte gratuit seemed to exhibit a sameness in their actions. Their collective effort to
liberate themselves from reason led merely to another kind of conformity, "a dreary
synthesis," as Kerouac put it, "between respectability and illicitness." Yet he was
eager to understand contemporary intellectual trends. He needed to know where his
own writing stood in relation to those trends, and perhaps particularly to the trend
toward spontaneity.
Kerouac's friendship with Carr soon involved him in his second conflict with
institutional authority. As in the previous conflict at Newport Naval Base, Kerouac's
offense was not an aggressive one but a quiet assertion of a difference in loyalty. In
August of 1944, harassed by the sexual advances of an older man who had been
pursuing him for some time, Carr murdered this man with a knife. He thereafter
sought out Kerouac. Carr wanted to drop the murder weapon through a sewer grating,
and Kerouac acquiesced. But then, in a reversal of attitude, Carr gave himself up to the
police, while Kerouac was arrested, without violence, as a material witness. When Leo
Kerouac, now thoroughly disgusted with his son and his new friends, refused to post
the $100 bail bond, Kerouac proposed marriage to Edie Parker so that she could
borrow money from her grandfather's estate to bail him out. By September Kerouac
was living in Michigan with his wife and members of her family, working in a
ball-bearing factory in order to pay back the bail bond money, and reading American
literary criticism. During this brief time, about two months, Kerouac's life regained a
kind of balance, but it was an artificial one and could not last.
The restless oscillation among conflicting urgings resumed later that year and became,
if possible, even wilder. In November 1944 Kerouac again joined the merchant
marine. He jumped ship in Norfolk, but instead of returning to his wife in Michigan,
he made his way back to New York where for a time he lived alone, engaging in a
ritual of romantic purification he called his "Self-Ultimacy" period. Gashing himself
so that he could write the phrase "The Blood of the Poet" in his own blood and
deliberately burning almost all he wrote at the time, Kerouac was making another--and
quite drastic--statement of his independence from artistic and social expectations. He
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wanted his writing to exist only for itself, to have no external or practical aim. But,
like the earlier gesture of reading Whitman during the Horace Mann graduation
ceremonies, this statement too was carried out under the auspices of other men's
systems, particularly those of Rimbaud and Nietzsche. The extensive reading he did in
Andre Gide, Thomas Mann, and other contemporary European writers may have been
the most useful result of this uncharacteristically violent and narrowly intellectual
experiment. Yet although the experiment was soon abandoned at Burroughs's
commonsense urging ("My God, Jack, stop this nonsense and let's go out and have a
drink"), it nevertheless foreshadows important aspects of Kerouac's mature style.
Beginning with Visions of Cody, his books are written with a rhythm and immediacy
which suggest the pulsing of blood. They also show a need to purge fixed attitudes, to
burn all bridges--even apparently safe ones.
The role that Burroughs played in Kerouac's life now became important. Edie Kerouac
had returned to New York late in 1944 and had taken an apartment with a friend of
hers named Joan Vollmer (later Burroughs's wife) on the Upper West Side. Burroughs
moved into the apartment too, as did Kerouac. Then Ginsberg moved in in January of
1945. The apartment became the scene of much drug-taking, and Edie,trying to hold
down a regular job, moved out in disgust. Burroughs and Joan Vollmer remained the
focus of the group. Ginsberg was as fascinated with Burroughs as Kerouac was. Both
saw in their older friend--he was Kerouac's senior by eight years, Ginsberg's by
twelve--a fearless, sardonic experimenter with drugs, sex, and crime, as well as a
coolly precise student of those analysts of society's ills, Korzybski, Spengler, and
Freud. A good teacher also, Burroughs willingly passed on his information to his
younger friends. He even undertook an informal psychoanalysis of both young men
and also served as literary critic, especially of Kerouac's writing. Kerouac's attitude
toward Burroughs was always an admiring one. Kerouac later talked of writing a book
about Burroughs; but though the book was never written, Burroughs does appear as a
calm, commonsensical, but, at the same time, an intensely imaginative figure in
several of Kerouac's books (for example, Burroughs is portrayed as "Old Bull Lee" in
On the Road and as "Bull Hubbard" in Desolation Angels).
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Jack Kerouac Biography
Kerouac's relation to Ginsberg was more complex. Four years older than
Ginsberg--Kerouac was twenty-two and Ginsberg eighteen when they met--Kerouac
tended to view him with some of the ambiguity of feeling of an older for a younger
brother. In the last decade of his life, Kerouac began to treat Ginsberg with contempt,
an attitude always generously excused by Ginsberg. But from at least the winter of
1944 and for many years afterward their relations were very close and mutually
beneficial. These relations had to overcome great differences in background.
Ginsberg, an urban Jew, had family traditions of political activism and intellectual
achievement that set him apart from Kerouac's conservative Catholic unbringing with
its close ties to a rural past. Yet both young men were united by their spirituality, their
love of poetry, and their maturing sense of the destructiveness of the modern industrial
state. Ginsberg became for Kerouac what Sebastian Sampas (who had recently died in
the battle of Anzio) had once been: someone with whom he could share his most
ardent flights of thought and imagination. Much of what the two men truly stood for
can be typified in the achievement of their friendship: the overcoming of boundaries
of class, temperament, sexual preference, and religious practice in a common
unembarrassed worship of God. Their own worship took the form of writing, and each
was instrumental in helping the other over stumbling blocks put in his way by the
outside world and by the limitations of his own nature. Ginsberg, for example, later
put his considerable political skills to work in bringing Kerouac's writing to the
attention of publishers. He was the one largely responsible for the fact that Kerouac's
books were published at all. Kerouac, for his part, encouraged Ginsberg to overcome
his fears of confessing in poetry his feelings about his friends and about the larger
society that seemingly sought to destroy both friends and feelings. The eventual result
of this encouragement was Howl, the first of Ginsberg's great poems and his
breakthrough as an artist.
By criticizing modern society both in their words and in their behavior, Burroughs and
Ginsberg had caused rifts in their relations with their families. Painful as these rifts
proved at times for them, however, they were proving nearly insupportable for
Kerouac in his relations with his own family. Weakened by the benzedrine addiction
acquired while living in Edie's apartment and by his efforts to keep friends and family
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happy (neither of his parents approved of Burroughs, and both disliked Ginsberg),
Kerouac contracted thrombophlebitis and spent December 1945 in a Queens VA
hospital. Also during this month a further toll on his strength was exacted. Leo
Kerouac was found to have stomach cancer and had to quit his job. His father's
sickness put Kerouac in the role of family provider. Yet the role he actually took was
the maternal one of staying home to nurse his father while his mother continued to
work in the shoe factory. Kerouac's family life was in fragments: the mother trying to
support the uprooted family, the father dying, the son still weak physically, unable to
hold a steady job, and with as yet little or nothing to show in compensation. The
second of the great ruptures, the rupture of his family from its early unity in Lowell,
was nearly complete.
The rupture became complete in May 1946 when Leo Kerouac died. But paradoxically
the father's death liberated the son. It freed the writer in him. Not long after his father
was buried and in part to justify himself in the eyes of his dead father's spirit, Kerouac
sat down in Ozone Park to write the book which would eventually become his first
published novel, The Town & the City (1950). The theme of the book was based most
directly on Kerouac's recent experience of the split between his parents and his
friends. But in this split Kerouac saw a more general division between the hometown
with its traditional social and religious values, and the city, with its intellectual and
physical dangers and stimulations. He saw further that the split was psychological as
well as social since each side of the split was but a part of the whole and by itself
insufficient to satisfy the heart and mind. The town, for all its snug attractiveness, had
become merely confining, while the city, for all its promise of limitless freedom, had
become destructive, since no limits on behavior were permitted. Between the halves of
what should have been a whole, and what Kerouac nostalgically viewed as once
having been a whole, the characters in The Town & the City found themselves trapped.
The book follows the course of a family's disintegration from its unity to its dispersal
within and beyond the city, each of those members doomed to a fruitless search for the
lost fragments of the family's former happiness.
