Have written about Jack Kerouac many times here before, this Beat icon, poet, writer and creator of spontaneous Bop prosity. This eternal beatnik words have acted like a gateway drug, that have helped me search for horizons, ways to be free, introducing me to the work of his friends, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gary Snyder etc etc.
The shaman of the Beat Generation arrived today in 1922 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. But his life only took a more hectic turn once he arrived in New York City, and he quickly clashed with his football coach. Jack dropped out of school, joined the Merchant Marines then joined the Navy. Unused to discipline Jack rebelled by punching his commanding officer. He was sent to a psychiatric hospital. His first diagnosis had been schizophrenia, but that was later changed to ' schizoid personality' with 'angel tendencies' and ' unrealistic self importance' He recieved an honourable discharge for 'indifferent character.'. He later claimed that he acted crazy to escape the Navy and becoming a full time writer, he did this by landing in New York City and falling in with New York’s literary crowd, meeting Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. Around this time, Kerouac took several cross-country road trips with his friend Neal Cassady that would later inspire his seminal work, On the Road.
Kerouac lived a life that symbolized freedom. Kerouac’s great novel On the Road was about the freedom that comes from traveling. His literary style was modeled after the improvisational free spirit of Jazz music. After Kerouac first got published and fame came with the popularity of his seminal book, he began to lose the latitude he enjoyed from being an unknown. Jack Kerouac began to drink more as the world he knew and loved changed dramatically. His books became accounts of his current despair and recollections of his youth. In his final days, Kerouac isolated himself from much of the counterculture movement he reluctantly started.
On The Road today is considered the Great American Novel. The story recounts Kerouac’s first trips across America between 1947 to 1950.The characters in it though renamed were also writers who became known as Beat writers. The term Beat is attributed to Jack Kerouac who first used the term and the literary movement became known as the Beat Generation. The term beatnik became a blanket description of everyone associated with drugs, jazz and homosexuality and Jack Kerouac was referred to as the ‘King of the Beat Generation.” The King of the Beats and much of what that title implied was rejected by Kerouac who said ‘I’m not a beatnik, I’m a Catholic”
The demands placed on Kerouac at the time required him to make appearances on television and in his book Big Sur the author recounts his experience on the Steve Allen Show,”the hell with the hot lights of Hollywood ( remembering that awful time one year earlier when I had to rehearse my reading of prose a third time under the hot lights on the Steve Allen Show….one hundred technicians waiting for me to start reading, Steve Allen watching..as he plunks at the piano, I sit there on the dunce’s stool and refuse to read a word or open my mouth,’I don’t have to REHEARSE for God’s sake Steve!’-‘But go ahead, we just wanta get the tome of your voice’….and I sit there sweating not saying a word for a whole minute….finally I say ‘No I can’t do it’ and I go …get drunk)(but surprising everybody the night of show by doing my job of reading just fine.(Kerouac, Big Sur Pgs.24-25)
Viking Press, his publishers demanded Kerouac produce a second book so they could build off of the success of On the Road This second book became known as The Dharma Bums.The story within it about Jack and poet Gary Snyder’s search for Zen truths while they studied Buddhism. At the same time as the figurehead of an entire movement, Kerouac became severely alcoholic while he received all of the pangs of his success.
His early years appear mostly dominated by beer, which he would continue to drink, often as a chaser for the rest of his life. However, through most of Beat history – from the early “libertine circle” days in New York, through the publication of the most important Beat texts and the subsequent “beatnik” fad Kerouac’s drink of choice was red wine, and it is this with which he is most often associated. It was, after all, wine that he drank during the famous 6 Gallery reading, while travelling America, and hiking in the wilderness.
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).
During a 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)
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. Big Sur was released in 1962, a chronicle of the time he when he escapes 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.
As the sixties progressed though, Kerouac’s alcoholism removed him as the head of the counter culture movement. Kerouac’s friend and fellow Beat writer Allen Ginsberg became the figure head of the counter culture movement.
In November of 1966, Jack Kerouac married Stella Sampas in Hyannis, Massachusetts . John Clellon Holmes describes Kerouac’s mood the night he got married. “During their wedding celebration, he called us, and he put Stella on the phone. I had never met Stella-knew about her of course…he was drunk and happy. He sounded great."
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. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Kerouac “was known to consume 17 shots of Johnny Walker Red per hour, washed down with Colt malt liquor.” and because of this his search for inner lamentation was cut tragically far to short.
Kerouac died on October 21st 1969 aged 47. The official cause of Kerouac’s death was bleeding esophagel varices caused by cirhosis, the result of a life of heavy drinking, who had at least devoted most of it to the free spirit he cherished. In his novels the life he lived became a symbol of freedom which resulted in the development of an entire Beat movement. The price for Kerouac’s vision led to his success which in turn resulted in excessive alcoholism.
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.
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. Blessed be you in golden eternity.
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.
This influential poet and writer who along with his friends, 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. I always looked to the writings of Jack Kerouac, not necessarily for answers, but for inspiration, for verve. If you were susceptible to such things, it was hard not to read On The Road or Visions Of Cody for the first time and not be enraptured and changed by its content. And even though Jack Kerouac was flawed and far from perfect, with his apparent weaknesses by which obviously, many other people have been similarly affected, I’ve come to terms with the sadness of Kerouac’s story his books have served as a kind of window to myself and others and for that, I am ever grateful, as his words live on, for eternity, ever so deep. Joy Kicks Darkness "Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever on the road " - JK
In Vain - Jack Kerouac
The stars in the sky
In vain
The tragedy of Hamlet
In vain
The key in the lock
In vain
The sleeping mother
In vain
The lamp in the corner
In vain
The lamp in the corner unlit
In vain
Abraham Lincoln
In vain
The Aztec empire
In vain
The writing hand: in vain
(The shoetrees in the shoes
In vain
The windowshade string upon
the hand bible
In vain—
The glitter of the greenglass
ashtray
In vain
The bear in the woods
In vain
The Life of Buddha
In vain)
