Jack Kerouac (1922-1909). Biography and creative work

The New York Times obituary read, “Jack Kerouac, Novelist, Dead; Father of the Beat Generation.” By the time he died on October 21, 1969, Kerouac’s name had become synonymous with a social and cultural movement that materialized in the wake of World War II America and included other prominent writers, most notably Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. Kerouac first heard the term Beat from Herbert Huncke, a Times Square hustler who used it to signify poverty and exhaustion. Kerouac, however, appropriated the word to describe a post-World War II generation of restless, curious, and spiritual young people eager to escape staid middle-class values and discover new modes of self-expression.

With the 1957 publication of On the Road, widely recognized as the Beat “manifesto,” Kerouac became the leading, although involuntary, spokesperson for this alternative culture. And while he published several essays attempting to delineate the term, it is ultimately through his life and literature that we truly understand the ethos of this Beat generation.

Jack Kerouac was born on March 12, 1922, in Lowell, Massachusetts; baptized Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac, and affectionately called Ti Jean (Little Jack) by his friends and family. Both of his parents— Gabrielle-Ange Levesque (whom everyone called Memere) and Leo-Alcide Kerouac—descended from French-Canadian immigrants. They married in 1915 and had two other children before Ti Jean was born: Gerard, born in 1916, and Caroline, born in 1918. The Kerouacs were a solidly working-class family and devout Catholics. Leo was in the printing business and owned his own press until financial failure forced him to seek work in others’ shops, and Memere worked intermittently in a shoe factory to supplement the family’s income. Kerouac had a particularly strong attachment to Memere: He slept in her bed for much of his childhood and lived with her on and off for his entire life.

One traumatic event that contributed to Jack’s strong maternal attachment was the tragic death of his brother, Gerard, in 1926. Gerard was diagnosed with rheumatic fever in 1924 and suffered with the disease for two years. Memories of his brother’s affliction and death would haunt Kerouac for the rest of his life and would later form the basis for his novel Visions of Gerard (1963). When Kerouac was only four years old, he became powerfully aware of death and profoundly affected by what he saw as a “world of shadows.”

Kerouac’s strong imagination and interest in fantasy defined his early education. Because French was the only language spoken in the Kerouac home, he did not learn English until he attended school at the age of six. Shortly after he learned to read, young Kerouac began to write stories, as well as draw and narrate his own cartoons. He became particularly fascinated with the comic series The Shadow, which originated as a radio show and later became a pulp weekly. Kerouac would later invoke the title character of The Shadow in Doctor Sax: Faust Part Three (1959), which describes his young teenage years and the solemn introspection and social distance that characterized his adolescence.

While, on the one hand, Kerouac was drawn to solitude, on the other hand, he envisioned himself as a romantic hero. Biographers are often quick to point out Kerouac’s fragmented personality, and this split emerged in his early years. While Kerouac was a shy boy who cherished his time alone, both in the local woods of the Merrimack Valley and in the Lowell Public Library poring over the classics, he also had dreams of grandeur, not only as a writer but as an athlete. At five feet eight inches, Kerouac was relatively short, but he was strong and fast, becoming a star football player in high school. He was the team captain, was scouted by colleges, and secured a football scholarship to Columbia University.

After graduating high school, Kerouac had to spend a year at Horace Mann School for Boys in New York to obtain the academic preparation necessary for attending Columbia. Kerouac’s experience at Horace Mann was his first foray into the world of fortune and privilege, as most of his classmates were members of wealthy Jewish families who sent their kids to school in chauffeured limousines. Kerouac, though, found inspiration in the energy and grittiness of Times Square; he began experimenting for the first time with drugs and alcohol and explored the growing culture of bop jazz. He gradually replaced visions of athletic stardom with dreams of becoming a famous writer.

A football injury during his first season at Columbia gave Kerouac the impetus to make the transition from athlete to aspiring writer. With a broken leg, Kerouac now had leisure time not only to focus on his schoolwork but to explore his own literary interests. Most importantly, he discovered the work of the American novelist Thomas Wolfe, who would become a major influence on his young literary career. In Vanity of Duluoz (1968), Kerouac tells us that Wolfe “woke [him] up to America as a Poem instead of America as a place to struggle around and sweat in. Mainly this dark-eyed American poet made me want to prowl, and roam, and see the real America that was there and that ‘had never been uttered’” (75). By the time his leg had healed, this dream of experiencing America had taken hold of him. In fall 1941 Kerouac left Columbia, signaling his new life as a writer and itinerant explorer of America.

