Jack+Kerouac+Biography

Jack Kerouac Biography

Name: Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac

VariantName:

Jack Kerouac

Birth Date: March 12, 1922

Death Date: October 21, 1969

Place ofDeath:

St. Petersburg, Florida, UnitedStates

Nationality: American

Gender: Male

Occupations: writer

AssociatedWorks:

On the Road (Novel)

Further Reading

Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957-1958, features letters byKerouac and Joyce Johnson (2000). An exceptionally detailed Kerouacbiography is Barry Miles's Jack Kerouac--King of the Beats (2000). TomClark's Jack Kerouac (1984) is an extremely thorough biography of the author'slife, but is short on criticism of Kerouac's work. Ellis Amburn also offers athoroughly researched, yet controversial biography in Subterranean Kerouac:The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac (1998), documenting Kerouac's strugglesconcerning his sexuality with evidence from Kerouac's unpublished journalsand diaries. Although critical of Kerouac's character, Barry Miles' JackKerouac: King of the Beats; A Portrait (1998) gives a good exploration ofKerouac's relationships with other Beat writers. A helpful package is On TheRoad, Text and Criticism, edited by Scott Donaldson (1979). In addition to the

•

Jack Kerouac Biography 2

novel, the package includes a number of insightful articles, including pieces byKerouac, John Clellon Holmes, Timothy Hunt, and the transcript of aninterview with the author by Ted Berrigan. Lonesome Traveler by Jack Kerouac(1960) is a collection of autobiographical pieces, useful for their style as muchas for their content. Jack Kerouac by Harry Russell Huebel (1979) is a quickbiography, and Jack's Book, An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac by BarryGifford and Lawrence Lee (1978) is also interesting.

Dictionary of Literary Biography Biography

Jack Kerouac, once called "our most misunderstood and underestimated writer," isgradually emerging from that limbo, though much about him remains obscure. Theobscurity results from a misreading of his books by critics who, borne along by ColdWar 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 theyhad invented that they failed to perceive an important truth about Kerouac: that hisaccomplishment was a complex and even a paradoxical one. A conservative in politicsand a sincere Roman Catholic, Kerouac was rebellious only in a traditional way, in thetradition of the individualism of Emerson and Thoreau. He was no egocentricromantic. His shyness and gift for admiration made him honor not his ownindividuality so much as that of his friends, whom he referred to as members of theBeat Generation. He honored them by telling their stories. But in order to tell theirstories with energy and accuracy he found that he had to invent a new prose style. Thisstyle, which cost him considerable time, energy, and pain to develop and sustain, hecalled "spontaneous prose," and by means of it he became known later as thespokesman or "father" of the Beat Generation.

Kerouac's literary reputation was sacrificed to this role of spokesman. The BeatGeneration was quickly condemned as a gang of subversives, deviants, and juveniledelinquents, a dubious sociological and political judgment that made any responsibleassessment of Kerouac's accomplishment as a writer impossible. Kerouac himself was


Further Reading 3

unable to defend his work against the critics' hostility. So desperate was he to escapethe suspicion and derision of critics that he repudiated the term beat which he himselfhad 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, mayhave been felt as a just retribution. Not even death itself could inspire a reversal ofcritics' attitudes. Though many of his books are still in print and read avidly, hisliterary reputation remains clouded. Kerouac is still consistently ignored in Americanliterature anthologies and is given only passing notice in critics' discussions of postwarwriters. Yet certain recent events--the reevaluation of his work by critics John Tytelland Tim Hunt, the biographies by Ann Charters and Dennis McNally, the publicationof the Viking critical edition of On the Road, as well as the continuing appearance inprint of appreciative articles--give hope that a calm assessment of Kerouac'sachievement is at last becoming possible. Perhaps as a result of this assessment histrue position as a major figure in American literature will become clear.

Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, an old textile manufacturing town on theMerrimac River. Kerouac's parents, both devout Roman Catholics, came from ruralcommunities in the French-speaking part of Quebec, and French was the languagespoken in the Kerouac home. Kerouac did not begin to learn to speak English until hewas six years old, a fact which, along with his Catholicism, has never been sufficientlystressed by commentators. Kerouac's father, Leo Kerouac, a former insurancesalesman, opened a print shop in Lowell and for many years was able to support hisgrowing family comfortably. The first of his sons, Gerard, was born in 1917; hisdaughter, Caroline, was born in 1919; and his second son and last child, Jean LouisLebris (or "Jack," as he came to be called later by his English-speaking friends), wasborn on 12 March 1922.

Kerouac's earliest years seem to have passed happily in an intimate familyatmosphere. But the first of what seem to have been four decisive and painful rupturesin his life occurred just after his fourth birthday when his older brother Gerard died ofrheumatic fever. Gerard's death struck Kerouac's imagination violently. He hadbecome close to his brother during Gerard's illness, and the subsequent death shattered


Dictionary of Literary Biography Biography 4

his security. But the death revealed a gift perhaps more precious than the happinessthat was lost. Gerard, at least in Kerouac's own perception of him (and there is noconflicting evidence), was an unusual boy. He was bright and also very pious but in away that went deeper than his obedience to the religious teaching of the CatholicChurch 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 tobirds to little brothers. This compassion did not desert Gerard during his illness; itseemed rather to increase in intensity. More importantly for us, it stimulated a similarresponse in the little brother, a response that lived on in the man. Years later, inexplaining the background of his writing, Kerouac reported that during his last illnessGerard had urged on him a "reverence for life.... That we all wander thru flesh, whilethe 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 hisguiding presence can be detected implicitly in all Kerouac's books. Kerouac, always afirm believer in the afterlife, acquired his chief theme and his chief spiritual guardianvery 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 hisopposite physically. Strongly built and well coordinated, he took part in the usualroughhouse games of boyhood. He was never in any sense, however, a bully or evenan aggressive child. His earliest friends were French-speaking, many of themattending local parochial grammar schools with him. He took his first communion in1929 and in 1932 served occasionally as altar boy at St. Jean Baptiste Cathedral (thesame cathedral in which his funeral service was held in 1969). The devoutness ofKerouac's early life was at odds with his rapidly developing love of physical activityand sensation. In general, the apparent split between the spirit and the flesh was onethat troubled Kerouac throughout his life, and his efforts to close that gap are evidentin his later writings, both as an explicit subject and as an animating principle of hisstyle.

Though Kerouac had learned some English earlier, he did not speak the languagefluently or make English-speaking friends until he attended a public junior high



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 traitthroughout his life. Yet, intimidating as junior high may have been for him, it alsogave 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 timethat Kerouac began his life-long habit of carrying pocket-sized notebooks in which hejotted down stories and observations. He made up elaborate horse-racing and baseballgames in which he played all the roles, including chief journalist and historian. Healso began to be aware of and to pay attention to an increasing variety of languagestyles, in the books he was reading, in the mouths of gossiping friends of his fatherand mother, in the voices of "The Shadow" and other radio heroes, and in the animatedmouths of film stars. It may be said of him that throughout his life he approachedlanguage, and the English language particularly, with the avidity of one who islearning it for the first time and for whom it is a rare gift. His eventual mastery ofEnglish never led to complacence or indifference. To the day of his death he keptexperimenting with the immense resources of his adopted tongue.

This fascination with language soon extended itself to the literary classics. Kerouacfrequently skipped class at Lowell High School in order to go to the library to choosehis own reading, from the Harvard classics and from modern masters like Saroyan andHemingway. This pattern of making independent forays into books prevailedthroughout his short college career and into adult life. Kerouac became a verywell-read man, fluent in two languages and familiar with the main works not only ofFrench, English, and American literature, but of German, Russian, and Sanskritliterature as well (though he had to depend on translations for his knowledge of theseliteratures). Yet he never cared about appearing well read. He read books for theinspiration they might give him to become a better writer himself. But he read themcritically also. He had the rare ability to set out a complex attitude toward a book in asentence or two. No one who reads Kerouac attentively can miss the evidence of thisvigorous apprenticeship to and critical knowledge of the classics. That evidence isexplicit in Kerouac's earlier books in which literary techniques and voices play a large



role. But it is evident also by implication even in his later books, where his preferencefor street and working-class voices over literary ones becomes predominant.

During the years in which Kerouac's literary interests were forming, his world beganto show the beginnings of a second great strain and rupture (Gerard's death being thefirst). In 1936, the Merrimac River flooded, causing much destruction to the town'sbuildings, including the building housing Leo Kerouac's print shop and press. Theflood seemed to reimpress on Jack Kerouac's imagination the idea of theindiscriminate violence of nature. Most directly, the flood was a major factor, alongwith 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 Lowellfor long periods of time. The family had to move to tenement housing. Bitter at whathe regarded as the bad deal life had given him, Leo Kerouac began to place the burdenof 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 inthe family's fortune. The boy now felt the pressure of family responsibility. Yet heseems never to have resented that responsibility, not even on the frequent occasions inlater life when he accused himself of having failed to fulfill it. Kerouac, theconservative Catholic, considered family life a blessing even in its most painfulmoments of obligation and trial.

