Pynchon and Catholicism

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

" ... a book I still believe is one of the great American novels, ON THE 
ROAD, by Jack Kerouac."

Thomas Pynchon: Slow Learner (Introduction)

+ ... 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 incoherence.

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 ... +

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-conservative-kerouac/