While Kerouac sensed that he was no longer interested in college, an alternative path did not clearly present itself. He worked in a variety of short-term jobs—as a gas station attendant, a short-order cook, a sports reporter—meandering up and down the East Coast as opportunity allowed and writing his first set of short stories, Atop an Underwood (first published in 1999). By 1942 America was at war, and, seeing an opportunity for adventure, Kerouac signed up as a scullion on the S.S. Dorchester, which was heading for Greenland. Soon after his return, he enlisted in the navy. Kerouac’s entrance into military life was dictated more by curiosity and romance than a passionate interest in the war. He had a strong distaste for violence and was ill prepared for the structure and demands of the navy. In an effort to be released, he feigned mental illness and was eventually discharged as having an “indifferent character.”

His parents, now living on Long Island, had hoped Kerouac would finish his education at Columbia. He had tried to return to school briefly in 1942 but quickly left again. He always felt that his education was obtained outside the classroom, preferring to pursue “real adventures” in the urban landscape of New York City between 1943 and 1947. During this critical period, he moved in with his girlfriend, Edie Parker, a carefree and wealthy woman from Grosse Pointe, Michigan, who was taking art classes at Columbia. Through Edie and her friends, Kerouac met many of the central figures of the Beat era who would later be immortalized in his novels. Together with William S. Burroughs, Lucien Carr, and Allen Ginsberg, Kerouac formed a type of intellectual commune, discussing authors (such as Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche), collaborating on poetry and prose, exploring emerging jazz forms, and searching for what Ginsberg and Carr called a “new vision.”

Though Kerouac found much in the way of inspiration from this collaboration, he also found a fair amount of trouble. His new friends were primarily collegians who were seeking to escape the trappings of mainstream America and locate higher levels of consciousness. Their experiences, however, were not only intellectual but also physical: Heavy drinking and extensive drug use were the norm, occasionally accompanied by violence.

One night in August 1944, Lucien Carr stabbed and killed David Kammerer, a man who had fallen in love with the handsome teen and had been stalking him for several years. After the murder, Carr sought Kerouac’s help, and eventually Kerouac was arrested and jailed as an accessory. Jack had no independent means of financial support and could not bail himself out. After his father refused to lend him the money, Kerouac turned to Edie for help. Her aunt paid for his bail but insisted that they marry first. Kerouac spent the first night of married life in his jail cell, waiting to be released.

Although Kerouac was eventually acquitted of any charges, the marriage would be over within the year. Kerouac was not in a position to be a responsible husband, as he was working intermittently and could barely feed himself, let alone provide for his wife. More importantly, Kerouac was bingeing on both alcohol and Benzedrine, an amphetamine that was available at the time in over-the-counter inhalers. High on speed, Kerouac would stay awake for days on end, exploring the underworld of New York City with Burroughs and Ginsberg, hanging out with local hustlers and thieves. Although Kerouac completed several pieces of writing during this period (including an unpublished collaborative novel with Burroughs about the Kammerer killing, called And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks), he would later describe this time in New York City as a “year of low, evil decadence” (Vanity 259).

Two critical medical events in 1945 forced Kerouac’s temporary retreat from this world. His father was diagnosed with stomach cancer, and Kerouac began to spend much of his time at home caring for him. Shortly thereafter, Kerouac himself was hospitalized with his first episode of what would become recurrent thrombophlebitis, or blood clots in the legs, brought on by his excessive use of Benzedrine.

This forced period of retreat was actually crucial to Kerouac’s literary career. Immobilized in the hospital for several weeks, Kerouac began to envision the first of his major novels, The Town and the City (1950).

After Leo Kerouac’s death in spring 1946, Jack sprang to work writing, modeling his efforts on the work of Thomas Wolfe. The Town and the City is a semiautobiographical tale of Kerouac’s boyhood and of his friends, in which Kerouac himself takes shape in the five sons of the fictionalized Martin family. While working on the novel, in winter 1946, Jack met Neal Cassady, a rebellious Denver native with whom Kerouac shared a close connection almost instantly. Their meeting, and the next several years of Jack’s life, would form the basis of Kerouac’s second (and best-known) novel, On the Road (1955). Embarking on his first cross-country trip in July 1947, Kerouac also gathered the worldly knowledge necessary for him to conclude The Town and the City, which closes with one of the Martin boys’ turning away from conventional society and toward the open road.

