The Conservative Kerouac

[Mark Kohut]

"spurred ever faster by the hostile media".....not in the United States I
grew up in and the media I watched. The Beats were
successes.

On Mon, Oct 2, 2017 at 3:12 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de
> wrote:

>
> " ... a book I still believe is one of the great American novels, *On the
> Road*, by Jack Kerouac."
>
> (*Slow Learner*, Introduction)
>
> Robert Dean Lurie:
>
> > ... The key to understanding Kerouac lies in a close examination of his
> roots, for it was in the small French Canadian community of Lowell,
> Massachusetts that the future author was inculcated with the values that
> would carry him through his life. He did indeed go on to lead a wild
> existence filled with alcohol, drugs, and perpetual shiftlessness; he fled
> from monogamy as from leprosy. Yet one cannot grasp the soul of Kerouac
> unless one understands his fundamentally traditional core. He never wished
> to foment a revolution. He did not desire to change America; he intended to
> document, celebrate, and, in the end, eulogize it.
>
> Jean-Louis (“Jack”) Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922, the
> son of French Canadian immigrants. His father Leo, like so many immigrants,
> fiercely loved his adopted country. This belief in the land of opportunity
> remained with him even after his Catholicism lapsed in the wake of
> devastating business failures. Jack’s conservatism, like his father’s, was
> the conservatism of the old ways: of hard work and even harder drink, of
> big blue-collar families passing down oral traditions. Above all, it was a
> conservatism of the natural world: of the large, solid, protective trees,
> of the perpetually roaring Merrimack and Concord Rivers—all combining to
> cast that crucial illusion of unchangingness that, in the best of
> circumstances, cradles and fortifies a soul for its journey beyond
> childhood. Late in life Kerouac would tell William F. Buckley Jr., “My
> father and my mother and my sister and I have always voted Republican,
> *always*.” This had nothing to do with party planks and everything to do
> with family identity, with holding onto *something*, no matter how
> arbitrary, in an otherwise disorienting world. * We’re Kerouacs and this
> is what we do. *
>
> Hand in hand with the politics was the pre-Vatican II Catholicism that
> saturated Lowell’s tight-knit French Canadian community. Gabrielle
> Kerouac—Jack’s mother—matched Leo’s civic pride with a fervent religious
> faith, which if anything intensified after the death of Jack’s older
> brother Gerard, whom Jack would later eulogize as an unheralded saint in
> the novel *Visions of Gerard*. This was that majestic, fearsome
> Catholicism that now exists purely in the realm of imagination for most
> modern practitioners: the Catholicism of the Latin mass, of all-powerful
> priests, of God as the unknowable, awe-inspiring *other.* To New
> England’s mostly impoverished French Canadians, the Catholic Church served
> as de facto government, educator, extended family, and cultural arbitrator.
> Perhaps as a result of this spiritual immersion, both Gabrielle and Jack
> saw signs of God and angels everywhere.
>
> “The Catholic Church is a weird church,” Jack later wrote to his friend
> and muse Neal Cassady. “Much mysticism is sown broadspread from its ritual
> mysteries till it extends into the very lives of its constituents and
> parishoners.” It is impossible to overstate the influence of Catholicism on
> all of Kerouac’s work, save perhaps those books written during his Buddhist
> period in the mid-to-late 1950s. The influence is so obvious and so pervasive,
> in fact, that Kerouac became justifiably incensed when Ted Berrigan of the *Paris
> Review* asked during a 1968 interview, “How come you never write about
> Jesus?” Kerouac’s reply: “I’ve never written about Jesus? … You’re an
> insane phony … *All I write about* is Jesus.”
>
> Berrigan ought to have known better. But casual readers can be forgiven
> for failing to grasp the religiosity in Kerouac’s writing. After all, his
> version of Christianity esteemed visions and personal experience over
> doctrine and dogma. He felt a special affinity for such offbeat souls as
> St. Francis of Assissi, St. Therese of Liseux (“The Little Flower”), and
> Thomas Merton, all of whom to some extent de-emphasized legalism in favor
> of a direct union with God. Beyond the confines of the Catholic Church, the
> influence of the painter and ecstatic poet William Blake loomed just as
> large and perhaps fueled Kerouac’s disregard for what he perceived to be
> restrictive sexual mores.
>
> Of course, Kerouac is best known not for his lovely Lowell-centered books
> but for *On the Road*, a breathless jazz-inflected torrent of words
> initially typed out onto a “scroll”—actually hundreds of pages of tracing
> paper taped together and fed continuously through his typewriter—during one
> epic coffee-fuelled writing session in 1951 and ultimately published in
> 1957. The book, now considered an American classic, documents the author’s
> real-life adventures traipsing around the country in his mid-20s with
> friends Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady who,
