The Conservative Kerouac

[Ian Livingston]

"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."



Those two paragraphs miss everything we now know about alcoholism
(substance use disorder)--as a description of the disease, it passes fairly
accurate, in it's poetic way, but it misses the point that Kerouac was an
alcohol addict and there was no science in place to address addiction at
the time. The science remains new, but it goes a lot further than AA, for
instance, ever dreamed during Kerouac's life.

On Tue, Oct 3, 2017 at 1:46 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> "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/
>>
>>
>>
>
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