Jack Kerouac's Centennial

As chaos reigns throughout the world I am reminded that if literary hero,: the beat writer Jack Kerouac   famous for the way he smashed literary conventions was.alive today, he would be celebrating his 100th birthday. This past Thursday, San Francisco’s City Lights, also a publisher of eight Kerouac books, celebrated this occasion with a packed online event. Other events in significant places in Kerouac’s life, like Lowell, Massachusetts—where he was born—are also planned in the coming days.

It's difficult to say much more  about Jack that I haven't said over the past 13 years of this blog's existence but as I owe Kerouac a lot of debt, an individual who has been a huge influence on me so  have rehashed some of my previous thoughts on him with some extra flourishes in a celebration of his truly remarkable life.. 

Like his character Sal Paradise in On the Road, Jack Kerouac was restless to discover himself in postwar America. His stream-of-consciousness writing style flowed like jazz, encompassing but not always embracing the Beat generation of the 1950s. A writer of spontaneous prose, lover of jazz, idealizer of México and adopter of Zen—Kerouac is a fixture in the United States’ counterculture mythos.

Thematically, his work covers topics such as his Catholic spirituality, jazz, promiscuity, Buddhism, drugs, poverty, and travel. He became an underground celebrity and, with other beats, a progenitor of the hippie movement, although he remained antagonistic toward some of its politically radical elements.

The shaman of the Beat Generation arrived today as  Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac to a  French-Canadian family in the factory town of  Lowell, Massachusettsus USA. Variously called the Beat Generations apostle, poet, hero, laureate, saint?  Through his own life story he created  a work of fiction .Soared so high, that in the end unfortunately found his own human skin, then found himself out of his depth in bottled delusion, where the burning ship had become his own.
Kerouac learned to speak French at home before he learned English at school. Reportedly he did not learn English until he was six years old . His father Leo Kerouac owned his own print shop, Spotlight Print, in downtown Lowell, and his mother Gabrielle Kerouac, known to her children as Memere, was a homemaker. Kerouac later described the family’s home life: “My father comes home from his printing shop and undoes his tie and removes his1920s vest, and sits himself down at hamburger and boiled potatoes and bread and butter, and with the kiddies and the good wife.”
Jack Kerouac endured a childhood tragedy in the summer of 1926, when his beloved older brother Gerard died of rheumatic fever at the age of 9. Drowning in grief, the Kerouac family embraced their Catholic faith more deeply. Kerouac’s writing is full of vivid memories of attending church as a child: “From the open door of the church warm and golden light swarmed out on the snow. The sound of the organ and singing could be heard.”
 Jack would earn a football scholarship to Columbia University, and planned to work in insurance after finishing school, according to the Beat Museum,http://www.kerouac.com/ which goes into detail about Kerouac’s rise to literary and cultural stardom.

Before going to Columbia University  first, he had to attend a year of preparatory school at the Horace Mann School for Boys in the Bronx. So, at the age of 17, Kerouac packed his bags and moved to New York City, where he was immediately awed by the limitless new experiences of big city life. Of the many wonderful new things Kerouac discovered in New York, and perhaps the most influential on his life was jazz. He described the feeling of walking past a jazz club in Harlem: "Outside, in the street, the sudden music which comes from the nitespot fills you with yearning for some intangible joy—and you feel that it can only be found within the smoky confines of the place." It was also during his year at Horace Mann that Kerouac first began writing seriously. He worked as a reporter for the Horace Mann Record and published short stories in the school's literary magazine, the Horace Mann Quarterly.

He broke his leg in one of his first games and was relegated to the sidelines for the rest of the season. Although his leg had healed, Kerouac's coach refused to let him play the next year, and Kerouac impulsively quit the team and dropped out of college. He spent the next year working odd jobs and trying to figure out what to make of his life. He spent a few months pumping gas in Hartford, Connecticut. Then he hopped a bus to Washington, D.C., and worked on a construction crew building the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. 

In 1942 he left Columbia to join the Merchant Marines completing only one voyage to Greenland before quitting. A few months later, his ship was sunk by the Germans, with many of his shipmates lost. In 1943 he joined the Navy, but lasted less than two weeks before being discharged on psychiatric grounds. He was described as 'restless, apathetic, seclusive', and the shrinks described his 'auditory hallucinations, ideas of reference and suicide, and a rambling grandiose philosophical manner'.

