The Conservative Kerouac

[John Bailey]

When I first read On the Road in the 90s (my late teens) I arrived at
a near-universally loved and iconic work of counterculture America...
and found it very conservative indeed. By that time the mythology of
the free-wheeling free-loving white dude without care or
responsibility whose very existence sticks it to the man was the
opposite of radical, and would soon be coopted by everyone from Steve
Jobs (Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels) to Donald
Drumpf. That this figure could in any way be a heroic outsider or
marginalised voice was mystifying to me (at the time).
Funnily enough it took reading John Cheever's complete short stories
in chronological order for me to get a real sense of the Man the
Kerouac was offering an alternative to becoming in America at the
time. I get it now, although I feel OtR is quite historical in its
way.

On Wed, Oct 4, 2017 at 2:11 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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/
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l