Kerouac's senior year at Lowell High in 1938-1939 allowed him to feel thecorresponding pleasures of that life. It was perhaps the first time since early infancywhen the various claims of his nature and of his environment upon him were insomething like a balance. Leo Kerouac was gladdened by the fact that his son, a starhalfback on the football team, was offered football scholarships at Boston College andColumbia. Also during this year Kerouac met the first friend who shared his love ofwords. 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 affairhe used aspects of in writing Maggie Cassidy (1959). Thanks to theseaccomplishments, 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



who could ease his loneliness as a lover of reading and writing. He had found a girlfriend who promised to satisfy his vivid romantic and sexual longings. One is temptedto pause here in Kerouac's biography and linger over the constellation of satisfactionssoon to be driven asunder.

The initial split occurred when Kerouac had to decide between Mary Carney and thefootball scholarships. He could marry her, but then he must stay in Lowell. Kerouacdecided to accept the scholarships. But which one? Boston College was nearby, but bydeciding on Columbia, Kerouac distanced himself from the site of his least equivocalachievements in athletics, friendship, and love--a distance he tried many timesafterwards to bridge, but never successfully. At the time, however, the decisionsprobably did not seem as climactic as they do now. Kerouac might console himselfwith the thought that he would see his family, Mary Carney, and Sebastian Sampas onvacations. After all, he was a local-boy-made-good, and though he found that hewould have to have a year of prep school at Horace Mann in New York beforeactually entering Columbia, this delay did not dampen Leo Kerouac's hopefulenthusiasm for his son's chances. Besides, two other aspects of Kerouac's nature hadbegun to assert themselves: his desire to travel and his curiosity about great cities.New York seemed more commensurate with his romantic expectations than did therelatively familiar Boston.

Kerouac did well at Horace Mann. His grades were good, and he led the football teamto a championship. He continued to write and read extensively. He had stories andarticles accepted in school publications and even made pocket money ghost-writingterm papers for his wealthy friends. Just as important for his education was theacquaintance he was making with jazz. He wrote articles on white swing bands for theschool 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 jazzfree-association or improvisation. Something like an aesthetic was beginning to takeform, one closely related to Kerouac's already established attraction to and practice ofintellectual independence. When the day of his graduation from Horace Mann foundKerouac not attending ceremonies but lying in the grass of an adjoining quadrangle



reading Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, there was more to behold in the scene thanmere truancy or the inability to pay for the graduation outfit. A statement was beingmade about the nonconformity of American writing to institutional standards and itspreference for natural environments over civilized ones. But the statement wasconformist in one respect. Kerouac was making his bid for artistic freedom under theauspices of Whitman's metaphors, as he would later make it in his first publishednovel under the auspices of Thomas Wolfe's sentences. His final gesture of freedomwould come only when he had freed himself from his liberators. But this gesturewould not be made for another ten years.

Though Kerouac's year at Horace Mann from 1939 to 1940 was a successful one, theredid occur during it premonitions of new ruptures. Hitler's invasions of Norway andDenmark made Americans uneasy. War seemed imminent. Meanwhile, many peoplewent about their normal occupations warily, as if anticipating the moment when theywould have to drop them. This general attitude of distrust in the continuity of thingsmay have aggravated the breakup in the spring of 1940 of Kerouac's romance withMary Carney. It may have aggravated also the ruptures that began to occur inKerouac's life as a college student at Columbia. The first of these ruptures, a literalone, could, however, have occurred at any time. Kerouac broke his leg during afootball game during that first fall of 1940. But with his leg in a cast, he took onlyintermittent interest in his studies. Though he received an A in Mark Van Doren'sShakespeare class, he failed chemistry, and he spent most of his time reading ThomasWolfe and writing in his notebooks. Allen Ginsberg once stated that by the timeKerouac read Wolfe "he had already written nearly a million words of prose." Arupture in place occurred when Leo Kerouac, having gotten what seemed like a steadyjob in New Haven, moved his family there early in 1941. But the most serious of theseruptures occurred that fall, after Kerouac returned to Columbia and to footballpractice. When war was declared in September, he walked away from both the schooland the sport. Kerouac's balancing of the conflicting claims upon him had begun tocome apart under the pressure of events.



The next few years, and indeed the rest of his life, were marked by a restless searchfor that lost balance. His first searching, after abandoning Columbia and football, wasa purposeless bus ride to Washington, as if the very purposelessness were acompensation for the conflicting purposes of his other obligations and innerpromptings. After briefly rejoining his family in New Haven, he worked as a greasemonkey 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. Butwriting sports took only a small part of his time. His major energies were directed towriting an autobiographical novel called "Vanity of Duluoz" (never published, thoughthe 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 wherehe 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 anammunition run to Greenland--its last mission before being torpedoed. In October,after the Dorchester returned to Boston, Kerouac, now oscillating from one pole ofresponsibility to another, returned to Columbia to play football. Yet, predictably, thisoption was no more sustaining the third time around than it was the first. He quit theteam, returned to Lowell to await the draft, but instead enlisted in the U.S. Navy inFebruary 1943.

It was on the drill field of Newport Naval Base, shortly after his enlistment, thatKerouac had his first serious conflict with institutional authority. Characteristically,the conflict was not a violent one. Kerouac was not a violent person, either in hisbehavior or in the attitudes he expressed in his writings. His true nature was exactlythe opposite: shy, fastidious, and compassionate. He simply put down the rifle andwalked over to the base library, where he took up Boswell's Life of Johnson , as ifanticipating the literary role he was to play later with Neal Cassady, Gary Snyder, andhis other heroes. Brought quietly to the psychiatric ward by the military guard,Kerouac was honorably discharged from the navy in March 1943 as an "indifferentcharacter." He returned to civilian life not so much "indifferent," however, asbewildered. There was no obvious next step for him to take. His family had movedfrom Lowell for the last time, settling in an apartment in Ozone Park, Queens. Both



parents were working, Leo Kerouac in a print shop and Kerouac's mother in a shoefactory, and both--Leo particularly--regarded their surviving son as a failure, ajudgment which Kerouac himself did not dispute. His sister, Caroline, who had joinedthe WACS, offered no refuge. Events and his own independent nature had thrown himon his own resources. Whatever steps he next took would have to be ones he inventedfor himself, not ones provided for him by family or society, both of which weredisplaced and in turmoil.

The steps which Kerouac then took had the look of habitual movements. Only laterdid 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 inManhattan. One of these old friends was Edie Parker, an art student from a wealthyfamily in Michigan who later became Kerouac's first wife and the means of hismeeting William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Then in June 1943 Kerouacshipped out once again in the merchant marine, this time as an ordinary seaman on anammunition 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 whilereading John Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga in his bunk that he conceived the idea ofwriting a connected series of stories about his adventures: Then, leaving Liverpool forthe sail home, he had a vision of his true role in life, that of what Dennis McNallycalls "divine scribe." The events that had rent his familiar world in pieces had alsorevealed his true purposes and were about to reveal the friends who would help himclarify those purposes further.

Edie Parker's apartment on the Upper West Side became the meeting ground of thosefriends, among whom were Lucien Carr, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg. Thefull complexity of Kerouac's friendships with Burroughs and Ginsberg developedabout a year later. During the spring of 1944, however, Kerouac's closest friend seemsto have been Carr, whose intellectual perversity and aestheticism Kerouac bothadmired and was skeptical of. Carr venerated Rimbaud and was fascinated by thesurrealist notion of the acte gratuit (a deliberately unmotivated action, a consciouscultivation of impulse). Kerouac's interest in the acte gratuit was guarded. Always an



astute observer of behavior, he was suspicious of the way that people who cultivatedthe acte gratuit seemed to exhibit a sameness in their actions. Their collective effort toliberate themselves from reason led merely to another kind of conformity, "a drearysynthesis," as Kerouac put it, "between respectability and illicitness." Yet he waseager to understand contemporary intellectual trends. He needed to know where hisown writing stood in relation to those trends, and perhaps particularly to the trendtoward spontaneity.

Kerouac's friendship with Carr soon involved him in his second conflict withinstitutional authority. As in the previous conflict at Newport Naval Base, Kerouac'soffense was not an aggressive one but a quiet assertion of a difference in loyalty. InAugust of 1944, harassed by the sexual advances of an older man who had beenpursuing him for some time, Carr murdered this man with a knife. He thereaftersought 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 thepolice, while Kerouac was arrested, without violence, as a material witness. When LeoKerouac, now thoroughly disgusted with his son and his new friends, refused to postthe $100 bail bond, Kerouac proposed marriage to Edie Parker so that she couldborrow money from her grandfather's estate to bail him out. By September Kerouacwas living in Michigan with his wife and members of her family, working in aball-bearing factory in order to pay back the bail bond money, and reading Americanliterary criticism. During this brief time, about two months, Kerouac's life regained akind 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 merchantmarine. 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 aritual of romantic purification he called his "Self-Ultimacy" period. Gashing himselfso that he could write the phrase "The Blood of the Poet" in his own blood anddeliberately burning almost all he wrote at the time, Kerouac was making another--andquite drastic--statement of his independence from artistic and social expectations. He



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 graduationceremonies, this statement too was carried out under the auspices of other men'ssystems, particularly those of Rimbaud and Nietzsche. The extensive reading he did inAndre Gide, Thomas Mann, and other contemporary European writers may have beenthe most useful result of this uncharacteristically violent and narrowly intellectualexperiment. Yet although the experiment was soon abandoned at Burroughs'scommonsense urging ("My God, Jack, stop this nonsense and let's go out and have adrink"), it nevertheless foreshadows important aspects of Kerouac's mature style.Beginning with Visions of Cody, his books are written with a rhythm and immediacywhich suggest the pulsing of blood. They also show a need to purge fixed attitudes, toburn all bridges--even apparently safe ones.