> together with Kerouac, would comprise the core of “The Beat Generation,”
> the last great American literary movement. Much drinking, drugging, and
> fornicating ensues over the course of *Road’*s 320 pages. Not
> surprisingly, these prurient elements did not endear Kerouac to the
> mainstream right of his time, which irked the young author, as he felt no
> affinity for the left.
>
> He never saw the impartial documenting of his own reckless youth as
> license for others to drop out of society. If anything, the downbeat ending
> of *Road*, in which Kerouac predicts the frantic, kicks-obsessed “Dean
> Moriarty’s” (Neal Cassady’s) eventual slide into oblivion, as well as his
> unflinching depiction of his own nervous breakdown from alcoholic excess
> in the follow-up novel *Big Sur*, make quite clear the inevitable outcome
> of a “life on the road.” But Kerouac should not have been surprised by the
> right’s reaction; this was, after all, not conservative writing. The
> books did not follow the established standards of the novel and, in
> reality, were not novels at all but something else entirely: “confessional
> picaresque memoirs” (a phrase coined by Beat scholar Ann Charters), with
> the names of the participants changed to avoid accusations of libel. The
> conservative critics, missing the deeper themes of loneliness and the
> yearning for God, lambasted Kerouac for encouraging delinquency, while
> critics of all stripes complained about his sloppiness and occasional
> incoherece.
>
> These commentators had a point: as novels, the books could be
> frustratingly uneven. Readers often found themselves bewildered by the
> sheer number of characters drifting in and out of the pages, unable to keep
> track of all the “mad ones” that Kerouac strained to include in his
> storylines. Why, the critics wondered, couldn’t Kerouac simply create a few
> composite characters embodying his friends’ most noteworthy traits? By any
> standard such an authorial modification would have vastly improved the
> readability of the books.
>
> But that was not Kerouac’s aim. He wished to capture the truth, his truth,
> as best and as purely as he could. And he wanted to do this spontaneously,
> like a jazz musician wailing on his horn during an onstage improvisation.
> Revision, in Kerouac’s eyes, would only dilute the purity of the original
> performance. Furthermore, since he viewed his writing vocation as rooted in
> the Sacrament of Reconciliation: revision was tantamount to lying in the
> confessional. It might have have resulted in better novels, but they
> would no longer have been “spontaneous” and “true” novels. And it is the
> spontaneity and the emotional truth of these books, more than anything
> else, that continue to speak to readers.
>
> It’s easy to approach *On the Road *with cynicism: an almost rapturous
> naïveté, or idiocy, permeates throughout. Yet this wide-eyed quality is
> actually one of the book’s great strengths; it evokes the exhilaration of
> being young, of leaving home for the first time and venturing out into the
> wider world with an open heart and credulous mind. Kerouac had the
> beguiling ability to find the admirable and holy in every soul he
> encountered on his travels, just as he had seen angels and the Holy Mother
> emerging from every corner in Lowell. And who has not experienced the sweet
> rush of moral transgression or the anguish of having to accept the
> consequences of such behavior? *On the Road *captures those emotions
> expertly.
>
> Kerouac’s self-destructive nature, which led to his premature death from
> alcohol-induced hemhorraging, is perhaps the most curious aspect of his
> life story. Why would a man who worked so relentlessly at his craft, who
> endured 15 years of obscurity and rejection before his triumphant
> breakthrough, and who seemed to derive blissed-out enjoyment from even the
> most mundane aspects of life methodically destroy everything he had worked
> so hard to attain?
>
> The answer may lie in a combination of near-crippling shyness and the very
> emotional openness that gave his writing such warmth. A fundamentally
> quiet, sensitive soul, Kerouac was woefully ill-equipped for the spotlight
> and had very little tolerance for criticism. Alcohol bolstered his
> confidence to speak in public and partially anaesthetized the sting of the
> many bad reviews his books received. Yet it was not enough. His friends
> watched helplessly as he barrelled onward to his demise, spurred ever
> faster by the hostile media.
>
> As the apolitical Beat Generation metastasized into the heavily
> politicized hippie movement, Kerouac’s despondency and sense of alienation
> deepened. “I made myself famous by writing ‘songs’ and lyrics about the
> beauty of the things I did and ugliness too,” he said in a heated exchange
> with polical activist Ed Sanders on Buckley’s “Firing Line*.*”* “You *made
> yourself famous by saying, ‘Down with this, down with that, throw eggs at
> this, throw eggs at that!’ Take it with you. I cannot use your refuse; you
> may have it back.” ... <
>
> http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-conservative-kerouac/
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20171003/96009e6b/attachment.html>