On April 23, 1949, a month after signing a contract with a Madison Avenue publisher for his first novel The Town and the City, Jack Kerouac wrote a letter to his friend Alan Harrington, another young novelist:
I am no longer “beat,” I have money, a career. I am more alone now than when I “lurked” on Times Square at 4 A.M., or hitch-hiked penniless down the highways of the night. It’s strange. And yet I was never a “rebel,” only a happy, sheepish imbecile, open-hearted & silly with joys. And so I remain.
Kerouac might have protested that he was “no longer beat” when he wrote the letter, but we have persisted in seeing him that way. Now regarded as the authentic voice of the post World War II “beat generation,” he thought of himself as an experimental writer in the Modernist tradition of Marcel Proust and James Joyce. His books are full of Buddhist imagery, but he also describes himself as a Catholic author. Kerouac’s life and work are full of such contradictions, never resolved. Perhaps it’s the unresolved tensions of these contradictions that keep him perennially alive to new generations of readers.
From the beginning Jack Kerouac was an outsider, the son of French-Canadian emigrants who passed on to him their American dreams. Baptized Jean Louis Lebris De Kerouac in memory of the man he called his “first North American ancestor Baron Alexandre Louis Lebris de Kerouac of Cornwall, Brittany,” Jack was born on March 12, 1922 to Gabrielle Levesque and Leo Kerouac, who had emigrated separately from Quebec to New England. They had met and married in Nashua, New Hampshire, and settled in Lowell, Massachusetts, by the time Jack was born. Leo owned a small print shop and Gabrielle worked in a shoe factory. The youngest of their three children, Jack attended local Catholic grammar schools and graduated as a star athlete in football and track from Lowell High School in 1939.
After a year at Horace Mann Prep School in New York, Kerouac attended Columbia University on scholarship. When the United States entered World War II, he quarreled with the varsity football coach at Columbia and dropped out of college in his sophomore year to join the Merchant Marine and (briefly) the Navy. He began a novel and continued writing after the end of the war, when he returned to New York City and became close friends through his first wife with Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, Jr. (Kerouac separated from both his first and second wives after only a few months of marriage.)
Kerouac’s first published novel, The Town and the City (1950), was begun after his father’s death in 1946, when his mother supported him by working a factory job. Twenty years later, Jack dismissed it as a book written before he had found his own voice. In 1966, he told me that “The Town and the City was written according to what they told me at Columbia University. Fiction. But I told you, the novel’s dead. Then I broke loose from all that and wrote picaresque narratives. That’s what my books are.”
In April 1951, after three weeks of inspired typing on a 120-foot roll he made out of long sheets of drawing paper held together with scotch tape (so he wouldn’t have to break off at the bottom of a page to put new paper into his typewriter), he created the novel published nearly seven years later as On the Road. At the age of 29, Kerouac had written his first successful autobiographical picaresque narrative. Six months later he discovered his experimental prose style, which he called “spontaneous prose” or “sketching.” He immediately began to revise On the Road, creating another book covering the same time period titled Visions of Cody. This narrative was so unconventional that it didn’t find a publisher in its complete version until three years after his death.
Between 1951 and 1956 Kerouac wrote several books which were considered too stylistically innovative to find publishers at the time. During the long, disheartening wait before On the Road was accepted by Viking Press, he worked a series of jobs as a railroad brakeman and fire lookout, traveling between the East and West Coasts, saving his money so he could live with his mother while he wrote the series of books he conceived of as his life’s work, “The Legend of Duluoz” or “The Legend of Kerouac” (Duluoz was Kerouac’s favorite fictional name for himself in three of his novels).
This was a dozen books comprising his fictionalized autobiography, which Kerouac intended in his old age to gather together in a uniform binding. Then he planned to insert the real names of his contemporaries into the narratives so that his larger design might be more apparent. In his introduction to a collection of his travel sketches, Lonesome Traveler (1960), Kerouac wrote that he
Always considered writing my duty on earth. Also the preachment of universal kindness, which hysterical critics have failed to notice beneath frenetic activity of my true-story novels about the “beat” generation—Am actually not “beat” but strangely solitary crazy Catholic mystic….