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Jack Kerouac Biography
The Town & the City, though based on events in Kerouac's life, is not directly
autobiographical. He distributes aspects of his personality among the various children
of the family and adjusts the facts of his life to give the story internal coherence. Even
Kerouac's later books exhibit some degree of shaping of materials. None of them is a
completely accurate biographical record. To this extent, The Town & the City is
consistent in method with Kerouac's later practice. The novel is consistent in spirit
also. It establishes the social and psychological dimensions of Kerouac's later work,
and it establishes the religious dimensions of that work as well. The split between the
town and the city is itself a metaphor for the split Kerouac saw between God and his
creatures. On the one hand, hints of God's presence abounded. In the town, the love
among family members and their close attachment to the land and to the rituals of the
church gave those members a comforting sense of God's protectiveness. Even the city,
in the limitless and fecundity of its forms, suggested God's presence. Yet always, as
one approached these moments of close union with the Divine, some form of division
or of evil caused one to stumble into sickness and despair. But not even in sickness
and despair could one accept the easy refuges of pessimism or atheism. Sickness and
despair could also become ways of approaching God more closely, as they had
become for Gerard during his last illness. God's presence was at once close and
infinitely distant, reliable and unpredictable, undeservedly rewarding and punishing,
blissful and painful. Among Kerouac's themes, the greatest of them is this, that his
books represent a tireless effort to make sense of these apparent discontinuities
between God's presence and absence in matter, behavior, imagination, and thought.
Kerouac was a God-haunted writer to a degree and with a complexity of attitude that
recalls Hawthorne and Melville.
But though Kerouac's major themes are evident in The Town & the City, there is one
vital element missing in the book, or at least present in an undeveloped form. This
vital element is style. The book's sentences are modeled after those of Thomas Wolfe.
Kerouac's presence in his own work is therefore partly muted because filtered through
another person's style. Of course, no one's style can be completely original. All writers
must acknowledge traditional grammatical structures and traditional meanings of
words, even if the acknowledgment takes the form of a defiant rejection of those
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Jack Kerouac Biography
structures and meanings. A completely original style would be private and therefore
not communicable. Kerouac was aware of this fact. Yet, like Emerson, Whitman,
Thoreau, and other great figures in American literature before him, he was sufficiently
possessed of the peculiar truths of what he called his "vast inner life" to struggle at the
impossible task of giving that life a unique voice. In the words of literary critic
Richard Poirier, "The crucial problem for the best American writers is to evade all
[sociological and psychological] categories and to find a language that will at once
express and protect states of consciousness that cannot adequately be defined by
conventional formulations." The problem is "crucial" in more ways than one. It is
crucial because it is perceived as a vital necessity without which an otherwise
respectable book is merely a bundle of lifeless pages; as a crossing or paradox of
impossibility, because language cannot carry the strain of thwarting its usual function
of bearing traditional meaning; and as a cross upon which the writer may have to nail
himself in the extremity of his desire to redeem language from the forces of
convention.
The evidence from letters and from other biographical sources makes it clear that
Kerouac was struggling with the problem of inventing a style at least from the time of
his experiment in "Self-Ultimacy" and probably earlier than that as well. He had once
remarked in a letter written to Allen Ginsberg in 1945 that "until I find a way to
unleash the inner life in an art-method, nothing about me will be clear." Those who
criticize Kerouac's eventual solution to this problem, with the stylistic invention that
he named "spontaneous prose," do not realize how hard and long he worked to arrive
at it. Perhaps part of him even resisted the solution. The Town & the City, in its
neatness and polish of construction, is itself a nostalgic tribute to Kerouac's previous
attitude toward writing. The book looks back on lost worlds: not only on lost social,
psychological, and religious worlds, but on a lost stylistic world as well--one in which
it was possible to use another man's accents to dramatize one's fictionalized past. It
could not have been a completely comfortable realization that he would have to make
a break from his carefully learned literary lessons and unleash the unpredictable forces
of an original method.
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Events conspired to allow the breaking away to occur, though the breaking was a slow
process. In the fall of 1946 Kerouac met Neal Cassady, later portrayed as Dean
Moriarty of On the Road (1957). Nearly five years later Cassady became a major
source of inspiration in Kerouac's invention of the "spontaneous prose" style which
Kerouac would use to tell Cassady's own story in Visions of Cody (1972). But in 1946
Cassady was interesting to Kerouac primarily for the vigor of his personality. Then
during the summer of 1947, in events upon which Kerouac later based part one of On
the Road, Kerouac made his first continental trip, visiting Cassady in Denver and
traveling to the West Coast. Many of the same qualities he was attracted to in Cassady
he discovered in the American landscape itself--its seemingly inexhaustible variety, its
wild rawness, its limitless depths and intricate surface detail. Once back home in the
fall, he continued work on The Town & the City. His working arrangements had
settled into the pattern they were to assume throughout his later life. He would keep
house with his mother, in fulfillment of his dying father's request. She would support
him financially while he did his writing, for the most part, though not entirely, in the
sanctuary of their home. Confining as this arrangement sometimes proved to be, it
nevertheless provided Kerouac with the peace he needed if he were to do any writing
at all. The house was quiet. His friends were kept at bay by his mother. And in
September 1948, about two years after he had begun it, he finished The Town & the
City.
His first efforts to have it published were unsuccessful, but the disillusionment that
followed had more behind it than a writer's piqued vanity. It was during the fall of this
year that he first coined, in conversation with his friend John Clellon Holmes, the
expression "Beat Generation." This much-abused term beat was Kerouac's shorthand
for a complex of attitudes he saw himself sharing with the many others who felt cast
aside by the modern industrial state. The term itself Kerouac had heard often in the
street, in the mouths of those castoffs. On the one hand, the term denoted what
Kerouac called "weariness with all the forms" of that state: its militarism, its
conformity, its exaggerated faith in mere human reason and in technological progress,
its distrust of spontaneity and nature. To this extent, the term referred to "beatenness,"
the state of having been overwhelmed by those forms. But the term denoted also
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Jack Kerouac Biography
"beatitude," the happy release of emotions no longer entrapped by observance of the
forms. Beat was a term that for Kerouac summed up his sense of America's and
mankind's victimization by its own social and scientific inventions. Those supposedly
in control of those inventions paid the price of a loss of "beatitude." Those
disenfranchised by them lost the material comforts and securities of life but gained an
at least partly compensating access to spontaneous pleasure. Yet both sides, haves and
have-nots, were parts of a whole. Society had split in two, and no side was the winner,
though if one had to belong to one side or the other, it was clear where Kerouac's own
allegiances lay.
Kerouac's stand for and with the outcasts of the modern industrial state, with the poor,
including the blacks, with winos and hobos, with the elderly, with children, and with
similar others was not primarily a political one, however. He had no formally outlined
program by which the split between society's halves could be eliminated or at least
eased, nor was he interested in such a program. Political talk was unpleasant to him
because it was abstract and rhetorical. It did not permit the mind to move freely among
its memories and sensed impressions but instead confined that mind to what Kerouac
called, in a letter written at about this time, the "white myth of Reason." But there was
a deeper explanation of Kerouac's revulsion against most political solutions.
Industrialism, with all its horrors, was caused, he felt, not primarily by misguided
political forces but by the evil that possessed men's hearts, including Kerouac's own;
and until this evil was recognized and brought to light in its smallest, most evasive
detail, there could be no redemption. The basis for true political change lay in each
individual's continuing confession of sin. A political solution to society's ills which
avoided this crucial first step would be absorbed and nullified by the evil it was
invented to cure. Kerouac's belief in God, never sufficiently stressed by critics, lay at
the back both of his diagnosis and of his vision of a truly effective cure, and much of
the later misunderstanding of Kerouac's intentions can be attributed to critics'
unwillingness to grant him the right to make a political diagnosis in religious terms.
Religious belief also lay behind his effort to invent a prose style free from the
corruptions of thought of the industrial age. These corruptions seemed to Kerouac to
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Jack Kerouac Biography
result from excessive calculation of effect, as if verbal expression were supposed to
improve automatically the further it departed from its spontaneous origins. During the
time he was trying to sell The Town & the City , Kerouac was experimenting with
prose methods that would allow him to break free of the slow, calculated, laborious
techniques he had employed in writing his novel. He was not satisfied with the results
of these experimentations, however; and it was with his writing life at a temporary
stand that he accompanied his mother to North Carolina to spend the Christmas of
1948 with his sister Caroline's family. Unexpectedly, Neal Cassady arrived at
Kerouac's sister's house just before Christmas dinner. The story of what happened next
is told in part two of On the Road. In it, it is plain that Cassady was beginning to
become more than a friend. He was beginning to stand for the values Kerouac had
already included in the term beat. Cassady had grown up in Denver slums and had
spent time in reform schools and jails for stealing cars, not to resell, but to use on
joyrides with his many girl friends. Socially an outcast, Cassady yet possessed a
spontaneous, exuberant energy and a belief in divine power that could not fail to make
him, in Kerouac's eyes, the positive embodiment of his social criticism. Kerouac had
been needing the encouragement to believe that the values in which he placed his trust
could take external form, and such a form had arrived.