After this he then fell in with New York’s literary crowd.

Jack Kerouac wanted to catalog his entire life in autobiographical novels similar to Marcel Proust’s Rememberance of Things Pass.. Kerouac once said ‘I intend to collect all my work and reinsert my pantheon of uniform names, leave the long shelf full of books there, and die happy”  Kerouac began working toward this goal with The Town and the City. In the novel, Kerouac writes about his family’s struggles with finances and the differences between his life in the town and the city. Allen Ginsberg hailed the book as a masterpiece and with the help of Kerouac’s former professor at Columbia University Mark Van Doren, the book was published in 1950 by Harcourt Brace. Shortly after Kerouac started working on The Town and the City he met Neal Cassady in 1946 and around this time,took several cross-country road trips with him that would later inspire his seminal work, “On the Road.” 

Kerouac produced“On the Road” in just a few weeks, but the novel itself was a long time in the making. In 1947, Kerouac began collecting material for a new novel. In 1948, he described it in his journal: “Two guys hitch-hiking to California in search of something they don’t really find, and losing themselves on the road, and coming all the way back hopeful of something else.” Notes and ideas for the novel filled hundreds of pages of journals, letters, and notebooks. In a letter to a friend, he wrote: “These ideas and plans obsess me so much that I can’t conceal them […] they overflow out of me, even in bars with perfect strangers.” Throughout those years of writing Kerouac continued to take cross-country trips with Neal Cassady, and recorded their adventures and conversations.

In late March of 1951, his friend John Clellon Holmes had just finished a novel about the Beats, and he showed Kerouac the manuscript. Kerouac was angry, feeling that Holmes had stolen his subject matter. Kerouac’s wife convinced her husband that instead of stewing about it, he should go ahead and get his own novel written. He began writing on April 2nd and finished on the 22nd. He wrote to Cassady: “Story deals with you and me and the road […] Plot, if any, is devoted to your development from young jailkid of early days to later (present) W.C. Fields saintliness … step by step in all I saw. […] I’ve telled all the road now. Went fast because the road is fast … wrote whole thing on strip of paper 120 foot long (tracing paper that belonged to Cannastra) — just rolled it through typewriter and in fact no paragraphs … rolled it out on floor and it looks like a road.” 

In 1957, “On the Road” was published by Viking, who had previously turned it down. Viking editors insisted that Kerouac change the names of real people so they couldn’t be sued for libel, so Neal Cassady became Dean Moriarty.and catapulted Kerouac to fame as a leading light of the Beat movement The book, like the roads he traveled, embodied Kerouac's marathon urge to create, having been typed on a continuous roll of taped-together paper measuring 120 feet in length so he did not have to stop typing to change paper.  Then, fueled on a cocktail of mind altering substances he unloaded the book in a marathon writing session.

Kerouac considered himself a Catholic writer. "I'm not a beatnik," he once said. "I'm a Catholic." Biographer Douglas Brinkley said On the Road has been misinterpreted as story of a couple of friends in search of kicks. But, for Kerouac, it was a search for God. Every page of his diary had a prayer or a crucifix or an appeal to God to be forgiven.

But bevertheless itt was Kerouac who coined the term “Beat Generation” and the  word“Beat” derived from “beat up” meaning old, used, poor, as in “a beat up old tramp”. In his life, he had been part of a culture and people, who burned like meteors. Jack Kerouac was the Beat Generations very own mythologiser, he and his band of brothers helped  redeem a bit of America's soul. His legacy, like that of the Beat Culture, still alive, still relevant, still taking root.

Kerouac alongside his friends, Gregory Corso,https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2009/11/gregory-corso-wayward-geniusan.html William Burroughs,https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2014/02/destroy-all-rational-thought.html Allen Ginsberg,https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2017/10/7th-october-1955-allen-ginsbergs-first.html Lawrence Ferllinghetti,https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2021/02/lawrence-ferlinghetti-poet-publisher.html Gary Snyder etc, paved a way for a whole host of dreamers searching for risk, some form of adventure. Colouring our worlds with their crazy visions, their minds in revolt, searching for future's possibilities. Hand in hand with rebellion, against the conventions of the times. 