“The Legend of Duluoz” begins with the novel Visions of Gerard, which describes the first four years of Kerouac’s childhood and the death of his brother Gerard from rheumatic fever in 1926. Doctor Sax, the next of the chronology, is a fantasy of memories and dreams about his boyhood (1930-1936) in Lowell with an imaginary companion Doctor Sax, who was like the pulp magazine hero The Shadow, the champion of Good in a mythic battle against the forces of Evil. Maggie Cassidy is a more realistic novel about his adolescence in high school and his first love (1938-1939). Vanity of Duluoz describes his years playing football at prep school and Columbia, and his experience during World War II, as well as his early friendship with Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, Jr., named “Irwin Garden” and “Will Hubbard” in the novel.
On the Road comes next in the sequence. It begins with Kerouac’s meeting a new friend from Denver who comes to New York and introduces him to “the road.” This is Neal Cassady, called “Dean Moriarty” in the novel, the inspiration for Kerouac (“Sal Paradise”) to make his cross-country trips between 1947 and 1950, hitch-hiking and riding buses, cars and trucks across the United States in the quest for joyful adventure. In this book Ginsberg is “Carlo Marx” and Burroughs is “Old Bull Lee.” Neal Cassady was such a strong personal and literary influence on Kerouac that he attempted another “in-depth” description of their times together in Visions of Cody (Cassady was called “Cody Pomeray” here).
The Subterraneans continues the autobiography as an intense account of Kerouac’s affair with an African-American young woman in the summer of 1953. In this book he is “Leo Percepied,” Ginsberg is “Adam Moorad,” and the poet Gregory Corso is “Yuri Gligoric.” In Tristessa, Kerouac describes his affair with a morphine addict in the slums of Mexico City during 1955 and 1956, the same time period as The Dharma Bums. In The Dharma Bums, Kerouac (“Ray Smith”) adventures in California with Cassady (“Cody Pomeray”) and Ginsberg (“Avah Goldbook”) and the West Coast poets Philip Whalen (“Warren Coughlin”), Michael McClure (“Ike O’Shay”) and Gary Snyder (“Japhy Ryder”), who teach Kerouac how to climb mountains, camp out with sleeping bags and live as a Buddhist during the period that journalists called the “Poetry Renaissance” in San Francisco. This was when Ginsberg read his poem “Howl” in public for the first time in October 1955, causing a sensation at a wildly successful poetry reading described in the novel.
Desolation Angels picks up the narrative in 1956 and continues until the fall of 1957, when the publication of On the Road catapults Kerouac into literary fame as a best-selling author and spokesman for the “Beat Generation.” Big Sur and Satori in Paris are the last books in “The Legend of Duluoz,” chronicling 1960-1965 and Kerouac’s last years of alcoholism and anger at the media’s distortion of his work and refusal to regard him as a serious writer.
The largest design of Kerouac’s novels has been overshadowed by the popularity of On the Road (1957), The Dharma Bums (1958), which established his reputation as a disaffiliated beat writer. In these books Kerouac offered what a Village Voice reviewer saw as “a rallying point for the elusive spirit of the rebellion of these times.” On the Road and The Dharma Bums are written in a conventional first-person prose style, telling the story of Kerouac’s search for a way of life in America that would fulfill his old-fashioned ideal of romantic individualism. In both novels he encounters “heroes” who appear to offer him alternatives to what he sees as the repression and conformity predominating the American life after World War II (On the Road) and at the beginning of the Cold War (The Dharma Bums).
In On the Road the hero is “Dean Moriarty” (Neal Cassady), whom “Sal paradise” (Kerouac) sees as a “young jailkid shrouded in mystery” because his energy and enthusiasm are so compelling that Kerouac follows him on a search for adventure. As Sal explains, “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time….”
Dean Moriarty offers trips on the road as an alternative to settling down, shrugging off responsibility for his wives and children just as his father had abandoned him. As he tells Sal, “You spend a whole life of non-interference with the wishes of others…and nobody bothers you and you cut along and make it your own way…What’s your road, man?—holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It’s an anywhere road for anybody anyhow. Where body how?” Dean was “Beat — the root, the soul of Beatific,” seeming to possess the secret of life, which impresses Sal as knowledge of the way to throw open the doors of experience to reveal the infinite possibilities of time itself.