Another auspicious event occurred in March 1949 when Harcourt, Brace accepted The
Town & the City. With the advance money, Kerouac was able to move his mother and
himself to Colorado, where he hoped to be able to continue his development as a
writer in peace and with the happy sense that that development had been legitimized
by the outside world. Yet such legitimization could not bode well since it was based
on social values Kerouac had begun to criticize. Diligently, Kerouac began a book
entitled On the Road during this stay in Colorado. But though the book's subject was
Neal Cassady, it does not appear that any of the material Kerouac wrote at this time
found a place in the published version of On the Road, which appeared in 1957.
(Readers interested in a full account of the complicated textual history of On the Road
should consult Tim Hunt's excellent Kerouac's Crooked Road.) Then in July
Kerouac's advance money ran out. The first of what would become a long series of
efforts to establish a refuge for himself had come to nothing. His mother returned to
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Jack Kerouac Biography
Queens and the shoe factory, while Kerouac followed in the fall, taking a trip in the
meanwhile to San Francisco to see Cassady. Once home, he began again on On the
Road, this time taking as his subject, not Cassady, but a fictional Denver businessman
consumed with guilt. This version too proved a dead end. What these false starts
show, however, is that Kerouac's eventual achievement of writing On the Road
spontaneously in three weeks was preceded by two years of trial and error in which
the true subject of the book--Neal Cassady and all that he came to stand for--was not
always in focus.
In March 1950 The Town & the City was finally published, but, like the move to
Colorado with his mother, this event did not produce the expected blessing. Reviews
were mixed, and sales were slow. Disillusioned with this result, Kerouac traveled back
to Denver and then went with Cassady to Mexico City, in events dramatized in part
four of On the Road. During this trip Cassady's nature assumed for Kerouac
apocalyptic proportions. Cassady had become more than an embodiment of beat. He
had become the embodiment of the spiritual forces of creation and destruction. It was
probably because of this new completeness in his understanding of Cassady that
Kerouac was able, when he went back to work in the fall on his book about his friend,
to achieve results which satisfied him and which found a place later in Visions of
Cody. Then in November, Kerouac, having received a Catholic annulment of his
marriage with Edie Parker, met and married his second wife, Joan Haverty, and set up
an apartment with her in New York City. Kerouac got a job writing synopses of scripts
with Twentieth Century-Fox, but his main occupation was his continuing effort to
invent a style capable of bearing the vision of his friend. The friend himself helped
matters to their climax by sending Kerouac, in February 1951, a 23,000 word letter,
which is sometimes referred to as the "Joan Anderson" letter and most of which is now
apparently lost. In this letter Cassady described one of his intricate love affairs in a
freely associated style that reproduced the rush of events as perceived by an excited
eye without losing track of the special qualities of events within the rush. In fact, as
Kerouac argued later in his tracts advocating "spontaneous prose," such a style
actually revealed the human significance of those qualities as no other style could,
since human significance was itself a fleeting thing. The style was, in other words,
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Jack Kerouac Biography
inseparable for Kerouac from his religious understanding of how all created things,
from physical objects to the minds beholding them, were vulnerable and transient.
Kerouac's response to the inspiration of this letter was characteristically slow in
coming. Not till two months later did he feed a roll of teletype paper through his
typewriter and then sit at that typewriter to produce, after twenty days, the 175,000
words of the first version of On the Road. "First version" is used advisedly since in
May, when Kerouac retyped the manuscript, he revised and added to it. The book was
altered again both by Kerouac himself and by the book's eventual editors at Viking
Press before it was published in 1957. What we know as On the Road is therefore a
later, much revised draft of an original manuscript which has never been published. It
is not a pure example of "spontaneous prose."
Probably because of these various revisions, On the Road is more closely related in
style and structure to The Town & the City than to the books written directly after it,
books which, with apparently only one exception, really are products of his mature
method. The style of On the Road, though it is more colloquial in tone and more
rapidly paced than the style of his first novel, does not in most instances call attention
to itself. Only when Sal Paradise, Kerouac's pseudonym in the book, describes a
visionary moment within the story does the style become excited or extravagant, as if
the extravagance were justified by the need to reevoke by imitation the moment
described. The book is neatly and classically structured in five parts. In part one, Sal
meets Dean for the first time and takes his first transcontinental trip, alone. Dean is a
peripheral figure in this part, an interesting personality among many others Sal meets
and describes with detailed enthusiasm. In part two, Dean picks up Sal from his
family's house during Christmas dinner and introduces him during their subsequent
trip west to the quest for "IT," or the moment of spontaneous ecstasy when all things
are known in their greatest purity. The climax of their relationship occurs in part three.
Sal assumes responsibility for Dean's eccentric behavior and in turn receives during
another cross-country car trip his initiation into the knowledge of "IT." In part four the
two friends journey to what they call the "end of the road," which they locate in
Mexico City. The apocalyptic nature of his quest for "IT" is now revealed to Sal.
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Jack Kerouac Biography
Ecstasy necessarily leads to death since ecstasy is release from all spatial and temporal
limitations. Yet death itself is the entrance to another kind of space and time behind or
beyond the familiar one. Sal's balanced handling of this hard-won, complicated
knowledge of the true nature of "IT"--the knowledge that "IT" is for mortals
inextricably bound up with joy and creativity but also with loss and death--is
reminiscent of Nick Carroway's final attitude toward Gatsby's "dream" in F. Scott
Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925): wonder at its purity and grandeur, dismay at its
costs.
On the Road is a book about spontaneity, but it is not itself spontaneous. It is much
more directly autobiographical than The Town & the City, but since all Kerouac's
books contain some shaping or combining of autobiographical facts,the crucial
difference between it and his later work is its holding itself within conventional ideas
of style and structure. On the Road is Kerouac's last effort to obey the dictates of
novelistic tradition, and the effort is a very successful one. His success makes clear an
important point: that when Kerouac subsequently abandoned the tradition, he did so
not because he had failed to operate within it, but because he had grown beyond it. It
cannot be sufficiently stressed that in these two autobiographical novels, The Town &
the City and On the Road, Kerouac paid fully his debts of apprenticeship. He had
mastered the traditional novel form; he had not shirked it. Deeply honest and
conservative in nature as he was, he would not have advanced beyond the novel form
if he had not made sure he had first advanced through it. Probably he would not have
advanced beyond it at all if his vision had not compelled him. Kerouac had no love of
rebellion for its own sake. His development is as much a record of resistance to
change as acceptance of it. Once his vision had forced him beyond what were now for
him the confines of the traditional novel, he had no choice but to follow. But by
having put in his years of apprenticeship, he was truly equipped to make this most
difficult and most lonely of all his journeys.
The climax of this development does not seem to have occurred until later in 1951, in
October. Previous to that, Kerouac's personal life had begun to come apart once again.
In May Harcourt, Brace rejected On the Road. Also in that month, Joan Haverty,
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Jack Kerouac Biography
having become understandably impatient with a husband who could not hold a steady
job, threw Kerouac out. She also told him she was pregnant. Kerouac denied the
paternity, partly out of fear of having to support the child, partly out of fear, evidently
unfounded, that the child was not his. Kerouac's insufficiency as a husband, a fact he
himself deeply regretted, was second only to his insufficiency as a father--a role he
could not even bring himself to accept biologically. Yet in the light of subsequent
events these insufficiencies acquire positive aspects, all derived from his maturing
sense of himself as a writer. Personal collapse acted as a stimulus. The problem of
style occupied him even in the VA hospital in which he was confined that summer by
a recurrence of his thrombophlebitis. As he wrote during that time to John Clellon
Holmes, "I want deep form, poetic form, the way consciousness really digs everything
that happens."
Then finally, in October 1951, when another friend, Ed White, suggested that he try
"sketching in the streets like a painter but with words," Kerouac seemed to find the
one metaphor around which all his earlier thinking about "deep form" could take
shape. Why "sketching" should have played such a significant role is hard to say since
in Kerouac's later tracts advocating his method, "Belief and Technique for Modern
Prose" and "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose," "sketching" is only one of several
metaphors used and even seems secondary in importance to those derived from jazz
improvisation. "Spontaneous prose," as Kerouac advocated and practiced it, employs
all the senses, not just the eye. What is clear, however, is that Ed White's metaphor
enabled Kerouac to trust fully the power of his spontaneous associations. From this
point to the end of his life Kerouac very seldom departed from the method which had
at last reached maturity.
