Guest post by Joan Hawkins.
“Who chose his words from mouths of babes got lost in the wood.
Hip-flask-slinging madmen, steaming café flirts.
They all spoke through you.”
— “Hey Jack Kerouac,” Natalie Merchant and Robert Buck
Remember the story of King Midas. He was granted a wish and without thinking it through, he asked that everything he touched be turned into gold. Soon enough he was wretched. Instead of enjoying unbridled wealth, he realized he could no longer eat or drink or hold his children. In the process of becoming the Ancient World’s Golden Boy, he was destroyed.
Jack Kerouac didn’t exactly wish for the extraordinary fame that was thrust on him, literally overnight. But there are many who believe that getting too much too fast sealed his fate. Certainly he was the Golden Boy of the Beat generation. “Of the San Francisco beat boys you were the favorite,” Natalie Merchant writes in the song cited above. And the reviews for his second novel, On the Road — the ones that guaranteed his Golden Boy status — were so good, they were scary. The kind all writers think they want, until they realize what it means.
Writing for The New York Times, Gilbert Millstein called the 1957 novel
the most beautifully executed, the clearest and most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as “beat,” and whose principal avatar he is. Just as more than any other novel of the Twenties, The Sun Also Rises came to be regarded as the testament of the Lost Generation, so it seems certain that On the Road will come to be known as that of the Beat Generation.
Hunched over the bar at Donnelly’s with his then-partner Joyce Glassman Johnson, Kerouac read the review as soon as it came out. “It’s good, isn’t it?” he kept asking. “It’s very, very good,” she told him. But privately she was anxious. She had worked in publishing for two years, she said later, and she had never read a review that made pronouncements about the future. “What would history demand of Jack?” she wrote. “What would a generation expect of its avatar?”
Kerouac was born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac. March 12, 1922, in Lowell, Massachusetts. Of French-Canadian ancestry, he spoke Canadian French before he spoke English. As an adult he wrote French poems, and scholars have argued for traces of French-Canadian rhythms in his English prose. His childhood was difficult. His older brother Gérard died of rheumatic fever when he was nine. Jack was only four and Gérard’s death had a profound effect on him. In fact, Gérard was the first of many angels and angel-headed hipsters who would populate Kerouac’s novels, innocents destroyed by the world. It was Gérard’s death which led to renewed interest in Catholicism in the Kerouac home and so, indirectly, paved the way for Jack’s abiding interest in the beatific. And it was his brother’s death that encouraged Jack to form a very close relationship with his mother, a closeness that lasted throughout his life. Whenever things got to be too much, he went home to her, and in his later years he said she was the only woman he had ever loved.
Which made it difficult for all the other women in his life: his wives Edie Parker, Joan Haverty, and Stella Sampas; his daughter Jan; his partners and lovers Joyce Glassman Johnson, Carolyn Cassady, Alene Lee (Mardou), and the many other fellaheen women that he describes in his novels. If his mother was the woman closest to him, the man he idolized was Neal Cassady (Kerouac’s father was something of a brute and drops out of the biography early). It was his road trips with Cassady that formed the basis for On the Road, and a recent publication of Cassady’s letters make it clear that something of Cassady’s own style and patois found its way into the novel. I don’t mean to suggest that Kerouac plagiarized, just that he built the main character of his novel — Dean Moriarty — around Cassady, and the novel simply would not be what it is without Cassady’s voice coming out of Moriarty’s mouth.
Easy behind the wheel and with women, Cassady was a larger-than-life hero in Kerouac’s imaginary, the same way that Kerouac is larger than life in the public imaginary. Impossibly handsome, Kerouac played football in high school and went to Columbia on a football scholarship. There he met Lucien Carr, William S. Burroughs, John Clellon Holmes, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, and the other “avatars” of what would come to be known as the Beat Generation. And of course he was introduced to the work of the authors who would influence him: Thomas Wolfe and James Joyce. The other influences — Buddhism and jazz — came later, as part of his real education, as he termed it, outside school.
His first novel, The Town and the City (1950), published under the name John Kerouac, earned respectable reviews but sold poorly. Disappointed in the novel’s lack of success, Kerouac spent the next few years writing and travelling through the U.S. and Mexico. His work ethic was phenomenal. During this period he finished drafts of what would become ten more novels including The Subterraneans (1958), Doctor Sax (1959), Tristessa (1960), and Desolation Angels (1965), all published after On the Road turned him into a literary rock star.