Kerouac’s portrait of Dean Moriarty was so compelling for many readers that they overlooked the conclusion of the novel, when the uncertainties and hardships of his way of life have overbalanced the adventures. Sal says goodbye to Dean at the end of the book, seeing him as a sad character in a ragged, moth-eaten overcoat. The vitality of Kerouac’s descriptions of their earlier trips together through the United States and Northern Mexico and the rushing optimism of their search for identity and fulfillment are underscored by Kerouac’s final sense of their shared mortality.
In The Dharma Bums, the hero is “Japhy Ryder” (the California poet Gary Snyder), a young student of Zen Buddhism whom Kerouac meets in Berkeley and presents as “a great hero of American culture.” Kerouac’s description of what he considers the emotional repression and false values in American society is more specific in this novel, where he dramatizes an alternative what was later defined as a “counterculture” to the American mainstream. It is basically Dean Moriarty’s life of “non-interference” presented in The Dharma Bums in terms of Asian philosophy (dharma means truth) and reverence for nature. Japhy Ryder adds a political context to Kerouac’s disaffiliation with his idea of a great “rucksack revolution” in America, anticipating the hippie movement of the following decade.
The third of Kerouac’s popular novels, The Subterraneans, is a confessional narrative written in “three full moon nights of October” on Benzedrine in one of his most astonishing creative bursts. He later said
…the book is modeled after Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, a full confession of one’s most wretched and hidden agonies after an affair of any kind. The prose is what I believe to be the prose of the future, from both the conscious top and the unconscious bottom of the mind, limited only by the limitations of time flying by as our mind flies by with it.
In its personal revelation and sexual detail, The Subterraneans is reminiscent of a Henry Miller novel, and later Miller wrote an introduction to the book saying that Kerouac’s prose was as striking as his subject matter. There is no search for an alternative lifestyle in this novel. Here Kerouac presents himself as the protagonist. Honestly describing his racism and his failure to love the black girl “Mardou,” he creates one of his strongest dramatizations of the basic theme in all his work, his belief that “All life is suffering.”
The explicit sexual description of The Subterraneans, the social anarchy suggested by the “rucksack revolution” in The Dharma Bums, the use of drugs and hedonistic “joyriding” in On the Road—all these angered many readers and reviewers in the repressive McCarthy era forty years ago. When the originality of Kerouac’s achievement as a writer was overlooked in his lifetime, he attempted to drown his sorrows in alcohol.
The aspect of Kerouac’s writing that influenced both Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs was what Kerouac called “sketching,” an unedited and unrevised spontaneity. He compared himself to a jazz musician improvising on a musical theme: “sketching language is undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret idea-words, blowing (as per jazz musician) on subject of image.” There was to be no revision: “Never afterthink to improve or defray impressions…tap from yourself the song of yourself, blow!—now!—your way is your only way—good—bad—always honest.”
In the years before Kerouac’s death at the age of 47 on October 21, 1969 in St. Petersburg, Florida, he was, as his third wife Stella Sampas said, “a very lonely man.” He disassociated himself from his former friends, as well as the beatniks and hippies who claimed descendancy from his books. Contradictions abounded in his life. He was politically very conservative, hostile to Vietnam War protestors and indifferent to Civil Rights activists, considering himself a patriotic American whose country had offered a good life to his French-Canadian parents.
Recently in editing letters from Kerouac to his literary agent and publishers, I found evidence that he was proud of the fact that he was “King of the Beats,” even if he publicly disavowed his influence on his readers at the end of his life. Kerouac, of course, didn’t follow the lifestyle of either Neal Cassady or Gary Snyder, the men he immortalized as his heroes. He always made his home with his mother Gabrielle, and on June 22, 1965, when their finances were low because his books weren’t selling very well, he sat at his desk in St. Petersburg, Florida, while she hung out a load of wash on the clothesline in the backyard and wrote a letter to Arabelle Porter, an editor at Signet/New American Library paperbacks, about his new idea for merchandizing On the Road.
If you only knew the enormous demand in this country proper, and not only N.Y.C. & suburbs, for On the Road, by people not only who’ve never read it but people who have read it but lost their copies and want to read it again, why you’d do a flip-flop of yr sales chart…
Kerouac’s portrait of Dean Moriarty was so compelling for many readers that they overlooked the conclusion of the novel, when the uncertainties and hardships of his way of life have overbalanced the adventures…the rushing optimism of their search for identity and fulfillment are underscored by Kerouac’s final sense of their shared mortality.