The method is the source of his books' vitality. Yet it is also a major source, not only
of the author's later notoriety but also of his eventually fatal vulnerability to that
notoriety. To see why "spontaneous prose" could have had such apparently
contradictory effects, we must look first at what it is and then at its significance,
beginning with an example taken from the section of prose sketches at the beginning
of Visions of Cody, the book Kerouac worked on after writing On the Road . In the
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Jack Kerouac Biography
title and in the example, "Cody" is another pseudonym for Cassady: "So I sit in
Jamaica, Long Island in the night, thinking of Cody and the road--happens to be a
fog--distant low of a klaxon moaning horn--sudden swash of locomotive steam, either
that or crash of steel rods--a car washing by with the sound we all know from city
dawns--reminds me of Cambridge, Mass. at dawn and I didn't go to Harvard--Far far
away a nameless purling or yowling of some kind done either by (raised, vibroned) a
train on a steel curve or skidding car--grumble of a truck coming--small truck, but has
whistle tires in the mist--a double 'bop bop' or 'beep beep' from railyards, maybe soft
application of big Diesel whistle by engineer to acknowledge hiball-on-the-air from
brakeman or car knocker--the sound of the whole thing in general when there are no
specific near-sounds is of course sea-like but also almost like the sound of the living
structure, so as you look at a house you imagine it is adding its breathing to the
general loud hush--(ever so far, in the hush, you can hear a tiny SQUEE of something,
the nameless asthmas of the throat of Time)--now a man, probably a truck-driver, is
yelling far away and sounds like an adventurous young fellow playing in the
darkness--...."
A reader who compares the final paragraph of On the Road with this passage, which is
too long to quote in its entirety, will hear immediately the difference between
Kerouac's traditional prose style and his "spontaneous" one. Both passages begin with
the speaker's putting himself in a meditative posture. Both passages then give an
account of the meditation, and both passages allow a distortion of normal sentence
structure in order that the meditation might have room for expression. But there the
similarity ends. In the On the Road passage, the distortion is eventually rectified by
the triple assertion of the main clause, "I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old
Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty." The friend's
name actually closes the speaker's meditation, whereas in the passage from Visions of
Cody the friend's name releases it. Another difference is that though both passages are
put in the present tense, the On the Road passage refers to a repeatable, characteristic
event, while the Visions of Cody passage refers to a special one, seemingly recorded
on the page as it occurs.
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Jack Kerouac Biography
The result is not chaotic, however. Thoughts pass through the speaker's mind, not in a
jumble, but in a surge from the particular to the general and back to the particular:
from his immediate perceptions, to his memories, to his tentative inclusion of these
perceptions and memories under the larger systems of "Time" and "living structure,"
back to his immediate perceptions. The train of association is sufficiently detailed in
image to permit our following it. But we have the pleasure of surprise, too, since, like
the speaker himself, we are an audience for the experience. Like us, he cannot quite
predict what will come next on the train of thought. Nor is he seeking to predict the
association. He has in fact abandoned the control he exerted in the On the Road
passage in order that he might be submissive to what he regards as the "sound of the
living structure."
Not all Kerouac's sentences or sentence-streams written according to the "spontaneous
prose" method are as unorthodox as this one when measured against conventional
grammatical rules. Some, however, particularly in "Old Angel Midnight," his 1956
experiment in rendering pure sound, are much wilder. We may describe the difference
in Kerouac's sentences after the discovery of "spontaneous prose" in these general
terms. A sensed detail would be registered with acute precision. The registering would
then provoke an instantaneous surge of remembered associations that would surround
the originally registered detail. This surge would often take the grammatical form of
subordinate clauses appended to the original assertion of detail. But the effect of
subordination would then be negated by the discovery within the surge of associations
of a spiritual truth for which the original detail would reverse the direction of
association. Foreground would become background and vice versa under the pressure
of this discovery of the general in the specific and the specific in the general. The
screech of a locomotive brake could contain the "living structure." Likewise the
"throat of Time" was not so large that a particular yell would get lost in it. The
infinitely large and the infinitely small fit inside each other. The tortuously expanded
grammatical structure that resulted from this paradox would be held together by the
rhythm of the words. This rhythm owned its quick, syncopated character to Kerouac's
delighted imitation of the improvisational styles of Lester Young, Charlie Parker, and
other great figures of postwar jazz. Like Kerouac, these artists found worlds of
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Jack Kerouac Biography
meaning within what might otherwise have seemed the most insignificant of phrases
and sounds.
The discovery of "spontaneous prose" involved no mere trick or paradox of technique,
however. It had behind it ethical and religious principles which Kerouac explicitly
stated in his "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose." "Spontaneous prose" was the way by
which the inner mind, trapped as Kerouac finally felt it to be by social, psychological,
and grammatical restrictions, could free itself from its muteness and take verbal shape
in the outside world. The result of this liberation would not be chaotic, however, since
the inner mind was innately shapely and would cause the words with which it
expressed itself to be shapely too. This shape would be a natural one, related to the
rhythm of breathing, orgasm, and other similar processes of fulfillment and release. It
would not conform to a plan preordained by the reason alone, although reason was not
to be banished from the mind. Reason's domination of the mind, particularly in its
tendency to censor the inner mind in acts of revision and rewriting, was to be broken,
not in the name of mindlessness and unreason, but in the name of truth and of the
divine mind which could alone contain that truth. "Spontaneous prose" was a way of
evoking the creator by reawakening in one's whole mind, conscious and unconscious,
the pulse or sound of the created thing. It was a method of finding out who God was
by trying to imitate the process by which things came into being and passed from it. In
a sense, the origins of this effort reach back into Kerouac's childhood. Kerouac once
remarked in a letter to Ginsberg that the "problem of God" first occurred to him at the
age of eight "when I started making worlds to see how he did it...." The effort reached
its climax twenty-two years later when Kerouac finally saw that those worlds made
spontaneously were closest to the creator's own.
Yet "spontaneous prose" abounds for the merely human creator in apparent
self-contradictions. The very fact that one must consciously invent the method
suggests that its source is in some important sense rationally conceived. One cannot
reject conventional ideas of prose composition without first knowing what those ideas
are, and the value of the method is expressed in terms produced by the kind of
thinking one is presumably rejecting. For instance, Kerouac addresses his readers
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Jack Kerouac Biography
pedagogically in his tracts and makes a continuous series of distinctions between what
he considers good and bad forms of expression. Even supporting examples seem only
ambiguously helpful. Kerouac refers in "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose" to Yeats
directly and William Carlos Williams indirectly as authorities legitimizing his method.
Yet these authorities themselves anticipate and therefore inhibit an activity that should
proceed entirely from within if it is to reach the writer's goal for it. Even the
possibility of the method's reaching anything so fixed as a goal is qualified by the
emphasis on organic rhythm. Since the writer speaks from within his own flux of
associations, how can he also take a position of control outside the flux, the position
from which he chooses to submit himself to the flux in the first place? Then finally
there is the seemingly insuperable problem that language itself is a medium at the
service of large impersonal forces, at least some of them being vicious and restrictive.
How is the inner mind to express itself through a medium hostile to it"
Kerouac's answer to this last problem is typical of his answers to the others. His
answer was not only to acknowledge the problem but to make the acknowledgment a
major theme of his writing as well. The discontinuity between the medium of language
and what he wanted that medium to express was analogous to the discontinuities that
had become his themes already. But this theme was complemented by its solution: the
belief in healing miracles, the belief which is sometimes stated, sometimes
dramatized, sometimes despaired of, but always implicit in the energy of the prose
style."Spontaneous prose" became a metaphor for the paradoxes of the human
condition as Kerouac, the Roman Catholic, conceived it: hopelessly corrupted and
compromised, yet somehow, in ways only indirectly glimpsed and never fully
understood, redeemable, even in the midst of its sin, and perhaps more redeemable at
that crisis than at any other time. "Spontaneous prose" thus became a corollary of
Kerouac's life in an extremely vital sense. It represented the outward form of the
progress, or decay, of his soul. But "Spontaneous prose" was also Kerouac's way of
taking upon himself the confessor's role in behalf of his fellow man. "Spontaneous
prose" became the means by which the confession could be generalized since the
confession made use of analogous instances of sin and redemption throughout the
large, detailed world that Kerouac studied. "Go moan for man," a voice from the
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Jack Kerouac Biography
clouds had once seemed to say to him on one of his early trips across America. That
"moan" can be heard at moments during On the Road and almost continually in the
book Kerouac finished in 1952, Visions of Cody.