On the Road was written over a period of 20 days, with his wife Joan Haverty supplying him with coffee, Benzedrine, and bowls of pea soup. Before beginning to type the draft, he created a continuous roll of paper — the scroll that is currently owned by Indianapolis Colts proprietor Jim Irsay and maintained by Indiana University Lilly Librarian James Canary. There are no page breaks in the manuscript and few paragraph breaks. Received wisdom has it that Kerouac did not revise at all. But a careful look at the scroll shows that’s not true. There are areas that are X’ed out and retyped, and Canary has done several wonderful presentations on Kerouac’s revisions to the manuscript.
What is true is that he didn’t painstakingly reorganize paragraphs and episodes, move them around. He just retyped passages in what seemed to be better prose, and moved on. The whole novel has the feel of spontaneity and improv — what Brian Hassett refers to as Kerouac’s “jazz” style. Perhaps because of the bennies and caffeine, it also has the rhythm of what Kerouac described as “all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going.” In that sense it is truly a quintessential American novel, one that could only have been written in a landscape like ours.
It’s also a picaresque novel. Moriarty and his friend, the narrator Sal Paradise, have adventures. There are the sexual adventures with women, of course. But throughout the novel, Sal and Dean encounter people from the working class and underclass. They pick fruit with the Hispanic farmworkers in California, and when the car isn’t working, they hitch rides with truckers. The road trip itself destabilizes the 1950s literary emphasis on the coasts. And Joyce Johnson credits the novel for inspiring the romance of the road that took hold of the hitchhiking 1960s counterculture.
If On the Road was written quickly, it took a long time finding a home. Rejected by countless presses because of the sexual content and the experimental writing style, the novel was finally picked up by Viking Press. But it took time. So Kerouac did not anticipate (or even hope for) the immediate literary success that On the Road achieved. Given the manuscript’s many rejection notices, he simply hoped the published novel would not be panned. Millstein’s review caught him off-guard, and he wasn’t prepared for the immediate public response. On the night the review came out, Joyce Johnson writes, “Jack lay down obscure for the last time in his life. The ringing phone woke him the next morning and he was famous.”
In response to his newfound fame, the manuscripts Kerouac had written prior to On the Road were published. All marked with the same improvisational jazz style and peppered with the voices he heard around him — the babes lost in the wood, hip-flask-slinging madmen, steaming café flirts. In Subterraneans he wrote about an interracial relationship, still dangerous and illegal in many states.
Tristessa is set in Mexico City and chronicles the narrator’s relationship with a junky prostitute. Desolation Angels draws on Kerouac’s experience as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak, and chronicles his disillusionment with the Buddhism he had previously embraced. Always he wrote about himself, and always with a vulnerability that few men of the period were willing to show. The novels did well, but in the wake of success, Jack himself no longer felt safe. Nine months after On the Road‘s publication, he was badly beaten outside the San Remo Bar in New York City. Shortly after, Neal Cassady was set up and arrested for selling marijuana; Kerouac blamed himself for calling attention to his friend. He was drinking heavily and taking speed. Perhaps because of the substance abuse, he thought he was being hunted. When Ferlinghetti tried to rescue him from an alcohol detox-gone-bad in Big Sur, Kerouac attacked him and accused Ferlinghetti of stealing the void. Ferlinghetti thought he had gone mad.
The rest of Kerouac’s life was hard. He spiraled down into the alcoholism that finally killed him, unable to complete any of the detox attempts he tried (“He can’t do it alone,” Burroughs kept lamenting. “He needs help.”) He had deep misgivings about the hippy movement and their embrace of a mysticism that he found alienating. And he disliked their embrace of his work. He sensed an orthodoxy in the counterculture that he felt left little room for people like him, for the Jack who used to be. As the ‘60s went on, he embraced a rightwing politics that opened him to criticism from the Left and scorn from the Right (in the contemporary landscape David Mamet comes the closest to a late Kerouac). William F. Buckley’s treatment of him on Firing Line (1968) is just one example of the way the Right used him; Buckley posed a series of snide questions to the clearly inebriated author, and when Kerouac became confused, he openly ridiculed him.