After spending almost two years traveling, Ker- ouac returned to his mother’s home and completed his 1,183-page manuscript of The Town and the City. After he shopped the book around to publishers (with the help of Allen Ginsberg), Harcourt Brace accepted the novel in March 1949 and assigned Robert Giroux to edit it into publishable form. It was finally released in 1950 and was met with moderate critical success. For Kerouac the pride of publishing his first novel was overshadowed by his drive to complete his second, which was jump-started by a rambling 40,000-word letter Jack received from Neal Cas- sady. Neal’s fast-paced confessional writing imitated the immediacy of real life, and in utilizing Cassady’s influence, Kerouac created what would become his trademark writing style. Inserting a roll of paper into his typewriter so that he would not have to waste time switching pages, Kerouac composed, over the course of about three weeks in spring 1951, a 175,000-word single-spaced paragraph, which would become his controversial novel On the Road.

Though it was completed in 1951, On the Road would not be published for another six years. While seeking publication, Kerouac embarked upon what he considered his life’s work, an epic multivolume novel in the vein of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (1913-27). Kerouac called his saga “the Duluoz Legend,” intending to document his entire life in fictionalized form and go back in his old age to make uniform the many pseudonyms he had invented for his real-life acquaintances. These novels include Visions of Gerard (1963), Maggie Cassidy (1959), Tristessa (1960), and Desolation Angels (1965).

In the eyes of some critics, though, Kerouac’s dream of a unified epic is overshadowed by the greatness of three novels: On the Road (1957), The Subterraneans (1958), and The Dharma Bums (1958). The Subterraneans was written on a three-night Benzedrine binge after Kerouac’s breakup with an African- American woman known in the novel as Mardou Fox and is considered one of the finest examples of Kerouac’s confessional style, which he dubbed “spontaneous prose.” The Dharma Bums recounts a time in Kerouac’s life when he was invested in a version of Buddhism and follows an autobiographical character (in this case, named Ray Smith) on trips across the country and to the tops of mountains. The Dharma Bums, as does On the Road, portrays Kerouac as the pupil of a wiser male friend, in this case, the poet and Buddhist scholar Gary Snyder (renamed Japhy Ryder). These three novels have earned a reputation as his finest and have been continuously in print since their first publications.

The period between 1951 and 1956 also saw the dissolution of Kerouac’s second marriage, this time to Joan Haverty. She and Jack had married impulsively in 1950, and Jack left her the following year after she told him she was pregnant with his child. These years also marked the ascendancy of the Beat generation: John Clellon Holmes published his essay “This Is the Beat Generation” in the New York Times in November 1952, introducing the word Beat into American vernacular as a term for the new generation of countercultural youths. In 1955 Allen Ginsberg and other Beat figures gave a powerful reading at San Francisco’s Gallery Six, and Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” (1956) sparked a landmark obscenity trial. Even with the growing appreciation of the Beats’ unconventional style, Viking Press rejected edited versions of On the Road until July 1955, when editors became convinced that it would be met with widespread acceptance.

Finally published in 1957, On the Road received praise from some critics, while many deemed it a nonliterary, self-centered tract encouraging youths to resist civilization and partake in drugs, alcohol, and free-wheeling sexual behavior. Despite critical dispute, On the Road was a commercial success and gave Kerouac the freedom to publish subsequent novels with relatively little editorial interference, thus preserving his ideal of spontaneity in literature. The next decade saw the publication of a great body of his work, from novels to books of poetry to compilations of essays.

Unfortunately, Kerouac felt ill at ease with his sudden notoriety as king of the Beats and slipped further into alcoholism and drug use, even participating in psychedelic drug experimentation with the noted drug-culture icon Timothy Leary. He withdrew from his peers; moved in with his mother in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1964; and grew even closer to her in the wake of his sister’s death that same year. Though he traveled briefly in Europe, he remained mostly at home, marrying Stella Sampas, the sister of a childhood friend, in 1966.

They relocated temporarily to Lowell, where Kerouac completed Vanity of Duluoz (1968), the last novel he would publish in his lifetime. They returned to Florida in 1968, just months after Neal Cassady died of congestive heart failure after becoming drunk and wandering away from a wedding party in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Kerouac himself would soon see the end of the road as a result of alcohol abuse. He developed cirrhosis of the liver in 1969, which led to internal hemorrhaging. Kerouac died in Memere’s house on October 21, 1969, at the age of 47.

Though Kerouac’s early death is certainly tragic, his absence has led readers to appreciate the prodigious body of literature that he created in his short life. It is in viewing the history of counterculture that one can truly appreciate his contributions to the history of art and literature in America: Kerouac’s influence on the rock musicians of the 1960s forever changed the face of contemporary music, and his Beat manifesto On the Road continues to inspire readers to question mainstream values.

He lives on as the subject of innumerable literature classes and as the namesake of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (founded by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman). Though he died without completing his Duluoz Legend, Kerouac left behind a legendary and lasting contribution to American literary tradition, and to the history of American counterculture.