It is misleading to imply, however, that Visions of Cody was written after On the
Road. An inspection of the manuscript of Visions of Cody shows that parts of the two
books were at one time joined and that Kerouac later separated those parts.
Biographical evidence also suggests that certain sections of Visions of Cody were
written before On the Road. But whatever their precise origins in time, it is clear that
Visions of Cody belongs with the works of Kerouac's maturity, those written according
to the "spontaneous prose" method. Like all this work, Visions of Cody is structurally
unorthodox. The first part consists of a series of sketches (part of one of these was
quoted earlier) of scenes around New York City. Part two includes a historical account
of Cassady's boyhood followed without formal division in the prose by the narrator's
account of his present trip to San Francisco to see his hero. The third part contains a
long transcription of the narrator's conversations with Cassady in Cassady's home
while both are high on marijuana. The structuring into parts ends here. What follows
the transcript is a section entitled "Imitation of the Tape," in which Kerouac
improvises upon and fills out the gaps in the transcript structure, and a section called
"Joan Rawshanks in the Fog," his description of Joan Crawford during the shooting of
a scene from one of her movies. The divisions between these sections are not strict.
The "Joan Rawshanks" section moves imperceptibly into a retelling of the On the
Road story and from there into a final elegy about Cassady, now completely
spiritualized by the immense pressure of Kerouac's admiration of him as the true
American hero, the man liberated by his spontaneous energies from the forces of
convention.
If On the Road is about spontaneity, Visions of Cody is itself spontaneous. It is not the
story of the consequences of Kerouac's friendship with Cassady; it instead directly
presents those consequences by displaying the new method which Cassady had
inspired. In an important sense, however, the method never became old since Kerouac
never afterward, except in one instance, abandoned it. And because of the special
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purpose of the method, to render the details of consciousness simultaneously with
their occurrence within the mind, Kerouac's writing, from Visions of Cody to the last
book published in his lifetime, Vanity of Duluoz (1968), is really one work, rather than
a series of separately crafted ones. Each book takes as it subject a different era in
Kerouac's life, and to that extent they are separable. But they are unified to a far
greater extent by the fact that they are records, not so much of his life, but of his
living. Kerouac's work from Visions of Cody onward follows his physiological and
emotional chronology because it is the direct expression of that chronology. He is no
longer an artist puzzling over the construction of a book; he has himself become the
puzzle which it is the book's purpose to present. The distinction between art and life
which is clear in his autobiography up to the writing of On the Road nearly disappears
altogether in his autobiography afterward.
The consequences of this effort to identify art and life were not ultimately happy ones
for Kerouac, but in the flush of the discovery of his "spontaneous prose" method he
produced two works that reflected this initial exuberance and that are generally
pointed to as his best. Visions of Cody is the first of these works; Doctor Sax (1959),
written in 1952 in Burrough's Mexico City apartment, is the second. Not only are
these books conceived on a grander scale and with a more elaborate structure than any
of Kerouac's later works, they employ also a wider variety of styles. Visions of Cody,
for example, is in part an improvisation upon the literary voices Kerouac had heard in
his years of apprenticeship. Joyce, Wolfe, Proust, and Melville are only four of the
masters whose best effects Kerouac celebrates. Likewise Doctor Sax is a tribute to the
pulp fiction and gothic radio adventures of his youth as well as to the figure of Dr. Sax
himself, a shrouded combination of "The Shadow" and William Burroughs. In both
books voices from the street mingle with the literary voices in a happy equality never
achieved to the same degree in Kerouac's later books.
Doctor Sax, subtitled Faust Part Three, is the first of what might be called Kerouac's
"miracle" books: books in which spiritual complexities dramatized in earlier pages are
transformed and smoothed away by a force whose origin is outside the author and
whose appearance evokes the author's amazement as strongly as our own. (The
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Dharma Bums , 1958, and Big Sur, 1962, are two more examples, different as these
books are from Doctor Sax in other respects.) Doctor Sax is divided into six parts or
"Books," each of which records a different stage in the progression of complexities
leading up to the final miracle. In Book one, called "Ghosts of the Pawtucketville
Night," Kerouac penetrates, by the expression of sensed impressions recalled in
dreams, his memories of his preadolescent past in Lowell. Dr. Sax, introduced early as
a half-Mephistophelian, half-Faustian figure inhabiting the outskirts both of Lowell
and of Kerouac's imagination, seems to be readying himself for an apocalyptic
confrontation with the powers of Evil. Kerouac, figuratively trying to catch at Sax's
flying coattails through the wide eyes of his reawakened boyhood, glimpses those
coattails everywhere that an imaginative boy would naturally find them: behind his
father's armchair, in the windows of abandoned buildings, behind damp trees, in the
pages of his pulp fiction, in the grainy reels of movie thrillers. In subsequent parts
Kerouac employs a variety of styles and formats, including movie scripts, back-fence
gossip, voices in French, newspaper clippings, farcical imitations of gothic
melodramas, poetry: all these mingling in the whirl of Sax's alternately haunting,
alternately clowning activity in search of Evil's antidote. Sax's efforts end in comic
confusion, however; and the Snake, having just emerged, at the end of Doctor Sax,
from under a Lowell hill, is plucked up like an earthworm by the Bird of Paradise. We
can only gape at the miracle and exclaim, along with Dr. Sax himself, "I'll be
damned.... The Universe disposes of its own evil!"
Doctor Sax is a brilliant reinvention of a child's imaginative wildness, his
unselfconscious mixing of humor and fright. This mixing of attitude serves to portray
a truth often invisible to strictly disciplined adult eyes, the truth that God likes to work
his miracles in laughter. But the brilliance of this achievement did not prevent
Kerouac's life from becoming unsettled once again. He was stalemated in his efforts to
have On the Road published, and he could not contain his jealousy when he
discovered that John Clellon Holmes had had his own novel on the Beat Generation, a
novel entitled Go (1952), accepted with a handsome advance. Kerouac was at his peak
as a writer; yet, for the next five years, he wrote with little hope of having his work
published. Restlessly, he moved in May 1952 from the Cassady home in San
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Francisco to Mexico City, from there to North Carolina in July to rejoin his family,
then back to the Cassadys', and then back to Mexico in December. He was in New
York City for Christmas but went back to California in the spring of 1953 only to
return to New York by way of New Orleans that summer. While in California he
worked, as did Cassady himself, as a brakeman on the Southern Pacific Railroad. But
he began to separate himself from the Cassadys' home life, living in skid-row hotels
and sending home large portions of his paychecks to his mother. Except for his fidelity
to his writing and to his mother, his life in all other ways seems to have been in
turmoil; and it was also becoming apparent that he was a victim of alcoholism.
The two books written in 1953 show his unsettledness. More specifically, they show
Kerouac's sad awareness that by choosing to be a writer he had sacrificed hope of
having the normal family life he respected. The first of these books, Maggie Cassidy,
written early in 1953, is Kerouac's account of his adolescent love affair with Mary
Carney, though elements of his life with Edie Parker are mixed in too. In part because
the book is about adolescence but in part also because by choosing this subject
Kerouac forced himself to relive his crucial decision to leave Lowell, the book is
turbulent. The moods dramatized within it surge between joy and gloomy desperation.
Maggie and Jack oscillate between a romantic sexual attraction for each other and a
suspicion that neither can share the other's life. At the end, the speaker, as if unwilling
to enter too closely into the wretchedness that is to come, separates himself from his
first person persona and watches dispassionately in the third person as Jack, now three
years out of high school and in his own eyes a man of the world, attempts finally and
coldly to "get" Maggie in the back seat of a car. But Maggie, having foiled the rapist
with a rubber chastity belt, laughs at Jack with a laugh more cold-blooded than his
own passion. She has the last grim laugh on Kerouac the writer too, whose decision to
separate himself from Lowell in order that he might write such books as Maggie
Cassidy has left him, like the speaker at the end of the story, suspended without
feeling in a bodiless void.