The role that Burroughs played in Kerouac's life now became important. Edie Kerouachad returned to New York late in 1944 and had taken an apartment with a friend ofhers named Joan Vollmer (later Burroughs's wife) on the Upper West Side. Burroughsmoved into the apartment too, as did Kerouac. Then Ginsberg moved in in January of1945. The apartment became the scene of much drug-taking, and Edie,trying to holddown a regular job, moved out in disgust. Burroughs and Joan Vollmer remained thefocus of the group. Ginsberg was as fascinated with Burroughs as Kerouac was. Bothsaw in their older friend--he was Kerouac's senior by eight years, Ginsberg's bytwelve--a fearless, sardonic experimenter with drugs, sex, and crime, as well as acoolly precise student of those analysts of society's ills, Korzybski, Spengler, andFreud. A good teacher also, Burroughs willingly passed on his information to hisyounger friends. He even undertook an informal psychoanalysis of both young menand also served as literary critic, especially of Kerouac's writing. Kerouac's attitudetoward Burroughs was always an admiring one. Kerouac later talked of writing a bookabout Burroughs; but though the book was never written, Burroughs does appear as acalm, commonsensical, but, at the same time, an intensely imaginative figure inseveral of Kerouac's books (for example, Burroughs is portrayed as "Old Bull Lee" inOn the Road and as "Bull Hubbard" in Desolation Angels).



Kerouac's relation to Ginsberg was more complex. Four years older thanGinsberg--Kerouac was twenty-two and Ginsberg eighteen when they met--Kerouactended to view him with some of the ambiguity of feeling of an older for a youngerbrother. 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 of1944 and for many years afterward their relations were very close and mutuallybeneficial. These relations had to overcome great differences in background.Ginsberg, an urban Jew, had family traditions of political activism and intellectualachievement that set him apart from Kerouac's conservative Catholic unbringing withits close ties to a rural past. Yet both young men were united by their spirituality, theirlove of poetry, and their maturing sense of the destructiveness of the modern industrialstate. Ginsberg became for Kerouac what Sebastian Sampas (who had recently died inthe battle of Anzio) had once been: someone with whom he could share his mostardent flights of thought and imagination. Much of what the two men truly stood forcan be typified in the achievement of their friendship: the overcoming of boundariesof class, temperament, sexual preference, and religious practice in a commonunembarrassed worship of God. Their own worship took the form of writing, and eachwas instrumental in helping the other over stumbling blocks put in his way by theoutside world and by the limitations of his own nature. Ginsberg, for example, laterput his considerable political skills to work in bringing Kerouac's writing to theattention of publishers. He was the one largely responsible for the fact that Kerouac'sbooks were published at all. Kerouac, for his part, encouraged Ginsberg to overcomehis fears of confessing in poetry his feelings about his friends and about the largersociety that seemingly sought to destroy both friends and feelings. The eventual resultof this encouragement was Howl, the first of Ginsberg's great poems and hisbreakthrough as an artist.

By criticizing modern society both in their words and in their behavior, Burroughs andGinsberg had caused rifts in their relations with their families. Painful as these riftsproved at times for them, however, they were proving nearly insupportable forKerouac in his relations with his own family. Weakened by the benzedrine addictionacquired while living in Edie's apartment and by his efforts to keep friends and family



happy (neither of his parents approved of Burroughs, and both disliked Ginsberg),Kerouac contracted thrombophlebitis and spent December 1945 in a Queens VAhospital. Also during this month a further toll on his strength was exacted. LeoKerouac was found to have stomach cancer and had to quit his job. His father'ssickness put Kerouac in the role of family provider. Yet the role he actually took wasthe maternal one of staying home to nurse his father while his mother continued towork in the shoe factory. Kerouac's family life was in fragments: the mother trying tosupport the uprooted family, the father dying, the son still weak physically, unable tohold a steady job, and with as yet little or nothing to show in compensation. Thesecond 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 paradoxicallythe father's death liberated the son. It freed the writer in him. Not long after his fatherwas buried and in part to justify himself in the eyes of his dead father's spirit, Kerouacsat down in Ozone Park to write the book which would eventually become his firstpublished novel, The Town & the City (1950). The theme of the book was based mostdirectly on Kerouac's recent experience of the split between his parents and hisfriends. But in this split Kerouac saw a more general division between the hometownwith its traditional social and religious values, and the city, with its intellectual andphysical dangers and stimulations. He saw further that the split was psychological aswell as social since each side of the split was but a part of the whole and by itselfinsufficient to satisfy the heart and mind. The town, for all its snug attractiveness, hadbecome merely confining, while the city, for all its promise of limitless freedom, hadbecome destructive, since no limits on behavior were permitted. Between the halves ofwhat should have been a whole, and what Kerouac nostalgically viewed as oncehaving 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 dispersalwithin and beyond the city, each of those members doomed to a fruitless search for thelost fragments of the family's former happiness.



The Town & the City, though based on events in Kerouac's life, is not directlyautobiographical. He distributes aspects of his personality among the various childrenof the family and adjusts the facts of his life to give the story internal coherence. EvenKerouac's later books exhibit some degree of shaping of materials. None of them is acompletely accurate biographical record. To this extent, The Town & the City isconsistent in method with Kerouac's later practice. The novel is consistent in spiritalso. 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 thetown and the city is itself a metaphor for the split Kerouac saw between God and hiscreatures. On the one hand, hints of God's presence abounded. In the town, the loveamong family members and their close attachment to the land and to the rituals of thechurch 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, asone approached these moments of close union with the Divine, some form of divisionor of evil caused one to stumble into sickness and despair. But not even in sicknessand despair could one accept the easy refuges of pessimism or atheism. Sickness anddespair could also become ways of approaching God more closely, as they hadbecome for Gerard during his last illness. God's presence was at once close andinfinitely distant, reliable and unpredictable, undeservedly rewarding and punishing,blissful and painful. Among Kerouac's themes, the greatest of them is this, that hisbooks represent a tireless effort to make sense of these apparent discontinuitiesbetween 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 thatrecalls Hawthorne and Melville.

But though Kerouac's major themes are evident in The Town & the City, there is onevital element missing in the book, or at least present in an undeveloped form. Thisvital 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 throughanother person's style. Of course, no one's style can be completely original. All writersmust acknowledge traditional grammatical structures and traditional meanings ofwords, even if the acknowledgment takes the form of a defiant rejection of those



structures and meanings. A completely original style would be private and thereforenot communicable. Kerouac was aware of this fact. Yet, like Emerson, Whitman,Thoreau, and other great figures in American literature before him, he was sufficientlypossessed of the peculiar truths of what he called his "vast inner life" to struggle at theimpossible task of giving that life a unique voice. In the words of literary criticRichard 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 onceexpress and protect states of consciousness that cannot adequately be defined byconventional formulations." The problem is "crucial" in more ways than one. It iscrucial because it is perceived as a vital necessity without which an otherwiserespectable book is merely a bundle of lifeless pages; as a crossing or paradox ofimpossibility, because language cannot carry the strain of thwarting its usual functionof bearing traditional meaning; and as a cross upon which the writer may have to nailhimself in the extremity of his desire to redeem language from the forces ofconvention.

The evidence from letters and from other biographical sources makes it clear thatKerouac was struggling with the problem of inventing a style at least from the time ofhis experiment in "Self-Ultimacy" and probably earlier than that as well. He had onceremarked in a letter written to Allen Ginsberg in 1945 that "until I find a way tounleash the inner life in an art-method, nothing about me will be clear." Those whocriticize Kerouac's eventual solution to this problem, with the stylistic invention thathe named "spontaneous prose," do not realize how hard and long he worked to arriveat it. Perhaps part of him even resisted the solution. The Town & the City, in itsneatness and polish of construction, is itself a nostalgic tribute to Kerouac's previousattitude 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 whichit was possible to use another man's accents to dramatize one's fictionalized past. Itcould not have been a completely comfortable realization that he would have to makea break from his carefully learned literary lessons and unleash the unpredictable forcesof an original method.