It is not true that On the Road is an evil influence on the young: it’s simply a true story about an ex-cowboy and an ex-football player running around the country looking for pretty girls to love…Put out the Signet edition on drugstore & supermarket & bus station and airline terminal bookracks & get it over with. The demand is furious everywhere. I haven’t once managed to keep my own private copies of On the Road, in hard & soft, on my reference shelf. The only copy that’s left my mother hides in her bedroom for God’s sake.
If you’re in business be businesslike. Don’t let incompetents tell you Road or anything connected with it is “dead.” Beatles is spelled Beatles and not Beetles.
Jack
P.S. How are you?
A year later Signet published a new edition of On the Road featuring a bright yellow comic book cartoon cover drawing of a T-shirted barefoot young couple sharing a hug while kneeling on the hood of an open blue convertible, a half-full jug of red wine at their feet. Above their heads was lettered, “ON THE ROAD The riotous odyssey of two American drop-outs, by the drop-out who started it all…JACK KEROUAC.” Inside the front cover was an endorsement by Time magazine: “A kind of literary James Dean…Whitmanesque.”
This new mass-market edition of On the Road was reissued just in time for the Monterey Pop Festival in July 1967, when at least a few of the 50,000 fans belonging to what journalists called the “hippie subculture” stuffed the paperback into their rucksacks. It was also read on the buses to Washington, D.C., in October of that year, when Norman Mailer and hundreds of other people from all over the United States gathered to protest the war in Vietnam by marching over the Memorial Bridge to the Pentagon.
Kerouac himself didn’t attend pop music festivals or war protest marches in the heady years of the late 1960s. He told one of his fans that he was a “Catholic conservative,” and he described himself as a “Bippie in the Middle” in his last article, titled “After Me, and Deluge” when it was published in the Los Angeles Times on October 26, 1969, five days after his death.
In the article, Kerouac railed about what he called the ‘bad times” of the 1960s, refusing to shoulder the blame for being “the great white father and intellectual forbear who spawned a deluge of alienated radicals, war protestors, dropouts, hippies, and even “beats,” just because he “wrote a matter-of-fact account of a true adventure on the road (hardly an agitational propaganda account) featuring an ex-cowhand and an ex-footballer driving across the continent north, northwest, Midwest and southland looking for lost fathers, odd jobs, good times, and girls…”
How could Kerouac take pride in the connection between the Beats and the Beatles when he wrote Arabelle Porter, and then deny that he played a part in causing the “deluge” he described in his last article? Perhaps the answer lies in his second letter to his editor about reprinting The Dharma Bums, which Kerouac sent her in the summer of 1967:
Dear Arabelle (Miss Porter):—
If you enjoyed my judgment in asking you, in 1965, to reprint ON THE ROAD, perhaps this inside information would interest you: The “hippies” and the “Now” Generation and the “Love” Generation are all writing me letters that 1967 is to be the “Year of the Dharma.”
In that connection, it would be a good idea to reprint THE DHARMA BUMS this Summer. They can spend 75 cents on three beers, or on a book that will stay in their pocket for a year, and tell them what the “Dharma” is about.
Just a suggestion, as before in 1965, and I think it’s a good idea. It has in it all the elements of Hinayana, Mahayana, and Zen thinking in Buddhism, plus tips about rucksack traveling, which they’re all trying to do, is readable, brief, etc. and concerns the new interest that the so-called “psychedelic” generation has gleaned from experiences with the insights of Mandala, Mosaic Mesh and Mystic Disaffiliation[…] No Yours sincerely,
Jack Kerouac
The following summer Signet reissued their second Kerouac title, The Dharma Bums. It featured the same cartoon couple pictured on the cover of On the Road (this time laying piggyback) in vivid yellow, blue and red colors. Above their heads were the words, “THE DHARMA BUMS by the man who launched the hippie world, the daddy of the swinging psychedelic generation, JACK KEROUAC author of ON THE ROAD.”
What to make of the contradictions in Kerouac’s life? It’s possible to view him not only as “King of the Beats” but also as a writer in the grand old nineteenth-century American tradition of romantic individualism, like his earlier Massachusetts neighbors Henry Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. It was Emerson the supreme iconoclast who said that foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. The contradictions in Kerouac’s life ultimately destroyed him, but in his books he is so compellingly “open-hearted” describing what happened to him that we continue to take his road.
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This piece originally appeared in the June 1997 issue of Gadfly Magazine.