In the six years that passed between the composition and publication of On the Road, Kerouac traveled extensively, experimented with Buddhism and wrote many novels that went unpublished at the time. His next published novel, The Dharma Bums (1958), described Kerouac's clumsy steps toward spiritual enlightenment on a mountain climb with his  friend, Zen poet Gary Snyder,https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2021/05/happy-birthday-gary-snyder-poet.html. Dharma was followed that same year by the novel The Subterraneans, and in 1959, Kerouac published three novels: Dr. Sax, Mexico City Blues and Maggie Cassidy.

Kerouac's most famous later novels include Book of Dreams (1961), Big Sur (1962), Visions of Gerard (1963) and Vanity of Duluoz (1968). Kerouac also wrote poetry in his later years, composing mostly long-form free verse as well as his own version of the Japanese haiku form. Additionally, Kerouac released several albums of spoken word poetry during his lifetime.
Jack Kerouac in his eighteen books  and many others under Jack's influence were to me important epiphanies on my own path of self discovery. He taught me about "Spontaneous prose." - writing without revising....... He called this " a spontaneous bop prosody."  which is a bit like a jazz musician taking an improvised solo, and he took it as far as he could go, with  no editing and no pause of breath. Sometimes what is left, has no meaning, a void, but often their is a glimmer, that spells hope, that can become endless, can run off the page, infinite but still accessible.
On my bookshelf at home Kerouacs influence groans on my bookcases, his own works, sharing spaces with others , that were touched by his inspiration. There is something about his tragic, magic life that still resonates, hums, there will always be new connections, outhouses where seeds will forever drift. New poets will emerge, to experience, among the whole wide world, words will dance, impulsively between time, forever and forever. Enthusiasm will be shared, thoughts will be exchanged, and for some the personal will always be political.Passion will ignite.
Jack had a wild  spirit,  but such a dazzling voice, who through his writing  revealed him as a believer in humanity, a dreamer, a doer and an explorer of metaphysical depth. He was however also a recluse, socially awkward, and despite maintaining a prolific pace of publishing and writing, Kerouac was never able to cope with the fame he achieved after On the Road, and his life soon devolved into a blur of drunkenness and drug addiction  that would ultimately destroy him .

After Kerouac’s breakdown on Big Sur in 1960, he returned home to be with his mother in Northport New York.  Kerouac attempted to improve his physical health and continue to work. After Big Sur was released in 1962, which is a chronicle of the time when he escaped to Big Sur, running from the world, and lost in a sea of depression and alcoholism, while trying to cope with  the pressures of celebrity.The novel earned critical success for its realistic accounts of sickness and madness where he rather poignantly reflects on the deterioration alcohol has caused. With the release of the novel, Kerouac began to move up and down the east coast. Kerouac still lived with his mother Gabrielle and together they relocated from New York to Florida in 1960 and from Florida to Lowell, Massachusetts in October 1962. (Gifford, Lee. Jack’s Book pg. 295)
In the late fifties or early sixties, Kerouac switched from wine  to whiskey,  and was also drinking rum at this point, but whiskey was to remain his drink of choice (and that of his mother) for the rest of his life. In Tristessa he had said that he was drinking “Juarez Bourbon whiskey” and that he mixed it with Canadian Dry, while most biographers and friends have recounted his fondness for Johnny Walker Red. During a trip to France, Kerouac began drinking Cognac, and once told Philip Whalen that “Cognac [is] the only drink in the world, with soda and ice, that won’t actually kill you.”
While a preeminent chronicler of America, Kerouac also spent a significant amount of time in Mexico, where he developed a taste for tequila and his signature drink, the margarita.Kerouac’s margarita is far from the saccharine slushie many would associate it with today. The drink is essentially a derivative of the Sidecar, substitute the cognac for tequila, the lemon juice for lime, keep the triple sec and you have it. Shake well, straining into a cocktail glass.After a few of these you’ll feel as free as Kerouac's  prose.

Kerouac was aware of his alcoholism and his experiences which made up the text of Big Sur explain how the man was not coping with his problem.  In the following passage, Kerouac explains alcoholism. “Any drinker knows how the process works: the first day you get drunk is okay, the morning after means a big head…you can kill with a few drinks and a meal, but if you pass up the meal and go on to another night’s drunk, and wake up to keep the toot going, and continue on to the fourth day, there’ll come one day when the drinks wont take effect because you’re chemically overloaded and you’ll have to sleep it off but can’t sleep any more because it was alcohol itself that made you sleep those last five nights, so delirium sets in-Sleeplessness, sweat, trembling, a groaning feeling of weakness where your arms are numb and useless, nightmares (nightmares of death).” (Kerouac, Big Sur pgs 74-75).