Events conspired to allow the breaking away to occur, though the breaking was a slowprocess. In the fall of 1946 Kerouac met Neal Cassady, later portrayed as DeanMoriarty of On the Road (1957). Nearly five years later Cassady became a majorsource of inspiration in Kerouac's invention of the "spontaneous prose" style whichKerouac would use to tell Cassady's own story in Visions of Cody (1972). But in 1946Cassady was interesting to Kerouac primarily for the vigor of his personality. Thenduring the summer of 1947, in events upon which Kerouac later based part one of Onthe Road, Kerouac made his first continental trip, visiting Cassady in Denver andtraveling to the West Coast. Many of the same qualities he was attracted to in Cassadyhe discovered in the American landscape itself--its seemingly inexhaustible variety, itswild rawness, its limitless depths and intricate surface detail. Once back home in thefall, he continued work on The Town & the City. His working arrangements hadsettled into the pattern they were to assume throughout his later life. He would keephouse with his mother, in fulfillment of his dying father's request. She would supporthim financially while he did his writing, for the most part, though not entirely, in thesanctuary of their home. Confining as this arrangement sometimes proved to be, itnevertheless provided Kerouac with the peace he needed if he were to do any writingat all. The house was quiet. His friends were kept at bay by his mother. And inSeptember 1948, about two years after he had begun it, he finished The Town & theCity.

His first efforts to have it published were unsuccessful, but the disillusionment thatfollowed had more behind it than a writer's piqued vanity. It was during the fall of thisyear that he first coined, in conversation with his friend John Clellon Holmes, theexpression "Beat Generation." This much-abused term beat was Kerouac's shorthandfor a complex of attitudes he saw himself sharing with the many others who felt castaside by the modern industrial state. The term itself Kerouac had heard often in thestreet, in the mouths of those castoffs. On the one hand, the term denoted whatKerouac called "weariness with all the forms" of that state: its militarism, itsconformity, 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



"beatitude," the happy release of emotions no longer entrapped by observance of theforms. Beat was a term that for Kerouac summed up his sense of America's andmankind's victimization by its own social and scientific inventions. Those supposedlyin control of those inventions paid the price of a loss of "beatitude." Thosedisenfranchised by them lost the material comforts and securities of life but gained anat least partly compensating access to spontaneous pleasure. Yet both sides, haves andhave-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 ownallegiances 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 withsimilar others was not primarily a political one, however. He had no formally outlinedprogram by which the split between society's halves could be eliminated or at leasteased, nor was he interested in such a program. Political talk was unpleasant to himbecause it was abstract and rhetorical. It did not permit the mind to move freely amongits memories and sensed impressions but instead confined that mind to what Kerouaccalled, in a letter written at about this time, the "white myth of Reason." But there wasa deeper explanation of Kerouac's revulsion against most political solutions.Industrialism, with all its horrors, was caused, he felt, not primarily by misguidedpolitical 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 evasivedetail, there could be no redemption. The basis for true political change lay in eachindividual's continuing confession of sin. A political solution to society's ills whichavoided this crucial first step would be absorbed and nullified by the evil it wasinvented to cure. Kerouac's belief in God, never sufficiently stressed by critics, lay atthe back both of his diagnosis and of his vision of a truly effective cure, and much ofthe 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 thecorruptions of thought of the industrial age. These corruptions seemed to Kerouac to



result from excessive calculation of effect, as if verbal expression were supposed toimprove automatically the further it departed from its spontaneous origins. During thetime he was trying to sell The Town & the City , Kerouac was experimenting withprose methods that would allow him to break free of the slow, calculated, laborioustechniques he had employed in writing his novel. He was not satisfied with the resultsof these experimentations, however; and it was with his writing life at a temporarystand that he accompanied his mother to North Carolina to spend the Christmas of1948 with his sister Caroline's family. Unexpectedly, Neal Cassady arrived atKerouac's sister's house just before Christmas dinner. The story of what happened nextis told in part two of On the Road. In it, it is plain that Cassady was beginning tobecome more than a friend. He was beginning to stand for the values Kerouac hadalready included in the term beat. Cassady had grown up in Denver slums and hadspent time in reform schools and jails for stealing cars, not to resell, but to use onjoyrides with his many girl friends. Socially an outcast, Cassady yet possessed aspontaneous, exuberant energy and a belief in divine power that could not fail to makehim, in Kerouac's eyes, the positive embodiment of his social criticism. Kerouac hadbeen needing the encouragement to believe that the values in which he placed his trustcould take external form, and such a form had arrived.

Another auspicious event occurred in March 1949 when Harcourt, Brace accepted TheTown & the City. With the advance money, Kerouac was able to move his mother andhimself to Colorado, where he hoped to be able to continue his development as awriter in peace and with the happy sense that that development had been legitimizedby the outside world. Yet such legitimization could not bode well since it was basedon social values Kerouac had begun to criticize. Diligently, Kerouac began a bookentitled On the Road during this stay in Colorado. But though the book's subject wasNeal Cassady, it does not appear that any of the material Kerouac wrote at this timefound 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 Roadshould consult Tim Hunt's excellent Kerouac's Crooked Road.) Then in JulyKerouac's advance money ran out. The first of what would become a long series ofefforts to establish a refuge for himself had come to nothing. His mother returned to



Queens and the shoe factory, while Kerouac followed in the fall, taking a trip in themeanwhile to San Francisco to see Cassady. Once home, he began again on On theRoad, this time taking as his subject, not Cassady, but a fictional Denver businessmanconsumed with guilt. This version too proved a dead end. What these false startsshow, however, is that Kerouac's eventual achievement of writing On the Roadspontaneously in three weeks was preceded by two years of trial and error in whichthe true subject of the book--Neal Cassady and all that he came to stand for--was notalways in focus.

In March 1950 The Town & the City was finally published, but, like the move toColorado with his mother, this event did not produce the expected blessing. Reviewswere mixed, and sales were slow. Disillusioned with this result, Kerouac traveled backto Denver and then went with Cassady to Mexico City, in events dramatized in partfour of On the Road. During this trip Cassady's nature assumed for Kerouacapocalyptic proportions. Cassady had become more than an embodiment of beat. Hehad become the embodiment of the spiritual forces of creation and destruction. It wasprobably because of this new completeness in his understanding of Cassady thatKerouac 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 ofCody. Then in November, Kerouac, having received a Catholic annulment of hismarriage with Edie Parker, met and married his second wife, Joan Haverty, and set upan apartment with her in New York City. Kerouac got a job writing synopses of scriptswith Twentieth Century-Fox, but his main occupation was his continuing effort toinvent a style capable of bearing the vision of his friend. The friend himself helpedmatters 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 nowapparently lost. In this letter Cassady described one of his intricate love affairs in afreely associated style that reproduced the rush of events as perceived by an excitedeye without losing track of the special qualities of events within the rush. In fact, asKerouac argued later in his tracts advocating "spontaneous prose," such a styleactually 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,



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 incoming. Not till two months later did he feed a roll of teletype paper through histypewriter and then sit at that typewriter to produce, after twenty days, the 175,000words of the first version of On the Road. "First version" is used advisedly since inMay, when Kerouac retyped the manuscript, he revised and added to it. The book wasaltered again both by Kerouac himself and by the book's eventual editors at VikingPress before it was published in 1957. What we know as On the Road is therefore alater, much revised draft of an original manuscript which has never been published. Itis not a pure example of "spontaneous prose."

Probably because of these various revisions, On the Road is more closely related instyle 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 maturemethod. The style of On the Road, though it is more colloquial in tone and morerapidly paced than the style of his first novel, does not in most instances call attentionto itself. Only when Sal Paradise, Kerouac's pseudonym in the book, describes avisionary moment within the story does the style become excited or extravagant, as ifthe extravagance were justified by the need to reevoke by imitation the momentdescribed. The book is neatly and classically structured in five parts. In part one, Salmeets Dean for the first time and takes his first transcontinental trip, alone. Dean is aperipheral figure in this part, an interesting personality among many others Sal meetsand describes with detailed enthusiasm. In part two, Dean picks up Sal from hisfamily's house during Christmas dinner and introduces him during their subsequenttrip west to the quest for "IT," or the moment of spontaneous ecstasy when all thingsare 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 duringanother cross-country car trip his initiation into the knowledge of "IT." In part four thetwo friends journey to what they call the "end of the road," which they locate inMexico City. The apocalyptic nature of his quest for "IT" is now revealed to Sal.



Ecstasy necessarily leads to death since ecstasy is release from all spatial and temporallimitations. Yet death itself is the entrance to another kind of space and time behind orbeyond the familiar one. Sal's balanced handling of this hard-won, complicatedknowledge of the true nature of "IT"--the knowledge that "IT" is for mortalsinextricably bound up with joy and creativity but also with loss and death--isreminiscent of Nick Carroway's final attitude toward Gatsby's "dream" in F. ScottFitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925): wonder at its purity and grandeur, dismay at itscosts.

On the Road is a book about spontaneity, but it is not itself spontaneous. It is muchmore directly autobiographical than The Town & the City, but since all Kerouac'sbooks contain some shaping or combining of autobiographical facts,the crucialdifference between it and his later work is its holding itself within conventional ideasof style and structure. On the Road is Kerouac's last effort to obey the dictates ofnovelistic tradition, and the effort is a very successful one. His success makes clear animportant point: that when Kerouac subsequently abandoned the tradition, he did sonot because he had failed to operate within it, but because he had grown beyond it. Itcannot 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 hadmastered the traditional novel form; he had not shirked it. Deeply honest andconservative in nature as he was, he would not have advanced beyond the novel formif he had not made sure he had first advanced through it. Probably he would not haveadvanced beyond it at all if his vision had not compelled him. Kerouac had no love ofrebellion for its own sake. His development is as much a record of resistance tochange as acceptance of it. Once his vision had forced him beyond what were now forhim the confines of the traditional novel, he had no choice but to follow. But byhaving put in his years of apprenticeship, he was truly equipped to make this mostdifficult and most lonely of all his journeys.

