Jack
Kerouac
Jack
Kerouac, original name Jean-Louis Lebris
de Kerouac (b. March 12, 1922, Lowell,
Mass., U.S.—d. Oct. 21, 1969, St.
Petersburg, Fla.), American novelist,
poet, and leader of the Beat movement
whose most famous book, On the Road
(1957), had broad cultural influence
before it was recognized for its
literary merits. On the Road captured
the spirit of its time as no other work
of the 20th century had since F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925).
Childhood and early influences
Lowell, Mass., a mill town, had a
large French Canadian population; while
Kerouac’s mother worked in a shoe
factory and his father worked as a
printer, Kerouac attended a French
Canadian school in the morning and
continued his studies in English in the
afternoon. He spoke joual, a Canadian
dialect of French, and so, though he was
an American, he viewed his country as if
he were a foreigner. Kerouac
subsequently went to the Horace Mann
School, a preparatory school in New York
City, on a football scholarship. There
he met Henri Cru, who helped Kerouac
find jobs as a merchant seaman, and
Seymour Wyse, who introduced Kerouac to
jazz.
In 1940
Kerouac enrolled at Columbia University,
where he met two writers who would
become lifelong friends: Allen Ginsberg
and William S. Burroughs. Together with
Kerouac they are the seminal figures of
the literary movement known as Beat, a
term introduced to Kerouac by Herbert
Huncke, a Times Square junkie, petty
thief, hustler, and writer. It meant
“down-and-out” as well as “beatific” and
therefore signified the bottom of
existence (from a financial and an
emotional point of view) as well as the
highest, most spiritual high.
Kerouac’s childhood and early adulthood
were marked by loss: his brother Gerard
died in 1926, when Gerard was nine.
Kerouac’s boyhood friend Sebastian
Sampas died in 1944 and his father, Leo,
in 1946. In a deathbed promise to Leo,
Kerouac pledged to care for his mother,
Gabrielle, affectionately known as
Memere. Kerouac married three times: to
Edie Parker (1944, annulled 1946); to
Joan Haverty (1951), with whom he had a
daughter, Jan Michelle; and to Stella
Sampas (1966), the sister of Sebastian,
who had died at Anzio, Italy, during
World War II.
On the Road and other early work
By the time Kerouac and Burroughs
met in 1944, Kerouac had already written
a million words. His boyhood ambition
had been to write the “great American
novel.” His first novel, The Town & the
City (1950), received favourable reviews
but was considered derivative of the
novels of Thomas Wolfe, whose Time and
the River (1935) and You Can’t Go Home
Again (1940) were then popular. In his
novel Kerouac articulated the “New
Vision,” that “everything was
collapsing,” a theme that would dominate
his grand design to have all his work
taken together as “one vast book”—The
Legend of Duluoz.
Yet
Kerouac was unhappy with the pace of his
prose. The music of bebop jazz artists
Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker began
to drive Kerouac toward his “spontaneous
bop prosody,” as Ginsberg later called
it, which took shape in the late 1940s
through various drafts of his second
novel, On the Road. The original
manuscript, a scroll written in a
three-week blast in 1951, is legendary:
composed of approximately 120 feet (37
metres) of paper taped together and fed
into a manual typewriter, the scroll
allowed Kerouac the fast pace he was
hoping to achieve. He also hoped to
publish the novel as a scroll so that
the reader would not be encumbered by
having to turn the pages of a book.
Rejected for publication at first, it
finally was printed in 1957. In the
interim, Kerouac wrote several more
“true-life” novels, Doctor Sax (1959),
Maggie Cassidy (1959), and Tristessa
(1960) among them.
Kerouac
found himself a national sensation after
On the Road received a rave review from
The New York Times critic Gilbert
Millstein. While Millstein extolled the
literary merits of the book, to the
American public the novel represented a
departure from tradition. Kerouac,
though, was disappointed with having
achieved fame for what he considered the
wrong reason: little attention went to
the excellence of his writing and more
to the novel’s radically different
characters and its characterization of
hipsters and their nonconformist
celebration of sex, jazz, and endless
movement. The character Dean Moriarty
(based on Neal Cassady, another
important influence on Kerouac’s style)
was an American archetype, embodying
“IT,” an intense moment of heightened
experience achieved through fast
driving, talking, or “blowing” (as a
horn player might) or in writing. In On
the Road Sal Paradise explains his
fascination with others who have “IT,”
such as Dean Moriarty and Rollo Greb as
well as jazz performers: “The only ones
for me are the mad ones, the ones who
are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be
saved.” These are characters for whom
the perpetual now is all.
Readers
often confused Kerouac with Sal
Paradise, the amoral hipster at the
centre of his novel. The critic Norman
Podhoretz famously wrote that Beat
writing was an assault against the
intellect and against decency. This
misreading dominated negative reactions
to On the Road. Kerouac’s rebellion,
however, is better understood as a quest
for the solidity of home and family,
what he considered “the hearthside
ideal.” He wanted to achieve in his
writing that which he could find neither
in the promise of America nor in the
empty spirituality of Roman Catholicism;
he strived instead for the serenity that
he had discovered in his adopted
Buddhism. Kerouac felt that the Beat
label marginalized him and prevented him
from being treated as he wanted to be
treated, as a man of letters in the
American tradition of Herman Melville
and Walt Whitman.
Sketching, poetry, and Buddhism
Despite the success of the
“spontaneous prose” technique Kerouac
used in On the Road, he sought further
refinements to his narrative style.
Following a suggestion by Ed White, a
friend from his Columbia University
days, that he sketch “like a painter,
but with words,” Kerouac sought visual
possibilities in language by combining
spontaneous prose with sketching.