In The Subterraneans (1958), written in three days in the fall of 1953, the laugh--not
Maggie's now, but that of Kerouac's own conscience--becomes warm and human
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again but frantic and helpless as well. Like Maggie Cassidy, The Subterraneans is
about a doomed love affair, this time between Kerouac, called Leo Percepied in the
story, and a black girl named Mardou Fox. Unlike Maggie, however, Mardou is no
hometown girl but a bohemian or "Subterranean" living in New York's East Village,
and she and other bohemian figures form the book's cast of characters, all of whom are
based upon real people. (The setting of the book was moved to San Francisco before
publication to avoid legal complications.) Unlike Maggie Cassidy, The Subterraneans
was written directly after the love affair ended, in this case the love affair with Mardou
Fox. Probably as a result, the speaker cannot distance himself from the episode. He
cannot escape from the worst moments of the affair's collapse, not even into a
protective coldness like the one at the end of Maggie Cassidy . He is instead caught in
the bewildering trials of a confession in which he plays alternately the roles of sinner,
judge, and jury. The final verdict rendered by the book is that for Kerouac love and his
art could not coexist. One had to choose. Kerouac had already made the choice several
times before in his ending by separation, annulment, and divorce his relations with
Mary Carney, Edie Parker, and Joan Haverty. The Subterraneans is the dramatization
of still another such choice, made within the very medium--writing--that was forcing
the choice upon him. In this sense The Subterraneans not only describes the ending of
a love affair; it is its very cause.
Kerouac was not proud of the fact that he had chosen writing over a settled married
life. He had none of the typical bohemian's pleasure in snubbing middle-class values
in favor of an unconventional form of freedom. He had none of the aesthete's
veneration of art for art's sake. His loyalty to "spontaneous prose" was of another
order, not one that excluded bohemians, aesthetes, and ordinary middle-class married
people but that included them as the audience of his confession. His writing was an act
of worship, though it was the worship, as he himself readily admitted, of a sinner.
Kerouac's bedrooms within the various apartments and houses he shared with his
mother were frequently described by visitors as looking like a monk's cell: spare,
meticulously neat, with a crucifix over the bed, a box or file for manuscripts and
correspondence, a typewriter on a table, a chair. "Spontaneous prose" required this
austerity if the confession were to be purified. Kerouac nowhere says that
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Jack Kerouac Biography
"spontaneous prose" required an identical austerity from all confessors, but it did so
from him. And no one regretted what was thereby lost more than he did.
Yet "spontaneous prose," even in a book as agitated and rueful as The Subterraneans,
never became a vehicle of pessimism or gloom. In The Subterraneans, the very
rapidity with which thoughts are chased down onto the page has about it a warm
laughter that is not suppressed even in Percepied's greatest fits of depression.
Kerouac's mind was too active to be mired in a self-satisfied melancholy. His sadness
was always a means of seeing more sympathetically than otherwise the world's
sorrows, not the justification for his closing himself off from them. Likewise his
humor--never given sufficient attention even by his admirers--was a means of
responding to the comic oddities of life, not the justification of his assuming a
superiority to them. His complexity of attitude was no accident. It was the direct result
of his extreme sensitivity to the fallen beauty of life.
But by 1954 the complexity had become too much even for him to handle. He was
looking for a new source of harmony and seemed to find it after his reading of
Ashvagosha's Life of Buddha . For the next few years and culminating with The
Dharma Bums, which he completed in 1957, Kerouac absorbed himself in the
literature and practice first and primarily of Mahayana and then of Zen Buddhism, and
this absorption is apparent in the large volume of writing that dates from this period.
The years between 1954 and 1957 were perhaps Kerouac's most fruitful. Assessing
this fruitfulness is made difficult, however, by the fact that most of Kerouac's
explicitly Buddhist writings have never been published. "Some of the Dharma," a
large book of Buddhist prayers; "Buddha Tells Us," Kerouac's version of the
Surangama Sutra; and "Wake Up," a biography of the Buddha, are still in manuscript.
Of this group, only The Scripture of the Golden Eternity (1960)--the only work written
after Visions of Cody that did not follow the "spontaneous prose" method--was
eventually published. Also written during the years 1954-1957 and only published
some years later were Mexico City Blues (1959), Visions of Gerard, Tristessa (1960),
and the first part of Desolation Angels (the second part was written in 1961 and both
parts were published together in 1965). But in these books Buddhism plays a
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Jack Kerouac Biography
subordinate though powerful role. It assumes a place within what seemed to him the
larger structure of his Roman Catholicism.
It does not seem difficult to explain Kerouac's attraction to Buddhism. Torn as he
often was by the paradox of God's seemingly simultaneous presence and absence in
the world he saw, Kerouac could seize with relief on Buddhism's annihilation of the
paradox. The suffering of all created things under a sky emptied of divinity could
never be ignored, but it could be tolerated and even accepted if it were viewed,not as a
sign of sin, but as an illusion from which Buddhists might release themselves through
the careful practice of ritual. Suffering, death, and the physical matter through which
suffering and death operated were not real. Reality was instead the highest
consciousness of illusion, the consciousness attained by the Buddha himself and
emulated by his followers. This consciousness was made even more attractive to
Kerouac by the fact that it was attained, according to Buddhist precept, only
spontaneously, since the conventional categories of thought were themselves
symptoms of the illusion from which one sought to be freed.
Attractive as Buddhism was to Kerouac and as sincerely as he submitted to it as a
mental and physical discipline, he never became a simple convert. He treated the
Buddha much as he had treated Cassady in On the Road and Visions of Cody and as he
had treated his brother Gerard in Visions of Gerard : as a hero whose advent he
announced but whose difference from himself was always clear. And though his
sentences acquired the cadences and terminologies of the sutras he had been studying,
they never lost their other points of reference, the ones that identified Kerouac as a
member of the suffering creation, the illusion of whose existence he was supposedly
learning to free himself from. In fact, much of the attraction of Mexico City Blues (a
group of 242 poems arranged as "choruses" or jazz improvisations upon the theme of
existence), Visions of Gerard (his narration of his brother's last illness and death),
Tristessa (his meditation upon the Mexican girl who served him both as his drug
pusher and as his saint of sadness), and the first part of Desolation Angels (his account
of the summer spent in 1956 as a fire-watcher on top of Desolation Peak in the
Cascades and later among his friends in San Francisco)--much of this attraction is
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Jack Kerouac Biography
derived from Kerouac's ability in these books to include his Buddhist belief in the
nullity of matter within his larger Catholic belief in the mysterious splendor of matter
as a gift of God. Buddhism soothed Kerouac's keen sense of sin while under the cover
of this comparative calm the world of the senses flowered wildly as before.
Though Buddhism did not liberate Kerouac altogether from the unsettledness and
sadness of The Subterraneans period, it did for a time mitigate them. His luck with
publishers seemed to be improving as well. Two sections of On the Road were
published in literary magazines in 1955--one in New World Writing and the other in
the Paris Review--and the novel itself, now championed by Malcolm Cowley at
Viking, seemed close to acceptance. Then in October Ginsberg read his own poem
Howl at the Six Gallery in San Francisco. From this reading dates the emergence of
the Beat Generation as a literary and eventually as a social phenomenon, and
Kerouac's publishing difficulties were reversed as a result of Ginsberg's success. And
when, a little later in October, Viking finally accepted On the Road, Kerouac seemed
to possess what would ordinarily be considered his vindication, or at least the sure
promise of it.
Kerouac made another long trip, this time to Tangier to visit Burroughs, before On the
Road was published in September 1957. But even before the book came out there
were ominous signs that the long-sought-for culmination was, at best, a mixed
blessing. Though only thirty-five years old at the time of its publication, Kerouac was
in many ways much older. His athlete's body had begun to weaken after several years
of alcohol abuse. His spirit was weary as well. He had moved very quickly in the six
years since the invention of "spontaneous prose." He had written at least a dozen
book-length manuscripts as well as many shorter pieces, including letters and poems;
he had traveled extensively and exhaustingly, and he was tired. He saw himself about
to be ushered into the glare of publicity and fame and found that all he really wanted
was peace and anonymity--the very anonymity he had sought to rise from.
Another split in his inner urgings began, then, to develop, this time between a need for
recognition and a need for solitude; and like all the other splits in Kerouac's life, this
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Jack Kerouac Biography
one was never healed. If this split had worse overt effects than any of the others, that
may be due to its occurring at a time when his energies had sunk too low to allow him
to sustain a new wound. For the fact is that of the four great ruptures in Kerouac's life,
the third must be located here, with the publication and subsequent "success" of On
the Road. Like Gerard's death and his family's forced emigration from Lowell, literary
fame had the effect of breaking his ties with nearly all that he had known as security.
But since those ties were fewer after each rupture, Kerouac's position was more
desperate in 1957 than it had been in 1925 or 1946. His resources for overcoming the
new division were few, and little good could come of it.
Virtually the only good that did come was financial, though Kerouac's earnings from
his books were never great and dwindled sharply after 1961. The critical reception of
On the Road was almost from the first antagonistic and even virulent. But though
Kerouac was hurt by this reception, he could not have been completely surprised by it.
