Jack Kerouac
From Philosopedia
Kerouac, Jack (12 March 1922 - 21 October 1969)
- • The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!"
- • You have to believe in life before you can accomplish anything. That is why dour, regular-houred, rational-souled State Department diplomats have done nothing for mankind. Why live if not for excellence?
- —From Jack Kerouac’s journals
Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, to French-Canadian parents, Léo-Alcide Kerouac and Gabrielle-Ange Lévesque. They spoke a Quebec French dialect called joual, and Kerouac did not start to learn English until he was six.
Kerouac became a novelist, a spokesman for the Beat generation who wrote On the Road (1957), which relates the wanderings of Sal Paradise and his friend, Dean Moriarty, across America. The two think they are getting somewhere and that they’re looking for someone. Then it dawns upon them that they’re already there, on the road, which is the sensible place to have a pad and for Dharma bums to be.
He also wrote Dharma Bums (1958) and The Subterraneans (1958). Dharma, the body of teachings expounded by Gautama Siddhartha, is a reference to the Buddha's way of obtaining enlightenment.
His marriage to a first wife, Edie Parker, ended in a year. She had helped pay bail for Kerouac's having been arrested as an accessory in the murder of David Kammerer, who had been stalking Lucien Carr, a friend. Marriage to a second wife, Joan Haverty, also ended in months. At the time of his death, he was living with a third wife, Stella Sampas, whom he had married in the mid-1960s.
Kerouac’s chronic alcoholism led to his death from a stomach hemorrhage. During one of his breakdowns, he had hallucinated, thinking of himself as a prize in a war between angels and devils. Cassady had abandoned Kerouac toward the end of 1947, when Kerouac was down and out with dysentery in Mexico City. "I didn't know who he was anymore," Kerouac wrote. "And he knew this, and sympathized and pulled the blanket over my shoulders. 'Yes, yes, yes, I've got to go now.' And he was gone."
He did not label his outlook, but although he was raised a Roman Catholic he developed views that were non-theistic with Zen, Buddhist, and humanist overtones.
Kerouac is buried in his home town of Lowell, Massachusetts.
On The Road
Gretchen Kelly, writing about On The Road, The Original Scroll (2007), called the 1957 work a famed coming-of-age travel novel - and subtextual gay love story.
It traces Kerouac's tour across America by bus and car both alone and with his best friend, Neal Cassady. Writes Kelly, the book's
- stream-of-consciousness, balls-to-the-wall style and its focus on the socially marginalized (hobos, intellectuals, gay hustlers) gained the matinee idol-handsome Kerouac a dedicated following of readers hungry for an icon of "otherness." All of a sudden it was cool to be "beat," a term Kerouac had lifted from his friend Herbert Huncke, a gay hustler in Times Square. "I'm beat," Huncke uttered to his friend, defining it as being down and out, humbled by life. Kerouac took the word and elevated it to mean "beatific," enraptured by life. "It involves a sort of nakedness of mind and, ultimately, of sour, a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness," Kerouac explained.
Kerouac lived with his mother in the Ozone Park neighborhood of Queens, a borough of New York City. When the book hit stores in 1957, sections of graphic gay sex had been removed at the publisher's request, and Kerouac had changed the names of the protagonists to quell worries by the legal department at the Viking company. Kerouac became Sal Paradise, Cassady became Dean Moriarty, and gay poet Allen Ginsberg became Carlo Marx.
In the restored novel, Kelly writes,
- Kerouac cites several instances of Cassady's bisexuality: his night of passion with Ginsberg, his hustling of a gay traveler on the road, exchanging sex for what he hoped would be cash. The relationship between Neal and Jack is that of mentor and acolyte, Fagin and Oliver, road daddy and enraptured, inexperienced puppy. Although Kerouac never mentioned sleeping with Cassady, his romanic attraction to him is undeniable. "With the coming of Neal there really began for me that part of my life you could call my life on the road," Kerouac wrote.
The original scroll was so-called because Kerouac typed it on a continuous roll of long sheets of tracing paper taped end to end - this way he did not have to stop to change sheets of standard typewriter paper, and this would speed his writing during white-hot, caffeine-fueled weeks in 1951.
Of his confessional style of writing, Truman Capote once quipped,
- That’s not writing. That’s typewriting.
In a 2007 work by Paul Maher Jr., Jack Kerouac's American Journey, recounts tales of Kerouac's bisexuality. "Gore Vidal famously claimed to have slept with him," Maher says. "But then, William Burroughs said he was a liar."
Some visit sites connected with Kerouac:
- • Kerouac lived with his mother at 133-01 Cross Bay Blvd., Ozone Park, Queens, N.Y.
- • Across the street was Glen Patrick's Pub, where Kerouac and Cassady drank and conversed.
- • Chumley's and the White Horse Tavern in Manhattan were where they also drank.
- • City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, California, is where beats frequented -
- a small alley nearby is named for Kerouac
- • Vesuvio Cafe, 255 Columbus Ave., across the street from the bookstore, is where they often ate.
(Gretchen Kelly, OutTraveler,com, Summer 2008; The New Yorker, 22-29 June 1998)
{OEL}