The climax of this development does not seem to have occurred until later in 1951, inOctober. 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,



having become understandably impatient with a husband who could not hold a steadyjob, threw Kerouac out. She also told him she was pregnant. Kerouac denied thepaternity, partly out of fear of having to support the child, partly out of fear, evidentlyunfounded, that the child was not his. Kerouac's insufficiency as a husband, a fact hehimself deeply regretted, was second only to his insufficiency as a father--a role hecould not even bring himself to accept biologically. Yet in the light of subsequentevents these insufficiencies acquire positive aspects, all derived from his maturingsense of himself as a writer. Personal collapse acted as a stimulus. The problem ofstyle occupied him even in the VA hospital in which he was confined that summer bya recurrence of his thrombophlebitis. As he wrote during that time to John ClellonHolmes, "I want deep form, poetic form, the way consciousness really digs everythingthat 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 theone metaphor around which all his earlier thinking about "deep form" could takeshape. Why "sketching" should have played such a significant role is hard to say sincein Kerouac's later tracts advocating his method, "Belief and Technique for ModernProse" and "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose," "sketching" is only one of severalmetaphors used and even seems secondary in importance to those derived from jazzimprovisation. "Spontaneous prose," as Kerouac advocated and practiced it, employsall the senses, not just the eye. What is clear, however, is that Ed White's metaphorenabled Kerouac to trust fully the power of his spontaneous associations. From thispoint to the end of his life Kerouac very seldom departed from the method which hadat last reached maturity.

The method is the source of his books' vitality. Yet it is also a major source, not onlyof the author's later notoriety but also of his eventually fatal vulnerability to thatnotoriety. To see why "spontaneous prose" could have had such apparentlycontradictory 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 beginningof Visions of Cody, the book Kerouac worked on after writing On the Road . In the



title and in the example, "Cody" is another pseudonym for Cassady: "So I sit inJamaica, Long Island in the night, thinking of Cody and the road--happens to be afog--distant low of a klaxon moaning horn--sudden swash of locomotive steam, eitherthat or crash of steel rods--a car washing by with the sound we all know from citydawns--reminds me of Cambridge, Mass. at dawn and I didn't go to Harvard--Far faraway a nameless purling or yowling of some kind done either by (raised, vibroned) atrain on a steel curve or skidding car--grumble of a truck coming--small truck, but haswhistle tires in the mist--a double 'bop bop' or 'beep beep' from railyards, maybe softapplication of big Diesel whistle by engineer to acknowledge hiball-on-the-air frombrakeman or car knocker--the sound of the whole thing in general when there are nospecific near-sounds is of course sea-like but also almost like the sound of the livingstructure, so as you look at a house you imagine it is adding its breathing to thegeneral 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, isyelling far away and sounds like an adventurous young fellow playing in thedarkness--...."

A reader who compares the final paragraph of On the Road with this passage, which istoo long to quote in its entirety, will hear immediately the difference betweenKerouac's traditional prose style and his "spontaneous" one. Both passages begin withthe speaker's putting himself in a meditative posture. Both passages then give anaccount of the meditation, and both passages allow a distortion of normal sentencestructure in order that the meditation might have room for expression. But there thesimilarity ends. In the On the Road passage, the distortion is eventually rectified bythe triple assertion of the main clause, "I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of OldDean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty." The friend'sname actually closes the speaker's meditation, whereas in the passage from Visions ofCody the friend's name releases it. Another difference is that though both passages areput in the present tense, the On the Road passage refers to a repeatable, characteristicevent, while the Visions of Cody passage refers to a special one, seemingly recordedon the page as it occurs.



The result is not chaotic, however. Thoughts pass through the speaker's mind, not in ajumble, 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 theseperceptions and memories under the larger systems of "Time" and "living structure,"back to his immediate perceptions. The train of association is sufficiently detailed inimage to permit our following it. But we have the pleasure of surprise, too, since, likethe speaker himself, we are an audience for the experience. Like us, he cannot quitepredict what will come next on the train of thought. Nor is he seeking to predict theassociation. He has in fact abandoned the control he exerted in the On the Roadpassage in order that he might be submissive to what he regards as the "sound of theliving structure."

Not all Kerouac's sentences or sentence-streams written according to the "spontaneousprose" method are as unorthodox as this one when measured against conventionalgrammatical rules. Some, however, particularly in "Old Angel Midnight," his 1956experiment in rendering pure sound, are much wilder. We may describe the differencein Kerouac's sentences after the discovery of "spontaneous prose" in these generalterms. A sensed detail would be registered with acute precision. The registering wouldthen provoke an instantaneous surge of remembered associations that would surroundthe originally registered detail. This surge would often take the grammatical form ofsubordinate clauses appended to the original assertion of detail. But the effect ofsubordination would then be negated by the discovery within the surge of associationsof a spiritual truth for which the original detail would reverse the direction ofassociation. Foreground would become background and vice versa under the pressureof this discovery of the general in the specific and the specific in the general. Thescreech 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. Theinfinitely large and the infinitely small fit inside each other. The tortuously expandedgrammatical structure that resulted from this paradox would be held together by therhythm of the words. This rhythm owned its quick, syncopated character to Kerouac'sdelighted imitation of the improvisational styles of Lester Young, Charlie Parker, andother great figures of postwar jazz. Like Kerouac, these artists found worlds of



meaning within what might otherwise have seemed the most insignificant of phrasesand 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 explicitlystated in his "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose." "Spontaneous prose" was the way bywhich 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 shapein the outside world. The result of this liberation would not be chaotic, however, sincethe inner mind was innately shapely and would cause the words with which itexpressed itself to be shapely too. This shape would be a natural one, related to therhythm of breathing, orgasm, and other similar processes of fulfillment and release. Itwould not conform to a plan preordained by the reason alone, although reason was notto be banished from the mind. Reason's domination of the mind, particularly in itstendency 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 thedivine mind which could alone contain that truth. "Spontaneous prose" was a way ofevoking 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 wasby trying to imitate the process by which things came into being and passed from it. Ina sense, the origins of this effort reach back into Kerouac's childhood. Kerouac onceremarked in a letter to Ginsberg that the "problem of God" first occurred to him at theage of eight "when I started making worlds to see how he did it...." The effort reachedits climax twenty-two years later when Kerouac finally saw that those worlds madespontaneously were closest to the creator's own.

Yet "spontaneous prose" abounds for the merely human creator in apparentself-contradictions. The very fact that one must consciously invent the methodsuggests that its source is in some important sense rationally conceived. One cannotreject conventional ideas of prose composition without first knowing what those ideasare, and the value of the method is expressed in terms produced by the kind ofthinking one is presumably rejecting. For instance, Kerouac addresses his readers



pedagogically in his tracts and makes a continuous series of distinctions between whathe considers good and bad forms of expression. Even supporting examples seem onlyambiguously helpful. Kerouac refers in "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose" to Yeatsdirectly and William Carlos Williams indirectly as authorities legitimizing his method.Yet these authorities themselves anticipate and therefore inhibit an activity that shouldproceed entirely from within if it is to reach the writer's goal for it. Even thepossibility of the method's reaching anything so fixed as a goal is qualified by theemphasis on organic rhythm. Since the writer speaks from within his own flux ofassociations, how can he also take a position of control outside the flux, the positionfrom which he chooses to submit himself to the flux in the first place? Then finallythere is the seemingly insuperable problem that language itself is a medium at theservice 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. Hisanswer was not only to acknowledge the problem but to make the acknowledgment amajor theme of his writing as well. The discontinuity between the medium of languageand what he wanted that medium to express was analogous to the discontinuities thathad become his themes already. But this theme was complemented by its solution: thebelief in healing miracles, the belief which is sometimes stated, sometimesdramatized, sometimes despaired of, but always implicit in the energy of the prosestyle."Spontaneous prose" became a metaphor for the paradoxes of the humancondition as Kerouac, the Roman Catholic, conceived it: hopelessly corrupted andcompromised, yet somehow, in ways only indirectly glimpsed and never fullyunderstood, redeemable, even in the midst of its sin, and perhaps more redeemable atthat crisis than at any other time. "Spontaneous prose" thus became a corollary ofKerouac's life in an extremely vital sense. It represented the outward form of theprogress, or decay, of his soul. But "Spontaneous prose" was also Kerouac's way oftaking upon himself the confessor's role in behalf of his fellow man. "Spontaneousprose" became the means by which the confession could be generalized since theconfession made use of analogous instances of sin and redemption throughout thelarge, detailed world that Kerouac studied. "Go moan for man," a voice from the



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 thebook Kerouac finished in 1952, Visions of Cody.