Nine years earlier, when he coined the term "Beat Generation," he had shown his
understanding of the prejudices that would make a sympathetic acceptance of this
work difficult, if not impossible. He had shown also that by choosing to address those
prejudices in religious terms he could not meet and perhaps overcome them on their
own ground. Not even On the Road's classic neatness of structure could protect it. In
its ardent enthusiasm for moments of spontaneous ecstasy and in its treating as a hero
a figure who must have seemed to many middle-class Americans a mere "juvenile
delinquent," On the Road was an easy mark for critics and book reviewers strongly
influenced by Cold War thinking. Predictably, they dismissed On the Road in terms
that said, in a negative form, far more about their own values than about Kerouac's.
Dennis McNally, in his biography of Kerouac, quotes some of these dismissals: "It
was 'verbal goofballs' to Saturday Review, 'infantile, perversely negative' to the Herald
Tribune, 'lack[ed] ... seriousness' to Commonweal, 'like a slob running a temperature'
to the Hudson Review, and 'a series of Neanderthal grunts' to Encounter. The New
Yorker labeled Dean Moriarty 'a wild and incomprehensible ex-convict'; the Atlantic
thought him 'more convincing as an eccentric than as a representative of any segment
of humanity,' and Time diagnosed him a victim of the Ganser Syndrome, whereby
people weren't really mad--they only seemed to be." According to the critics who
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Jack Kerouac Biography
wrote these reviews, ecstasy, when it occurred in a noninstitutional setting like the
backseat of a car, was indistinguishable from mental and physical illness, filth,
incoherence, deceit, criminal violence, degeneracy, and mindless folly. This
assumption said much, for those who had ears to hear it, about the depths of those
critics' fears of their emotions and of their pride in the narrow limits of their intellects.
But it did not say much of anything about On the Road.
To the many people who were inspired by On the Road, most of them young and
without political influence, the book had a more positive meaning. Kerouac's
directness of tone engaged such readers, and his quick pacing kept them interested.
But though the complexity of his meanings may have been lost on them (just as they
were certainly lost, for another reason, on his critics), the theme of On the Road was
not only clear but also seductive. The book was a celebration of the spontaneous
American personality and of the effort of that personality to express itself through
confessional conversations, cars, sex, marijuana, and jazz. The book satisfied the
longings of its readers for hints of how they might use their energies to reach moments
of physical and emotional delight. But it did more: it connected those moments to
forces even larger than personality. On the Road made Dean Moriarty a human image
of the vast, wild continent which was his playground. The hint was and is irresistible.
The book continues to inspire in the young a desire to follow in Dean's footsteps and
to feel, as they are doing so, that they are taking part in some unwritten ritual of the
American experience. One can often point to the myth of the frontier as a precursor of
the myth of spontaneity as enacted by Dean and Sal Paradise in their wild continental
car trips. But for many of the young, On the Road was a necessary translation of the
American dream, a guidebook to mid-twentieth century ecstasy. Kerouac's ability to
make such a guidebook, complete with personalities and landscapes that are
spiritualized into mythic forces but which are also presented in intricate detail, is the
reason for his acquiring the label of spokesman or "King of the Beats." No other writer
of the Beat group drew in such detail or with such attention to narrative logic the
relations among personality, place, and spirit. He put the Beat Generation on the
American map by awakening in readers their previously unarticulated visions of what
a vast territory of space and consciousness that map covered and of how attractively
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Jack Kerouac Biography
large those persons must become who cross it.
But the positive reception of On the Road was for the most part unvoiced. Gilbert
Millstein's appreciative review in the daily New York Times was the most prominent
exception. What sounded loudest were the critics' transformation of Kerouac's
celebration of Cassady into a cry of anarchy and finally into an object of ridicule. Just
as painful for the shy Kerouac was the media attention that was now being directed at
him. Amid this uproar Kerouac became even more anxious and depressed. His
alcoholism became severe--a quart of hard liquor a day was not unusual--and he found
himself unable to write with his earlier fluency. He had finished The Dharma Bums,
the story of his friendship with Gary Snyder and his introduction through Snyder to
mountain-climbing and Zen Buddhism, in the fall of 1957 before the media attention
had become overpowering. But he was not able to conceive and write another
full-length book for three years, when he wrote Big Sur. (Lonesome Traveler and Book
of Dreams, published in 1960 and 1961, are collections of shorter pieces.) Joan
Haverty, aware of his fame, sued him for support of their daughter, Janet. In 1958 he
received the first of several barroom beatings, and in 1960 he suffered his first attack
of delirium tremens. Not only was he increasingly vulnerable physically, he was
increasingly vulnerable also to critics' attacks. The books written after On the Road
were now being published and were being received with scorn. The "spontaneous
prose" method itself was depreciated as a lazy trick, a way of avoiding the serious
business of careful revision and planning. Truman Capote dismissed it
contemptuously as mere "typing." Kerouac's efforts at self-defense were futile. The
Escapade articles he wrote from 1959 to 1961, a fascinating series of occasional
pieces and defenses of his art, were taken no more seriously than the explanations he
made during his few nervously drunken television appearances. He became less and
less able to present himself as the figure of sobriety, which alone might have
convinced his critics he was worth listening to.
It is important, however, not to exaggerate the destructiveness of the media's attacks
upon him. Deplorable as the critics' prejudices may have been, there is reason for
thinking that even the warmest reception of his work would not have had a decisive
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Jack Kerouac Biography
effect on Kerouac's decline in energy or on his attitude toward fame. The role of
"divine scribe" had not only worn him out, it had also committed him to a vision of
life that no mere literary "success" could have satisfied. In his vanity, Kerouac might
enjoy the prospect of becoming a lionized author, the toast of the lecture circuit. But
the actuality would probably under any circumstances have been abhorrent to him,
since it would have assumed privileges of permanence and control he could not
condone, given his religious sense of his vocation. Even the images of himself
presented according to the "spontaneous prose" method were false since they carried
with them a timelessness he could not claim for himself in the flesh. The Jack Kerouac
appearing in books and the Jack Kerouac at each succeeding moment in life were
separated not only by past and present; they were separated also by the fact that while
the literary character inhabited a world bounded by the meanings of words, the writer
himself was at each instant afloat in a world whose dimensions were fluid--fluid both
because of the facts of material change and because of the unpredictability and
obliqueness of God's appearances. Kerouac was forced to acknowledge the rupture
between the image of himself dramatized in his books and his present knowledge of
what that self was becoming; and he was resentful of and finally even frightened by
those admirers who, unaware that such a rupture existed, treated him as if the image
and the changing reality were one.
Kerouac also felt compelled to shrug off the titles, particularly the title of "King of the
Beats," conferred upon him by those connecting On the Road with the way of life it
had encouraged among the young. He probably felt this way, again, because the role
of leader or "King" implied not merely a public authority but also a limitation of
present action he could not endure. So deep was his antipathy to accomplishment as
ordinarily viewed that it may even have affected his relation with his daughter by Joan
Haverty. His refusal to accept his paternity may have been due, in part, to his
reluctance to see his image fixed in an outward form, even in that of a child. One is
reminded of his extravagance of behavior during his "Self-Ultimacy" period. In a
figurative sense, Kerouac really did write with his own blood by writing
spontaneously. And he also continued to burn what he wrote, refusing to allow the
world to put its own categories on his work, even categories that originated with him.
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Jack Kerouac Biography
"[I am] actually not 'Beat,'" he said, in his introduction to Lonesome Traveler, "but
strange solitary crazy Catholic mystic."
Such a deep loyalty to spontaneity can have serious psychological consequences.
Combined with alcoholism, it can be nearly deadly, as Kerouac himself demonstrated
in the fall of 1961 with the writing in ten days of Big Sur. Big Sur is the account of a
devastating seizure of alcohol sickness that occurred the previous summer during
Kerouac's retreat to a cabin on the Big Sur coast. It is an account also of Kerouac's
losing struggle to maintain some kind of coherence among the various images of
himself his own writing and his fame had generated. But, here as earlier, personal
collapse acted as a stimulus. The book resulting from these disasters is as sadly
humorous and lucid as it is frantic and frightening. "Spontaneous prose" gives shape to
the chaos of alcohol hysterics, not only sentence by sentence but in the design of the
whole work. Kerouac's persona is released from his frenzy, but not in conventional
ways such as death, therapy, or some other merely human solution. In the last pages of
the book a vision of redemption appears, as perhaps all such visions
must--inexplicably, momentarily, and, of course, spontaneously. Once again, the
"divine scribe," frantic at the absence of his master's voice, hears that voice issue from
an unpredicted direction, from within the despair caused by the voice's absence. The
book closes around that vision, giving it a literary permanence; but the life continued,
and Kerouac's energies grew weaker.