In 1969, at age 47, Kerouac died of an abdominal hemorrhage, brought on by a lifetime of heavy drinking. But however badly Kerouac ended, he left behind a remarkable body of work: 54 volumes (some published posthumously) that have influenced Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Tom Waits, the Doors, and the Grateful Dead, and which continue to influence new generations of writers at Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and beyond. He developed the art of reading alongside jazz musicians and incorporating jazz rhythms into his written work. And while his work certainly does not rise to the level of critique we would welcome now, there are flashes in his prose of a racial awareness that was also exceptional in 1957. In one of the revised passages in the On the Road scroll, he describes walking through a black and Latinx neighborhood in Denver, after a day doing hard labor. The revisions make it clear he wanted to strengthen his language about the impoverished nature of whiteness. “I wished I were a Denver Mexican,” he wrote, “anything but what I was so drearily, a ‘white’ man disillusioned. All my life I’d had white ambitions,” ambitions that led him nowhere he really wanted to be.
This year is Kerouac’s centenary. There have already been some events, including events in Bloomington. Early this year there was a quiet celebration of a Tibetan translation of On the Road, and there is a large celebration planned in Lowell, Mass., later this year.
As part of IU Cinema’s Creative Collaborations program, The Writers Guild at Bloomington has organized a series of screenings to take place Oct. 14-16. Part of the goal here is to celebrate Kerouac, of course, but also to situate him within the larger Beat movement and postwar culture.
On Friday, Oct. 14, IU Cinema will be screening Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie’s Pull My Daisy (1959, story written by Kerouac; narration by Kerouac). Based on an incident in the life of Neal Cassady and his wife, the painter Carolyn, the film tells the story of a railway brakeman whose wife invites a respected bishop over for dinner. However, the brakeman’s bohemian friends crash the party with comic results. The film is notable not only for Kerouac’s story and the performance of people like Allen Ginsberg and Delphine Seyrig, but also for Robert Frank’s stunning photography. There will be a Q&A following the film.
On Saturday, Oct. 15, IU Cinema will be screening Walter Salles’s On the Road (2012). A film adaptation of Kerouac’s novel had been in the work for ages. Kerouac himself wrote a letter to Marlon Brando suggesting that he play Dean Moriarty against Kerouac’s Sal Paradise. Brando did not respond. In 1979, Francis Ford Coppola bought the screen rights and over the years hired a number of different writers to adapt the novel for screen, and tried to interest nearly as many directors in the project. In 2004, after Coppola saw Motorcycle Diaries, he asked Walter Salles to direct the picture. Salles was drawn to the project because, he said, the novel is about people “trying to break into a society that’s impermeable” and “a generation that collides with its society.” But it still took years for Salles to find the right approach and tone; he even made a documentary, Searching for On the Road (2011), in order to get a better feel for Kerouac.
On Sunday, Oct. 16, for broader context, The Writers Guild will be screening Chuck Workman’s doc The Source (1999), a documentary about the Beats, at 3 pm at the Monroe County Public Library.
Also on Sunday, Oct. 16, Anthony Harvey’s The Dutchman (based on the 1964 play by Amiri Baraka, aka Leroi Jones) will be shown through the Ryder at 7 pm in the IU Fine Arts building. In this film, a white woman gets on a subway car and sits next to a black man; it ends badly. This is a very tense and disturbing film that needs to be seen more than it is.
Finally, although it is not officially part of the Kerouac and Beat Series, the IU Cinema will be screening Robert Frank’s Me and My Brother (1969) on October 29 at 7 pm as part of the Underground Film Series. Starring Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Joseph Chaiken, and others, this is a faux-vérité documentary that depicts bohemian life in 1960s New York.
An earlier version of this essay appeared in The Ryder Magazine’s September 2022 issue.
Joan Hawkins is Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at IU Bloomington. She has written extensively on the avant-garde and regularly teaches classes on Beat cinema. Her most recent book is William S. Burroughs Cutting Up the Century, co-edited with Alex Wermer-Colan, and is currently editing two anthologies of 1968, which include discussion of Kerouac’s influence on the counterculture.