It is misleading to imply, however, that Visions of Cody was written after On theRoad. An inspection of the manuscript of Visions of Cody shows that parts of the twobooks were at one time joined and that Kerouac later separated those parts.Biographical evidence also suggests that certain sections of Visions of Cody werewritten before On the Road. But whatever their precise origins in time, it is clear thatVisions of Cody belongs with the works of Kerouac's maturity, those written accordingto the "spontaneous prose" method. Like all this work, Visions of Cody is structurallyunorthodox. The first part consists of a series of sketches (part of one of these wasquoted earlier) of scenes around New York City. Part two includes a historical accountof Cassady's boyhood followed without formal division in the prose by the narrator'saccount of his present trip to San Francisco to see his hero. The third part contains along transcription of the narrator's conversations with Cassady in Cassady's homewhile both are high on marijuana. The structuring into parts ends here. What followsthe transcript is a section entitled "Imitation of the Tape," in which Kerouacimprovises 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 ofa 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 theRoad story and from there into a final elegy about Cassady, now completelyspiritualized by the immense pressure of Kerouac's admiration of him as the trueAmerican hero, the man liberated by his spontaneous energies from the forces ofconvention.

If On the Road is about spontaneity, Visions of Cody is itself spontaneous. It is not thestory of the consequences of Kerouac's friendship with Cassady; it instead directlypresents those consequences by displaying the new method which Cassady hadinspired. In an important sense, however, the method never became old since Kerouacnever afterward, except in one instance, abandoned it. And because of the special



purpose of the method, to render the details of consciousness simultaneously withtheir occurrence within the mind, Kerouac's writing, from Visions of Cody to the lastbook published in his lifetime, Vanity of Duluoz (1968), is really one work, rather thana series of separately crafted ones. Each book takes as it subject a different era inKerouac's life, and to that extent they are separable. But they are unified to a fargreater extent by the fact that they are records, not so much of his life, but of hisliving. Kerouac's work from Visions of Cody onward follows his physiological andemotional chronology because it is the direct expression of that chronology. He is nolonger an artist puzzling over the construction of a book; he has himself become thepuzzle which it is the book's purpose to present. The distinction between art and lifewhich is clear in his autobiography up to the writing of On the Road nearly disappearsaltogether in his autobiography afterward.

The consequences of this effort to identify art and life were not ultimately happy onesfor Kerouac, but in the flush of the discovery of his "spontaneous prose" method heproduced two works that reflected this initial exuberance and that are generallypointed 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 arethese books conceived on a grander scale and with a more elaborate structure than anyof 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 inhis years of apprenticeship. Joyce, Wolfe, Proust, and Melville are only four of themasters whose best effects Kerouac celebrates. Likewise Doctor Sax is a tribute to thepulp fiction and gothic radio adventures of his youth as well as to the figure of Dr. Saxhimself, a shrouded combination of "The Shadow" and William Burroughs. In bothbooks voices from the street mingle with the literary voices in a happy equality neverachieved 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 aretransformed and smoothed away by a force whose origin is outside the author andwhose appearance evokes the author's amazement as strongly as our own. (The



Dharma Bums , 1958, and Big Sur, 1962, are two more examples, different as thesebooks 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 complexitiesleading up to the final miracle. In Book one, called "Ghosts of the PawtucketvilleNight," Kerouac penetrates, by the expression of sensed impressions recalled indreams, his memories of his preadolescent past in Lowell. Dr. Sax, introduced early asa half-Mephistophelian, half-Faustian figure inhabiting the outskirts both of Lowelland of Kerouac's imagination, seems to be readying himself for an apocalypticconfrontation with the powers of Evil. Kerouac, figuratively trying to catch at Sax'sflying coattails through the wide eyes of his reawakened boyhood, glimpses thosecoattails everywhere that an imaginative boy would naturally find them: behind hisfather's armchair, in the windows of abandoned buildings, behind damp trees, in thepages of his pulp fiction, in the grainy reels of movie thrillers. In subsequent partsKerouac employs a variety of styles and formats, including movie scripts, back-fencegossip, voices in French, newspaper clippings, farcical imitations of gothicmelodramas, 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 comicconfusion, 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. Wecan only gape at the miracle and exclaim, along with Dr. Sax himself, "I'll bedamned.... The Universe disposes of its own evil!"

Doctor Sax is a brilliant reinvention of a child's imaginative wildness, hisunselfconscious mixing of humor and fright. This mixing of attitude serves to portraya truth often invisible to strictly disciplined adult eyes, the truth that God likes to workhis miracles in laughter. But the brilliance of this achievement did not preventKerouac's life from becoming unsettled once again. He was stalemated in his efforts tohave On the Road published, and he could not contain his jealousy when hediscovered that John Clellon Holmes had had his own novel on the Beat Generation, anovel entitled Go (1952), accepted with a handsome advance. Kerouac was at his peakas a writer; yet, for the next five years, he wrote with little hope of having his workpublished. Restlessly, he moved in May 1952 from the Cassady home in San



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 NewYork City for Christmas but went back to California in the spring of 1953 only toreturn to New York by way of New Orleans that summer. While in California heworked, as did Cassady himself, as a brakeman on the Southern Pacific Railroad. Buthe began to separate himself from the Cassadys' home life, living in skid-row hotelsand sending home large portions of his paychecks to his mother. Except for his fidelityto his writing and to his mother, his life in all other ways seems to have been inturmoil; 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 showKerouac's sad awareness that by choosing to be a writer he had sacrificed hope ofhaving 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 MaryCarney, though elements of his life with Edie Parker are mixed in too. In part becausethe book is about adolescence but in part also because by choosing this subjectKerouac forced himself to relive his crucial decision to leave Lowell, the book isturbulent. The moods dramatized within it surge between joy and gloomy desperation.Maggie and Jack oscillate between a romantic sexual attraction for each other and asuspicion that neither can share the other's life. At the end, the speaker, as if unwillingto enter too closely into the wretchedness that is to come, separates himself from hisfirst person persona and watches dispassionately in the third person as Jack, now threeyears out of high school and in his own eyes a man of the world, attempts finally andcoldly to "get" Maggie in the back seat of a car. But Maggie, having foiled the rapistwith a rubber chastity belt, laughs at Jack with a laugh more cold-blooded than hisown passion. She has the last grim laugh on Kerouac the writer too, whose decision toseparate himself from Lowell in order that he might write such books as MaggieCassidy has left him, like the speaker at the end of the story, suspended withoutfeeling in a bodiless void.

In The Subterraneans (1958), written in three days in the fall of 1953, the laugh--notMaggie's now, but that of Kerouac's own conscience--becomes warm and human



again but frantic and helpless as well. Like Maggie Cassidy, The Subterraneans isabout a doomed love affair, this time between Kerouac, called Leo Percepied in thestory, and a black girl named Mardou Fox. Unlike Maggie, however, Mardou is nohometown 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 arebased upon real people. (The setting of the book was moved to San Francisco beforepublication to avoid legal complications.) Unlike Maggie Cassidy, The Subterraneanswas written directly after the love affair ended, in this case the love affair with MardouFox. Probably as a result, the speaker cannot distance himself from the episode. Hecannot escape from the worst moments of the affair's collapse, not even into aprotective coldness like the one at the end of Maggie Cassidy . He is instead caught inthe 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 hisart could not coexist. One had to choose. Kerouac had already made the choice severaltimes before in his ending by separation, annulment, and divorce his relations withMary Carney, Edie Parker, and Joan Haverty. The Subterraneans is the dramatizationof still another such choice, made within the very medium--writing--that was forcingthe choice upon him. In this sense The Subterraneans not only describes the ending ofa love affair; it is its very cause.

Kerouac was not proud of the fact that he had chosen writing over a settled marriedlife. He had none of the typical bohemian's pleasure in snubbing middle-class valuesin favor of an unconventional form of freedom. He had none of the aesthete'sveneration of art for art's sake. His loyalty to "spontaneous prose" was of anotherorder, not one that excluded bohemians, aesthetes, and ordinary middle-class marriedpeople but that included them as the audience of his confession. His writing was an actof 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 hismother 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 andcorrespondence, a typewriter on a table, a chair. "Spontaneous prose" required thisausterity if the confession were to be purified. Kerouac nowhere says that



"spontaneous prose" required an identical austerity from all confessors, but it did sofrom 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 veryrapidity with which thoughts are chased down onto the page has about it a warmlaughter 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 sadnesswas always a means of seeing more sympathetically than otherwise the world'ssorrows, not the justification for his closing himself off from them. Likewise hishumor--never given sufficient attention even by his admirers--was a means ofresponding to the comic oddities of life, not the justification of his assuming asuperiority to them. His complexity of attitude was no accident. It was the direct resultof his extreme sensitivity to the fallen beauty of life.

But by 1954 the complexity had become too much even for him to handle. He waslooking for a new source of harmony and seemed to find it after his reading ofAshvagosha's Life of Buddha . For the next few years and culminating with TheDharma Bums, which he completed in 1957, Kerouac absorbed himself in theliterature and practice first and primarily of Mahayana and then of Zen Buddhism, andthis 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. Assessingthis fruitfulness is made difficult, however, by the fact that most of Kerouac'sexplicitly Buddhist writings have never been published. "Some of the Dharma," alarge book of Buddhist prayers; "Buddha Tells Us," Kerouac's version of theSurangama 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 writtenafter Visions of Cody that did not follow the "spontaneous prose" method--waseventually published. Also written during the years 1954-1957 and only publishedsome 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 bothparts were published together in 1965). But in these books Buddhism plays a



subordinate though powerful role. It assumes a place within what seemed to him thelarger structure of his Roman Catholicism.