Big Sur marks the end of the unhappy affair with fame. The media had grown tired of
making fun of the Beats and their king, and Kerouac, now left alone, grew lonely. His
life with his mother in their various homes was disturbed by quarrels; his old friends
were far away; and the strenuous effort required by the "spontaneous prose" style was
becoming hard to sustain. To please his mother, he moved his home between Florida
and New England several times between 1962 and his death in Florida in 1969. Both
he and his mother felt themselves drawn most strongly to their old hometown of
Lowell. During his visits there, Kerouac spent his time mostly in bars, reacquainting
himself with the family of his dead boyhood friend, Sebastian Sampas. Kerouac had
not in the intervening years lost complete contact with the Sampas family, however.
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He had apparently asked Sebastian's sister Stella to marry him long before she finally
accepted his proposal in 1966. Her previous refusal was due to her need to take care of
members of her own family. But in the fall of 1966 they were wed. And since
Kerouac's mother had suffered a stroke earlier that year, Stella was asked to be not
only a wife but a nurse as well--a role she seems to have assumed without complaint.
By returning to Lowell and marrying his third wife, Kerouac was imposing a
much-needed shape on his life. And though the Kerouac returning to Lowell, the
garrulous barfly whose "literary" fame was regarded with suspicion by many of those
residents of Lowell who were aware of it, seemed unrelated to the shy, hopeful,
athletic Kerouac who had left Lowell at eighteen, there was still a sustaining
connection of past and present. Other efforts at imposing shapes were not as
successful. Ever since reading The Forsyte Saga in 1942, Kerouac had wanted to write
one multi-episode but connected account of one life and vision. Although the books he
wrote actually do constitute such an account, Kerouac wanted at various times
throughout the 1960s to standardize the names in all his published books. (The change
in names from book to book had been ordered by his various publishers.) Then he
would republish his books in a uniform format. Such an arrangement would make
clear, he hoped, the kinship of his work with that of Balzac and Proust. The idea was
never realized, however, probably because of publishers' lack of interest in a project
that did not seem profitable. Still, he might have had success with his idea if his health
had allowed him to pursue it. But his alcoholism was now approaching its inevitable
climax.
It is a remarkable fact about Kerouac that his alcoholism neither dulled his wit nor
prevented him from writing two more books, the second of which is worthy of
inclusion within his best work. In 1965, Kerouac wrote Satori in Paris (1966), his first
book since Big Sur. It is an account of a trip he made alone to France in that same year
to research his family tree. Though frequently dismissed even by his admirers, Satori
in Paris is a sly, teasing, funny book in which Kerouac portrays himself in a new role,
one hard to get used to if the reader is expecting the youthful, lyrical Kerouac of the
early books or even the frantic alcoholic of Big Sur. This new role, that of a barroom
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raconteur, a kind of Sir John Falstaff teasing his mates, is, in part, the negative product
of his exhaustion and his disillusionment with fame. But it is also the positive product
of his continuing fidelity to the "spontaneous prose" method. "Spontaneous prose"
both contributed to his decline, by making it impossible for him to stay fixed in any
one role, even one that was successful by worldly measure, and redeemed the decline,
by making it the basis for an extension of his vision. As an aging veteran of the mad
scrambles of life, Kerouac could talk in ways not open to him as a younger man. He
could speak as one who has nothing to lose, least of all his dignity. He could parody
himself; he could laugh without bitterness or guilt at his own follies and those of his
readers. But from behind the laughter could echo the sound characteristic of all
Kerouac's writing, the sound of his compassion for the endless suffering of all mortal
beings.
Satori in Paris serves as a prelude for the greater book that was published two years
later, Vanity of Duluoz. Like Satori in Paris, this book too has found few admirers
until recently. Yet Vanity of Duluoz--"Duluoz" being the pseudonym for himself
which Kerouac translates into English as "the louse"--is a model of comic melancholy.
It tells the story--Kerouac's wife Stella is imagined as the audience--of Kerouac's
football career at Lowell High, Horace Mann, and Columbia. It also describes his life
during the war years up to the time of his father's death in 1946. Thematically, the
book represents Kerouac's attempt to sum up the value not only of his various youthful
strivings for fame but also of his whole subsequent literary career. "Vanity" is the sum
he tries to obtain, but the greatness of Vanity of Duluoz , particularly in its closing
pages, consists in its resisting such simple arithmetic. Even to declare his life vain
turns out itself to be a species of vanity, and though he attempts to maintain the tone of
a modern-day Ecclesiastes when recounting his vanities, his love of detail, his sense of
humor, and his Christian compassion thwart him. No summing up of one's life is
possible while one is still in that life, and the genius of "spontaneous prose" is such
that the crucial facts of one's being still alive cannot be eliminated in favor of a neat
moral completeness, not even a negative one such as "vanity."
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Jack Kerouac Biography
Those crucial facts were soon to be eliminated by another method, however. Having
received a severe barroom beating in the spring of 1969, Kerouac afterward
sequestered himself in his St. Petersburg home with his wife and his crippled mother,
drinking heavily, watching television, listening to Handel's Messiah on his record
player, reading, and, as always, writing. His late-night long-distance telephone calls to
his old friends became fewer. He felt exiled not only from his own past but from his
own country. America's involvement in the Vietnam War he despised. Yet equally
despicable to him were the hippies along with their mentor, his old friend Allen
Ginsberg, who seemed merely to be indulging themselves at the expense of traditional
American values of patriotism and decency. Caught characteristically between divided
allegiances, both craving companionship and alienating it, Kerouac remained faithful
to his writing, and it was while he was jotting notes in front of his television one
morning that death came for him. A vein in his stomach burst, and twenty hours later,
on 21 October 1969, after many emergency transfusions in a St. Petersburg hospital,
he was dead. The fourth of the great ruptures in his life was the last, because it divided
him from that life altogether.
An assessment of Kerouac's literary accomplishment must be expressed in paradoxes
if it is to avoid simplification. The "spontaneous prose" method is itself a paradoxical
instrument: consciously formed yet unconsciously, intuitively practiced. It is a method
designed specifically for those who, like Kerouac himself, are already masters of the
conventional modes of writing. It is a step beyond literary formality, not an escape
from it. It uses such formality as the basis upon which the inner mind can articulate its
contrasting effects. This is why even in Kerouac's wildest uses of the method, as in,
for example, sections of Visions of Cody or of "Old Angel Midnight," his writing is
almost always coherent. There are always indirect references to be found, if only in
the sounds of the sentences, to verbal structures that are being transcended.
Kerouac's literary accomplishment is the attainment, laboriously sought for and
painfully maintained, of this transcendence by means of the "spontaneous prose"
method. Though other classic American authors had extolled the virtue of spontaneity
in writing--Emerson and Thoreau come immediately to mind--none of them, before or
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since, has sought as strenuously and as successfully as Kerouac did to realize that
virtue in practice. In view of what the realization cost Kerouac, who can blame them?
But who can blame Kerouac for pursuing a legitimate goal other authors had elected
not to pursue? If American literature is the acting out of Emerson's prophecies, then
Kerouac's life's work is foretold in the following paragraph from Emerson's essay
"Nature," published in 1836: "Wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words
once again to visible things, so that the picturesque language is at once a commanding
certificate that he who employs it is in allegiance with truth and God.... The imagery is
spontaneous. It is the blending of experience with the present action of the mind."
Similar passages from Emerson's later essays are easy to find. Here is one from
"Intellect": "Our spontaneous action is always the best.... Our thinking is a pious
reception. Our truth of thought is therefore vitiated as much by too violent direction
given by our will, as by too great negligence.... As far as we can recall these ecstasies
we carry away in the ineffaceable memory the result, and all men and all the ages
confirm it. It is called truth. But the moment we cease to report and attempt to correct
and contrive, it is not truth."
Kerouac's true position in American literature will never become clear until he is
measured against standards which he himself set and which were legitimized over a
century earlier by no less an authority than Emerson. Kerouac is still held hostage,
however, by the Cold War prejudices that originally condemned his work. It is
perhaps a sadder thought that such prejudices can last so long than that one writer has
suffered from them. Kerouac's literary reputation has become a test of the American
intellectual climate since World War II: a climate not much less grey and forbidding
now than it was twenty-five years ago.
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