  Big Sur was the last novel that would make up the Legend of Duluoz collection although the author would continue to write about his youth in future works.
In Big Sur Kerouac concludes the novel with a detailed account of his nervous breakdown. “Masks explode before my eyes when I close them, when I look at the moon it waves, moves, when I look at my hands and feet they creep-Everything is moving, the porch is moving like ooze and mud, the chair trembles under me” (Kerouac Big Sur Pg 200).
In the following  paranoiac passage, Kerouac explains a premonition of his death.: "But angels are laughing and having a big barn dance in the rocks of the sea…Suddenly as clear as anything I ever saw in my life, I see the Cross…it stays a long time, my heart goes out to it, my whole body fades away to it.(Kerouac Big Sur Pgs.204-205)

Throughout his troubled  life Kerouac made an effort to learn about other cultures, but the projections and language he uses are nevertheless within a white framework. He like a lot of beat writers mistranslated ideas, symbols and words to suit their own needs, creating a parallel literary reality. Artist Medinltz says that Kerouac helped “Perpetuate negative and, at the same time, romanticized racist stereotypes.” There are many scholarly papers that fortunately, have been written about this. that you  can search for and read online and elsewhere.

He married Edie Parker in 1944, but their marriage ended in divorce after only a few months. In 1950, Kerouac married Joan Haverty, who gave birth to his only daughter, Jan Kerouac, but this second marriage also ended in divorce after less than a year. Kerouac married Stella Sampas, who was also from Lowell, in 1966.

 Though Kerouac was married, his wife describes his isolation after marriage.  “It was bad for Jack, living in Florida. He had no real friends. In Lowell, Jack was…as isolated as he had been in Florida. Though she (Kerouac’s Mother) was fairly incapacitated by her stroke he was still operating under the stern eye of Memere.”
With Kerouac’s mother sick, the author attempted to continue his writing.  Between March and May of 1967, Kerouac wrote a reworking of the period of his life he covered in The Town and the City called the Vanity of Duloz . In February of 1968, Kerouac was told by his friend Luanne Henderson that Neal Cassady had died in Mexico City.  Henderson spoke of Kerouac’s reaction after hearing of Cassady’s death “Afterward, Jack liked to pretend he didn’t really think Neal was dead, even telling interviewers from The Paris Review that Neal would show up again someday and surprise everyone.”
After resettling in Florida by 1968, Kerouac settled with his wife and together they tried to take care of the author’s ailing mother. Jack wrote very little during his final year and would rarely leave the house. Stuck in a sad exile,this  mystical breath had grown tired, what was once beautiful  had begun to  drift towards bitterness.

Jack was not immortal, although for me his words are, and he left this planet on October 21 1969, at only 47 years of age, related to alcoholism from an abdominal hemorrhage.  

After his death he left us with a  rather complicated legacy but  nevertheless Kerouac’s influence on literature and culture is still felt  very  strongly today. Artists including Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Patti Smith, Tom Waits, The Grateful Dead, and The Doors all credit Kerouac as a significant influence on their music and lifestyles. This is especially so with members of the band The Doors, Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek who quote Jack Kerouac and his novel On the Road as one of the band’s greatest influences, and .writers like  Ken Kesey, Haruki Murakami, Richard Brautigan, Hunter S. Thompson, Lester Bangs, and Tom Robbins have all pointed to Kerouac as a defining influence on their writing too,

 Kerouac’s iconic status shows no signs of letting up. All his books are still in print and his masterpiece On the Road  remains a defining work of the post war Beat and Counterculture generation, it appears on virtually every list of the 100 greatest American novels. Kerouac's words, spoken through the narrator Sal Paradise, continue to inspire today's youth with the power and clarity with which they inspired the youth of his own time

There are two types of people in this world; those that ‘get’ Kerouac, and those that do not. I am in the first category, of course, so  happy birthday Jack, your impact continues to be felt , your satori breath released , and your legacy today is stronger today than ever ... om  switchin on.... tomorrow's dawns chorus echoes,anesthesising the sky.... sentences littered with wild perception, language as  a spell that  leaves us forever hooked. In human existence our contradictions will abound, freeze framed, on the road to nowhere. Kicks joy darkness.blessed be you in golden eternity., and as Jack said "Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you're already in heaven  now." 