It does not seem difficult to explain Kerouac's attraction to Buddhism. Torn as heoften was by the paradox of God's seemingly simultaneous presence and absence inthe world he saw, Kerouac could seize with relief on Buddhism's annihilation of theparadox. The suffering of all created things under a sky emptied of divinity couldnever be ignored, but it could be tolerated and even accepted if it were viewed,not as asign of sin, but as an illusion from which Buddhists might release themselves throughthe careful practice of ritual. Suffering, death, and the physical matter through whichsuffering and death operated were not real. Reality was instead the highestconsciousness of illusion, the consciousness attained by the Buddha himself andemulated by his followers. This consciousness was made even more attractive toKerouac by the fact that it was attained, according to Buddhist precept, onlyspontaneously, since the conventional categories of thought were themselvessymptoms 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 amental and physical discipline, he never became a simple convert. He treated theBuddha much as he had treated Cassady in On the Road and Visions of Cody and as hehad treated his brother Gerard in Visions of Gerard : as a hero whose advent heannounced but whose difference from himself was always clear. And though hissentences 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 amember of the suffering creation, the illusion of whose existence he was supposedlylearning to free himself from. In fact, much of the attraction of Mexico City Blues (agroup of 242 poems arranged as "choruses" or jazz improvisations upon the theme ofexistence), 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 drugpusher and as his saint of sadness), and the first part of Desolation Angels (his accountof the summer spent in 1956 as a fire-watcher on top of Desolation Peak in theCascades and later among his friends in San Francisco)--much of this attraction is



derived from Kerouac's ability in these books to include his Buddhist belief in thenullity of matter within his larger Catholic belief in the mysterious splendor of matteras a gift of God. Buddhism soothed Kerouac's keen sense of sin while under the coverof this comparative calm the world of the senses flowered wildly as before.

Though Buddhism did not liberate Kerouac altogether from the unsettledness andsadness of The Subterraneans period, it did for a time mitigate them. His luck withpublishers seemed to be improving as well. Two sections of On the Road werepublished in literary magazines in 1955--one in New World Writing and the other inthe Paris Review--and the novel itself, now championed by Malcolm Cowley atViking, seemed close to acceptance. Then in October Ginsberg read his own poemHowl at the Six Gallery in San Francisco. From this reading dates the emergence ofthe Beat Generation as a literary and eventually as a social phenomenon, andKerouac's publishing difficulties were reversed as a result of Ginsberg's success. Andwhen, a little later in October, Viking finally accepted On the Road, Kerouac seemedto possess what would ordinarily be considered his vindication, or at least the surepromise of it.

Kerouac made another long trip, this time to Tangier to visit Burroughs, before On theRoad was published in September 1957. But even before the book came out therewere ominous signs that the long-sought-for culmination was, at best, a mixedblessing. Though only thirty-five years old at the time of its publication, Kerouac wasin many ways much older. His athlete's body had begun to weaken after several yearsof alcohol abuse. His spirit was weary as well. He had moved very quickly in the sixyears since the invention of "spontaneous prose." He had written at least a dozenbook-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 aboutto be ushered into the glare of publicity and fame and found that all he really wantedwas 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 forrecognition and a need for solitude; and like all the other splits in Kerouac's life, this



one was never healed. If this split had worse overt effects than any of the others, thatmay be due to its occurring at a time when his energies had sunk too low to allow himto 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 Onthe Road. Like Gerard's death and his family's forced emigration from Lowell, literaryfame 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 moredesperate in 1957 than it had been in 1925 or 1946. His resources for overcoming thenew division were few, and little good could come of it.

Virtually the only good that did come was financial, though Kerouac's earnings fromhis books were never great and dwindled sharply after 1961. The critical reception ofOn the Road was almost from the first antagonistic and even virulent. But thoughKerouac 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 hisunderstanding of the prejudices that would make a sympathetic acceptance of thiswork difficult, if not impossible. He had shown also that by choosing to address thoseprejudices in religious terms he could not meet and perhaps overcome them on theirown ground. Not even On the Road's classic neatness of structure could protect it. Inits ardent enthusiasm for moments of spontaneous ecstasy and in its treating as a heroa figure who must have seemed to many middle-class Americans a mere "juveniledelinquent," On the Road was an easy mark for critics and book reviewers stronglyinfluenced by Cold War thinking. Predictably, they dismissed On the Road in termsthat 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: "Itwas 'verbal goofballs' to Saturday Review, 'infantile, perversely negative' to the HeraldTribune, 'lack[ed] ... seriousness' to Commonweal, 'like a slob running a temperature'to the Hudson Review, and 'a series of Neanderthal grunts' to Encounter. The NewYorker labeled Dean Moriarty 'a wild and incomprehensible ex-convict'; the Atlanticthought him 'more convincing as an eccentric than as a representative of any segmentof humanity,' and Time diagnosed him a victim of the Ganser Syndrome, wherebypeople weren't really mad--they only seemed to be." According to the critics who



wrote these reviews, ecstasy, when it occurred in a noninstitutional setting like thebackseat of a car, was indistinguishable from mental and physical illness, filth,incoherence, deceit, criminal violence, degeneracy, and mindless folly. Thisassumption said much, for those who had ears to hear it, about the depths of thosecritics' 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 andwithout political influence, the book had a more positive meaning. Kerouac'sdirectness 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 theywere certainly lost, for another reason, on his critics), the theme of On the Road wasnot only clear but also seductive. The book was a celebration of the spontaneousAmerican personality and of the effort of that personality to express itself throughconfessional conversations, cars, sex, marijuana, and jazz. The book satisfied thelongings of its readers for hints of how they might use their energies to reach momentsof physical and emotional delight. But it did more: it connected those moments toforces even larger than personality. On the Road made Dean Moriarty a human imageof 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 andto feel, as they are doing so, that they are taking part in some unwritten ritual of theAmerican experience. One can often point to the myth of the frontier as a precursor ofthe myth of spontaneity as enacted by Dean and Sal Paradise in their wild continentalcar trips. But for many of the young, On the Road was a necessary translation of theAmerican dream, a guidebook to mid-twentieth century ecstasy. Kerouac's ability tomake such a guidebook, complete with personalities and landscapes that arespiritualized into mythic forces but which are also presented in intricate detail, is thereason for his acquiring the label of spokesman or "King of the Beats." No other writerof the Beat group drew in such detail or with such attention to narrative logic therelations among personality, place, and spirit. He put the Beat Generation on theAmerican map by awakening in readers their previously unarticulated visions of whata vast territory of space and consciousness that map covered and of how attractively



large those persons must become who cross it.

But the positive reception of On the Road was for the most part unvoiced. GilbertMillstein's appreciative review in the daily New York Times was the most prominentexception. What sounded loudest were the critics' transformation of Kerouac'scelebration of Cassady into a cry of anarchy and finally into an object of ridicule. Justas painful for the shy Kerouac was the media attention that was now being directed athim. Amid this uproar Kerouac became even more anxious and depressed. Hisalcoholism became severe--a quart of hard liquor a day was not unusual--and he foundhimself 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 tomountain-climbing and Zen Buddhism, in the fall of 1957 before the media attentionhad become overpowering. But he was not able to conceive and write anotherfull-length book for three years, when he wrote Big Sur. (Lonesome Traveler and Bookof Dreams, published in 1960 and 1961, are collections of shorter pieces.) JoanHaverty, aware of his fame, sued him for support of their daughter, Janet. In 1958 hereceived the first of several barroom beatings, and in 1960 he suffered his first attackof delirium tremens. Not only was he increasingly vulnerable physically, he wasincreasingly vulnerable also to critics' attacks. The books written after On the Roadwere now being published and were being received with scorn. The "spontaneousprose" method itself was depreciated as a lazy trick, a way of avoiding the seriousbusiness of careful revision and planning. Truman Capote dismissed itcontemptuously as mere "typing." Kerouac's efforts at self-defense were futile. TheEscapade articles he wrote from 1959 to 1961, a fascinating series of occasionalpieces and defenses of his art, were taken no more seriously than the explanations hemade during his few nervously drunken television appearances. He became less andless able to present himself as the figure of sobriety, which alone might haveconvinced his critics he was worth listening to.

It is important, however, not to exaggerate the destructiveness of the media's attacksupon him. Deplorable as the critics' prejudices may have been, there is reason forthinking that even the warmest reception of his work would not have had a decisive



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 oflife that no mere literary "success" could have satisfied. In his vanity, Kerouac mightenjoy the prospect of becoming a lionized author, the toast of the lecture circuit. Butthe actuality would probably under any circumstances have been abhorrent to him,since it would have assumed privileges of permanence and control he could notcondone, given his religious sense of his vocation. Even the images of himselfpresented according to the "spontaneous prose" method were false since they carriedwith them a timelessness he could not claim for himself in the flesh. The Jack Kerouacappearing in books and the Jack Kerouac at each succeeding moment in life wereseparated not only by past and present; they were separated also by the fact that whilethe literary character inhabited a world bounded by the meanings of words, the writerhimself was at each instant afloat in a world whose dimensions were fluid--fluid bothbecause of the facts of material change and because of the unpredictability andobliqueness of God's appearances. Kerouac was forced to acknowledge the rupturebetween the image of himself dramatized in his books and his present knowledge ofwhat that self was becoming; and he was resentful of and finally even frightened bythose admirers who, unaware that such a rupture existed, treated him as if the imageand the changing reality were one.

