The Conservative Kerouac

[Mark Kohut]

My experience was NOT about his appearances touring for that book. I was
too young and knew nothing.

And, I won't doubt this guy's interpretation since I know nothing, and
Kerouac may easily have been "hurt' by negative reviews
but I do know that when I came along and read him, I also learned of many
positive reviews of On The Road, led, to me and by the nation
(usually) by that over-the-top canon-making review in The New York Times....

Some writers sorta feel only the negative ones.....maybe that was him...

When I came along to read him and other works of his, he was selling like a
movement leader, like a writer who had to be read,
the Beats a 'revolution' in my time.....

But then there was Truman Capote and others surely.



On Tue, Oct 3, 2017 at 11:02 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:

>
> Was that your experience? Hard to believe ...
>
> > ... Though undoubtedly ambitious, Kerouac was utterly unprepared for the
> fame, notoriety and controversy that followed On the Road. *He was hurt
> by the many negative reviews of the book, and by the parodies of the Beat
> generation that suddenly started appearing on mainstream television chat
> shows*. In interviews from the time, he is palpably ill at ease,
> sometimes inebriated. In the most recent biography of the writer, Kerouac:
> His Life and Work, Paul Mather writes: 'The obscurity that Kerouac by turn
> loved and loathed had vanished. He began drinking.'
> Twelve years later, Kerouac was dead ... <
>
> https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/aug/05/fiction.jackkerouac
>
>
> Am 03.10.2017 um 10:46 schrieb 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/
>>
>>
>>
>
>
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