Visions of Cody (written in 1951–52 and
published posthumously in 1972), an
in-depth, more poetic variation of On
the Road describing a buddy trip and
including transcripts of his
conversation with Cassady (now
fictionalized as Cody), is the most
successful realization of the sketching
technique.
As he
continued to experiment with his prose
style, Kerouac also bolstered his
standing among the Beat writers as a
poet supreme. With his sonnets and odes
he ranged across Western poetic
traditions. He also experimented with
the idioms of blues and jazz in such
works as Mexico City Blues (1959), a
sequential poem comprising 242 choruses.
After he met the poet Gary Snyder in
1955, Kerouac’s poetry, as well as that
of Ginsberg and fellow Beats Philip
Whalen and Lew Welch, began to show the
influence of the haiku, a genre mostly
unknown to Americans at that time. (The
haiku of Bashō, Buson, Masaoka Shiki,
and Issa had not been translated into
English until the pioneering work of
R.H. Blyth in the late 1940s.) While
Ezra Pound had modeled his poem In a
Station of the Metro (1913) after
Japanese haiku, Kerouac, departing from
the 17-syllable, 3-line strictures,
redefined the form and created an
American haiku tradition. In the
posthumously published collection
Scattered Poems (1971), he proposed that
the “Western haiku” simply say a lot in
three short lines:
Above
all, a Haiku must be very simple and
free of all poetic trickery and make a
little picture and yet be as airy and
graceful as a Vivaldi Pastorella.
In his
pocket notebooks, Kerouac wrote and
rewrote haiku, revising and perfecting
them. He also incorporated his haiku
into his prose. His mastery of the form
is demonstrated in his novel The Dharma
Bums (1958).
Kerouac
turned to Buddhist study and practice
from 1953 to 1956, after his “road”
period and in the lull between composing
On the Road in 1951 and its publication
in 1957. In the fall of 1953 he finished
The Subterraneans (it would be published
in 1958). Fed up with the world after
the failed love affair upon which the
book was based, he read Henry David
Thoreau and fantasized a life outside
civilization. He immersed himself in the
study of Zen, beginning his
genre-defying Some of the Dharma in 1953
as reader’s notes on Dwight Goddard’s A
Buddhist Bible (1932); the work grew
into a massive compilation of spiritual
material, meditations, prayers, haiku,
and musings on the teaching of Buddha.
In an attempt to replicate the
experience of Han Shan, a reclusive
Chinese poet of the Tang dynasty
(618–907), Kerouac spent 63 days atop
Desolation Peak in Washington state.
Kerouac recounted this experience in
Desolation Angels (1965) using haiku as
bridges (connectives in jazz) between
sections of spontaneous prose. In 1956
he wrote a sutra, The Scripture of the
Golden Eternity. He also began to think
of his entire oeuvre as a “Divine Comedy
of the Buddha,” thereby combining
Eastern and Western traditions.
Later work
By the 1960s Kerouac had finished
most of the writing for which he is best
known. In 1961 he wrote Big Sur in 10
days while living in the cabin of
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a fellow Beat
poet, in California’s Big Sur region.
Two years later Kerouac’s account of his
brother’s death was published as the
spiritual Visions of Gerard. Another
important autobiographical book, Vanity
of Duluoz (1968), recounts stories of
his childhood, his schooling, and the
dramatic scandals that defined early
Beat legend.
In 1969
Kerouac was broke, and many of his books
were out of print. An alcoholic, he was
living with his third wife and his
mother in St. Petersburg, Fla., where he
spent his time in local bars. A week
after he had been beaten by fellow
drinkers whom he had antagonized, he
died of internal hemorrhaging in front
of his television while watching The
Galloping Gourmet—the ultimate ending
for a writer who came to be known as the
“martyred king of the Beats.”
Assessment
Kerouac’s insistence upon “First
thought, best thought” and his refusal
to revise was controversial. He felt
that revision was a form of literary
lying, imposing a form farther away from
the truth of the moment, counter to his
intentions for his “true-life” novels.
For the composition of haiku, however,
Kerouac was more exacting. Yet he
accomplished the task of revision by
rewriting. Hence, there exist several
variations of On the Road, the final one
being the 1957 version that was a
culmination of Kerouac’s own revisions
as well as the editing of his publisher.
Significantly, Kerouac never saw the
final manuscript before publication.
Still, many critics found the long
sweeping sentences of On the Road ragged
and grammatically derelict.
Kerouac
explained his quest for pure,
unadulterated language—the truth of the
heart unobstructed by the lying of
revision—in two essays published in the
Evergreen Review: Essentials of
Spontaneous Prose (1958) and Belief and
Technique for Modern Prose (1959). On
the grammatically irreverent sentences,
Kerouac extolled a “method” eschewing
conventional punctuation in favour of
dashes. In Essentials of Spontaneous
Prose he recommended the “vigorous space
dash separating rhetorical breathing (as
jazz musician drawing breath between
outblown phrases)”; the dash allowed
Kerouac to deal with time differently,
making it less prosaic and linear and
more poetic. He also described his
manner of developing an image, which
began with the “jewel center,” from
which he wrote in a “semi-trance,”
“without consciousness,” his language
governed by sound, by the poetic effect
of alliteration and assonance, until he
reached a plateau. A new “jewel center”
would be initiated, stronger than the
first, and would spiral out as he riffed
(in an analogy with a jazz musician). He
saw himself as a horn player blowing one
long note, as he told interviewers for
The Paris Review. His technique explains
the unusual organization of his writing,
which is not haphazard or sloppy but
systematic in the most individualized
sense. In fact, Kerouac revised On the
Road numerous times by recasting his
story in book after book of The Legend
of Duluoz. His “spontaneity” allowed him
to develop his distinct voice.
Regina Weinreich