Kerouac also felt compelled to shrug off the titles, particularly the title of "King of theBeats," conferred upon him by those connecting On the Road with the way of life ithad encouraged among the young. He probably felt this way, again, because the roleof leader or "King" implied not merely a public authority but also a limitation ofpresent action he could not endure. So deep was his antipathy to accomplishment asordinarily viewed that it may even have affected his relation with his daughter by JoanHaverty. His refusal to accept his paternity may have been due, in part, to hisreluctance to see his image fixed in an outward form, even in that of a child. One isreminded of his extravagance of behavior during his "Self-Ultimacy" period. In afigurative sense, Kerouac really did write with his own blood by writingspontaneously. And he also continued to burn what he wrote, refusing to allow theworld to put its own categories on his work, even categories that originated with him.



"[I am] actually not 'Beat,'" he said, in his introduction to Lonesome Traveler, "butstrange 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 demonstratedin the fall of 1961 with the writing in ten days of Big Sur. Big Sur is the account of adevastating seizure of alcohol sickness that occurred the previous summer duringKerouac's retreat to a cabin on the Big Sur coast. It is an account also of Kerouac'slosing struggle to maintain some kind of coherence among the various images ofhimself his own writing and his fame had generated. But, here as earlier, personalcollapse acted as a stimulus. The book resulting from these disasters is as sadlyhumorous and lucid as it is frantic and frightening. "Spontaneous prose" gives shape tothe chaos of alcohol hysterics, not only sentence by sentence but in the design of thewhole work. Kerouac's persona is released from his frenzy, but not in conventionalways such as death, therapy, or some other merely human solution. In the last pages ofthe book a vision of redemption appears, as perhaps all such visionsmust--inexplicably, momentarily, and, of course, spontaneously. Once again, the"divine scribe," frantic at the absence of his master's voice, hears that voice issue froman unpredicted direction, from within the despair caused by the voice's absence. Thebook 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 ofmaking fun of the Beats and their king, and Kerouac, now left alone, grew lonely. Hislife with his mother in their various homes was disturbed by quarrels; his old friendswere far away; and the strenuous effort required by the "spontaneous prose" style wasbecoming hard to sustain. To please his mother, he moved his home between Floridaand New England several times between 1962 and his death in Florida in 1969. Bothhe and his mother felt themselves drawn most strongly to their old hometown ofLowell. During his visits there, Kerouac spent his time mostly in bars, reacquaintinghimself with the family of his dead boyhood friend, Sebastian Sampas. Kerouac hadnot in the intervening years lost complete contact with the Sampas family, however.



He had apparently asked Sebastian's sister Stella to marry him long before she finallyaccepted his proposal in 1966. Her previous refusal was due to her need to take care ofmembers of her own family. But in the fall of 1966 they were wed. And sinceKerouac's mother had suffered a stroke earlier that year, Stella was asked to be notonly 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 amuch-needed shape on his life. And though the Kerouac returning to Lowell, thegarrulous barfly whose "literary" fame was regarded with suspicion by many of thoseresidents 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 sustainingconnection of past and present. Other efforts at imposing shapes were not assuccessful. Ever since reading The Forsyte Saga in 1942, Kerouac had wanted to writeone multi-episode but connected account of one life and vision. Although the books hewrote actually do constitute such an account, Kerouac wanted at various timesthroughout the 1960s to standardize the names in all his published books. (The changein names from book to book had been ordered by his various publishers.) Then hewould republish his books in a uniform format. Such an arrangement would makeclear, he hoped, the kinship of his work with that of Balzac and Proust. The idea wasnever realized, however, probably because of publishers' lack of interest in a projectthat did not seem profitable. Still, he might have had success with his idea if his healthhad allowed him to pursue it. But his alcoholism was now approaching its inevitableclimax.

It is a remarkable fact about Kerouac that his alcoholism neither dulled his wit norprevented him from writing two more books, the second of which is worthy ofinclusion within his best work. In 1965, Kerouac wrote Satori in Paris (1966), his firstbook since Big Sur. It is an account of a trip he made alone to France in that same yearto research his family tree. Though frequently dismissed even by his admirers, Satoriin 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 theearly books or even the frantic alcoholic of Big Sur. This new role, that of a barroom



raconteur, a kind of Sir John Falstaff teasing his mates, is, in part, the negative productof his exhaustion and his disillusionment with fame. But it is also the positive productof 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 anyone 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 madscrambles of life, Kerouac could talk in ways not open to him as a younger man. Hecould speak as one who has nothing to lose, least of all his dignity. He could parodyhimself; he could laugh without bitterness or guilt at his own follies and those of hisreaders. But from behind the laughter could echo the sound characteristic of allKerouac's writing, the sound of his compassion for the endless suffering of all mortalbeings.

Satori in Paris serves as a prelude for the greater book that was published two yearslater, Vanity of Duluoz. Like Satori in Paris, this book too has found few admirersuntil recently. Yet Vanity of Duluoz--"Duluoz" being the pseudonym for himselfwhich 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'sfootball career at Lowell High, Horace Mann, and Columbia. It also describes his lifeduring the war years up to the time of his father's death in 1946. Thematically, thebook represents Kerouac's attempt to sum up the value not only of his various youthfulstrivings for fame but also of his whole subsequent literary career. "Vanity" is the sumhe tries to obtain, but the greatness of Vanity of Duluoz , particularly in its closingpages, consists in its resisting such simple arithmetic. Even to declare his life vainturns out itself to be a species of vanity, and though he attempts to maintain the tone ofa modern-day Ecclesiastes when recounting his vanities, his love of detail, his sense ofhumor, and his Christian compassion thwart him. No summing up of one's life ispossible while one is still in that life, and the genius of "spontaneous prose" is suchthat the crucial facts of one's being still alive cannot be eliminated in favor of a neatmoral completeness, not even a negative one such as "vanity."



Those crucial facts were soon to be eliminated by another method, however. Havingreceived a severe barroom beating in the spring of 1969, Kerouac afterwardsequestered himself in his St. Petersburg home with his wife and his crippled mother,drinking heavily, watching television, listening to Handel's Messiah on his recordplayer, reading, and, as always, writing. His late-night long-distance telephone calls tohis old friends became fewer. He felt exiled not only from his own past but from hisown country. America's involvement in the Vietnam War he despised. Yet equallydespicable to him were the hippies along with their mentor, his old friend AllenGinsberg, who seemed merely to be indulging themselves at the expense of traditionalAmerican values of patriotism and decency. Caught characteristically between dividedallegiances, both craving companionship and alienating it, Kerouac remained faithfulto his writing, and it was while he was jotting notes in front of his television onemorning 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 dividedhim from that life altogether.

An assessment of Kerouac's literary accomplishment must be expressed in paradoxesif it is to avoid simplification. The "spontaneous prose" method is itself a paradoxicalinstrument: consciously formed yet unconsciously, intuitively practiced. It is a methoddesigned specifically for those who, like Kerouac himself, are already masters of theconventional modes of writing. It is a step beyond literary formality, not an escapefrom it. It uses such formality as the basis upon which the inner mind can articulate itscontrasting 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 isalmost always coherent. There are always indirect references to be found, if only inthe sounds of the sentences, to verbal structures that are being transcended.

Kerouac's literary accomplishment is the attainment, laboriously sought for andpainfully maintained, of this transcendence by means of the "spontaneous prose"method. Though other classic American authors had extolled the virtue of spontaneityin writing--Emerson and Thoreau come immediately to mind--none of them, before or



since, has sought as strenuously and as successfully as Kerouac did to realize thatvirtue 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 electednot to pursue? If American literature is the acting out of Emerson's prophecies, thenKerouac'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 wordsonce again to visible things, so that the picturesque language is at once a commandingcertificate that he who employs it is in allegiance with truth and God.... The imagery isspontaneous. 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 piousreception. Our truth of thought is therefore vitiated as much by too violent directiongiven by our will, as by too great negligence.... As far as we can recall these ecstasieswe carry away in the ineffaceable memory the result, and all men and all the agesconfirm it. It is called truth. But the moment we cease to report and attempt to correctand contrive, it is not truth."

Kerouac's true position in American literature will never become clear until he ismeasured against standards which he himself set and which were legitimized over acentury 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 isperhaps a sadder thought that such prejudices can last so long than that one writer hassuffered from them. Kerouac's literary reputation has become a test of the Americanintellectual climate since World War II: a climate not much less grey and forbiddingnow than it was twenty-five years ago.



Jack+Kerouac+Biography

Documents

Transcript of Jack+Kerouac+Biography