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A LONG BIRTHDAY CARD FOR JACK KEROUAC

 

 

…” 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!"” – On The Road

 

ABOUT JACK

 

Happy 100th Birthday! You’ve been silent longer now than you were alive. I sat in your tall shadow for a couple of summers when I went to the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa U., and I met and listened to Allen Ginsberg, Bill Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and Anne Waldman.

 

A hundred birthday candles throw out some serious light though, and it’s a good time to ask who you were out of the shadows, both as writer and man. Because so much of your writing was autobiographical it’s often hard to distinguish fiction from your personal memory in it. There may be a key to your complex being in a seemingly trivial fact—your discharge from the US Naval Reserve with the diagnosis of a “schizoid” personality.  I doubt that you were truly schizophrenic - the arc of your life contains enough bouts of depression and something close to mania that you might have been diagnosed today as bipolar instead... as well as alcoholic (but typing the first draft of 'On The Road' in three weeks on a long roll of paper truly makes you a “writer on a roll”)! The reason that early diagnosis is interesting, and part of why you’re so fascinating as a writer and troubled human, is that you were in so many ways occupied with negotiating multiple identities.  

 

 

Far from being only a hedonistic rebel desperate for new experiences and Zen illuminations as suggested in the above quotation from 'On The Road' and the spiritual godfather of the “turn on, tune in and drop out” hippies, you were also traditional and conservative in many ways - an athlete and fraternity member in your youth, a lifelong Catholic and friend of William F. Buckley, Jr., admirer of Joseph McCarthy, hater of draft dodgers, and lover of your country and Maman. You pushed against some limits and respected others.

 

SO WHAT?

 

What are the splits that count, the pressure fractures which formed Kerouac’s prose diamonds and his huge influence on others? First of all, his family background was French Canadian; the most common spelling of his surname in Quebec is Kirouac. He spoke only French up the age of six or so, and wrote poems and fiction in French that were not published until after his death. He was culturally a French-Canadian who eventually spoke like an Anglo-American. For a creative take on Jack’s Quebec roots, look for Jack Kerouac: A Chicken Essay by Victor-Lévy Beaulieu.

 

In terms of sexuality, although he was not public about it, Jack’s desires were more complex than his three marriages to women might suggest.  He may have had encounters with both Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady, and even Gore Vidal claimed to have had an affair with Jack. In letters published posthumously, he confessed to erotic fixations with both his mother and brother Gerard. Given the Catholic church’s frowning on homosexuality, Jack must have been conflicted, both drawn to experiment and worried about eternal damnation for loving men as well as women.

 

Religiously, Kerouac stayed true to his Catholic upbringing, even painting a portrait of the Pope.  He sought earthly pleasures and ached for transcendence, be it in Heaven or Nirvana. He wanted to feel the Beat in beatific. He was fascinated by Buddhism, and read many texts, as well as discussing it with his friend, poet Gary Snyder. True to Jack’s nature, he was not a conventional Buddhist.  Some devotees disagreed with his views in books like Dharma Bums. Rather than a devout meditator and student of doctrines, he was in the tribe of Buddhists described in “Howl”, “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night”. This connects with one of my own reactions to Kerouac: he was a not a writer of ideas or arguments, but of feelings. Reading Kerouac is about exploring the depth and poetry of wounds to the soul, and whether there is balm for them.

 

Lori Gomez, whose “A Poetry Channel” readings on YouTube are some of the best vocalizations of Kerouac available, explains her connection to his work this way: “I can't give you a critical analysis because my feelings about his work are visceral... he resonates in ways that defy description and mock any attempt at analysis, like feeling sunshine on your face... so... his energy, his descriptive powers, his empathy, his sad mad monk little boy blue desire to save the world and yet be so lost in himself he can only yearn... I just can't describe it... it's like listening to Billie Holiday sing, there is so much beauty and pathos, and yet they do not ask for pity or sympathy, they transcend all that...”

 

That’s an eloquent reaction to his work, and explains why it continues to resonate for readers today, several generations after the Beats. Emotions, visions and awareness of his own conflicts fuel his explorations. His prose was not influenced by the carefully constructed sentences and plots of literary predecessors like Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway or James Joyce, but by the less trammeled forms of poetry and jazz. Like the bebop musicians he loved – Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk – Kerouac would take a theme or memory and play changes, turn it inside out, connect to his own fantasies and doubts, building momentum as he went along, breaking an image or phrase with a dash to go somewhere else. His prose sometimes seems jumbled, but is searingly honest, a record of his thoughts and feelings as they arose. The continuous rolls of paper he typed on were not just a handy time-saver; they are an image of his approach to writing, more of an onrushing river of consciousness in prose-poem form than a series of steps. As he also wrote in On The Road: “because he had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars...”

 

Thank you for opening so many doors, Jack. May you always find bliss in Heaven/Nirvana and in the souls of all your readers.--

 

My new book 'Higher Teaching' is now available from bookstores and online sellers. My online course "Organizational Writing" can be taken through udemy.com. Visit my website:  writing/editing at joughton.wixsite.com/author.