 A passage from On the Road, though written about others, may describe him best: "I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because 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, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes Awww!"

Happy 100th  Birthday, Jack.Kerouac.

 

 How to meditate- Jack Kerouac

-lights out-
fall, hands a-clasped, into instantaneous
ecstasy like a shot of heroin or morphine,
the gland inside of my brain discharging
the good glad fluid (Holy Fluid) as
i hap-down and hold all my body parts
down to a deadstop trance-Healing
all my sicknesses-erasing all-not
even the shred of a ‘I-hope-you’ or a
Loony Balloon left in it, but the mind
blank, serene, thoughtless. When a thought
comes a-springing from afar with its held-
forth figure of image, you spoof it out,
you spuff it off, you fake it, and
it fades, and thought never comes-and
with joy you realize for the first time
‘thinking’s just like not thinking-
So I don’t have to think
any
more’

Woman - Jack Kerouac

      A woman is beautiful
       but
          you have to swing
          and swing and swing
          and swing like
          a hankerchief in the
                                       wind

149th Chorus - Jack Kerouac

I keep falling  in love
with my mother
I dont want to hurt her
=Of all people to hurt

Every time I see her
she's grown older
But her uniform always
amazes me
For its Dutch simplicity
And the Doll she is.
The doll-like way
she stands
Bowlegged in my dreams,
Waiting to serve me

And I am only an Apache
Smoking Hashi
In old Cabashy
By the Lamp

2111th Chorus - Jack Kerouac

The wheel of the quivering meat
conception
Turns in the Void expelling human beings,
Pigs, turtles, frogs, insects, nits,
Mice, Lice, Lizards, rats, roan
Racing horses, poxy bucolic pig tics,
Horrible unnameable lice of vultures
Murderous attacking dog-armies
Of Africa, Rhinos roaming in the jungle
Vast boars and huge gigantic bull
Elephants, rams, eagles, condors,
Pones and Porcupines and Pills-
All the endless conception of living
beings
Gnashing everywhere in Consciousness
Throughout the ten directions of space
Occupying all the quarters in and out,
From supermicroscopic no-bug
To huge Galaxy Lightyear Bowell
Illuminating the sky of one mind


And then they got him - Jack Kerouac

The Oil of the Olive
Bittersweet taffies
Bittersweet cabbage
Cabbage soup made right
A hunk a grass
In a big barrel
Stunk but Good

163rd Chorus - Jack Kerouac

Left the Tombs to go
  and look at the
  Millions of cut glass-
-a guy clocking them,
as you look you swallow,
you get so fat
you can't leave the building
-stand straight,
don't tip over, breathe
in such a way yr fatness
deflates, go back to
               the Tombs,
ride the elevator-
             he tips over again'
gazes on the Lights,
eats them, is clocked,
    gets so fat
    he can leave elevator,
has to stand straight
and breathe out the fat -
-hurry back to the Tombs

242nd Chorus - Jack Kerouac

The sound in your mind
   is the first sound
      that you could sing

If you were singing
   at a cash register
       with nothing on yr mind-

But when that grim reper
   comes to lay you
       look out my lady

He will steal all you got
   while you dingle with the dangle
   and having robbed you

Vanish
     Which will be your best reward,
     T'were better to get rid o
     John O'Twill, then sit a mortying
     In this Half Eternity with nobody
    To save the old man being hanged
    In my closet for nothing
    And everybody watches
    When the act is done-

Stop the murder and the suicide!
   All's well!
      I am the Guard

Jack Kerouac: I'm Sick of Myself...I'm Not a Courageous Man

 A rare interview of Jack Kerouac in French (with english subtitles) for a Canadian television channel in which he explains how he came up with the name that described the literary movement of his generation... the Beat Generation. Kerouac also talks about the differences with the beat generation and the Bohemians and when asked about himself, he admits being sick of himself, although he does think of himself as a great writer...

Jack Kerouac on the Steve Allen show  1959

 

 Jack Kerouac Reads On the Road

This 28-minute recitation was apparently recorded on an acetate disc in the 1950s but thought lost for decades. It re-surfaced during the late 1990s. Enjoy.

You may also like this playlist "Music in On The Road." https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJ...