Shortly Brief original name Jean-Louis Kerouac: (born March 12, 1922, Lowell, Mass., U.S.—died Oct. 21, 1969, St. Petersburg, Fla.) American novelist, poet, and leader of the Beat movement whose most famous book, On the Road (1957), had broad cultural influence before it was recognized for its literary merits. On the Road captured the spirit of its time as no other work of the 20th century had since F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925).
Childhood and early influences
Lowell, Mass., a mill town, had a large French Canadian population; while Kerouac's mother worked in a shoe factory and his father worked as a printer, Kerouac attended a French Canadian school in the morning and continued his studies in English in the afternoon. He spoke joual, a Canadian dialect of French, and so, though he was an American, he viewed his country as if he were a foreigner. Kerouac subsequently went to the Horace Mann School, a preparatory school in New York City, on a football scholarship. There he met Henri Cru, who helped Kerouac find jobs as a merchant seaman, and Seymour Wyse, who introduced Kerouac to jazz.
In 1940 Kerouac enrolled at Columbia University, where he met two writers who would become lifelong friends: Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. Together with Kerouac they are the seminal figures of the literary movement known as Beat, a term introduced to Kerouac by Herbert Huncke, a Times Square junkie, petty thief, hustler, and writer. It meant “down-and-out” as well as “beatific” and therefore signified the bottom of existence (from a financial and an emotional point of view) as well as the highest, most spiritual high.
Kerouac's childhood and early adulthood were marked by loss: his brother Gerard died in 1926, when Gerard was nine. Kerouac's boyhood friend Sebastian Sampas died in 1944 and his father, Leo, in 1946. In a deathbed promise to Leo, Kerouac pledged to care for his mother, Gabrielle, affectionately known as Memere. Kerouac married three times: to Edie Parker (1944, annulled 1946); to Joan Haverty (1951), with whom he had a daughter, Jan Michelle; and to Stella Sampas (1966), the sister of Sebastian, who had died at Anzio, Italy, during World War II.
On the Road and other early work
By the time Kerouac and Burroughs met in 1944, Kerouac had already written a million words. His boyhood ambition had been to write the “great American novel.” His first novel, The Town & the City (1950), received favourable reviews but was considered derivative of the novels of Thomas Wolfe, whose Time and the River (1935) and You Can't Go Home Again (1940) were then popular. In his novel Kerouac articulated the “New Vision,” that “everything was collapsing,” a theme that would dominate his grand design to have all his work taken together as “one vast book”—The Legend of Duluoz.
Yet Kerouac was unhappy with the pace of his prose. The music of bebop jazz artists Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker began to drive Kerouac toward his “spontaneous bop prosody,” as Ginsberg later called it, which took shape in the late 1940s through various drafts of his second novel, On the Road. The original manuscript, a scroll written in a three-week blast in 1951, is legendary: composed of approximately 120 feet (37 metres) of paper taped together and fed into a manual typewriter, the scroll allowed Kerouac the fast pace he was hoping to achieve. He also hoped to publish the novel as a scroll so that the reader would not be encumbered by having to turn the pages of a book. Rejected for publication at first, it finally was printed in 1957. In the interim, Kerouac wrote several more “true-life” novels, Doctor Sax (1959), Maggie Cassidy (1959), and Tristessa (1960) among them.
Kerouac found himself a national sensation after On the Road received a rave review from The New York Times critic Gilbert Millstein. While Millstein extolled the literary merits of the book, to the American public the novel represented a departure from tradition. Kerouac, though, was disappointed with having achieved fame for what he considered the wrong reason: little attention went to the excellence of his writing and more to the novel's radically different characters and its characterization of hipsters and their nonconformist celebration of sex, jazz, and endless movement. The character Dean Moriarty (based on Neal Cassady, another important influence on Kerouac's style) was an American archetype, embodying “IT,” an intense moment of heightened experience achieved through fast driving, talking, or “blowing” (as a horn player might) or in writing. In On the Road Sal Paradise explains his fascination with others who have “IT,” such as Dean Moriarty and Rollo Greb as well as jazz performers: “The only ones for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved.” These are characters for whom the perpetual now is all.
Readers often confused Kerouac with Sal Paradise, the amoral hipster at the centre of his novel. The critic Norman Podhoretz famously wrote that Beat writing was an assault against the intellect and against decency. This misreading dominated negative reactions to On the Road. Kerouac's rebellion, however, is better understood as a quest for the solidity of home and family, what he considered “the hearthside ideal.” He wanted to achieve in his writing that which he could find neither in the promise of America nor in the empty spirituality of Roman Catholicism; he strived instead for the serenity that he had discovered in his adopted Buddhism. Kerouac felt that the Beat label marginalized him and prevented him from being treated as he wanted to be treated, as a man of letters in the American tradition of Herman Melville and Walt Whitman.
Sketching, poetry, and Buddhism
Despite the success of the “spontaneous prose” technique Kerouac used in On the Road, he sought further refinements to his narrative style. Following a suggestion by Ed White, a friend from his Columbia University days, that he sketch “like a painter, but with words,” Kerouac sought visual possibilities in language by combining spontaneous prose with sketching. Visions of Cody (written in 1951–52 and published posthumously in 1972), an in-depth, more poetic variation of On the Road describing a buddy trip and including transcripts of his conversation with Cassady (now fictionalized as Cody), is the most successful realization of the sketching technique.
As he continued to experiment with his prose style, Kerouac also bolstered his standing among the Beat writers as a poet supreme. With his sonnets and odes he ranged across Western poetic traditions. He also experimented with the idioms of blues and jazz in such works as Mexico City Blues (1959), a sequential poem comprising 242 choruses. After he met the poet Gary Snyder in 1955, Kerouac's poetry, as well as that of Ginsberg and fellow Beats Philip Whalen and Lew Welch, began to show the influence of the haiku, a genre mostly unknown to Americans at that time. (The haiku of Bash, Buson, Masaoka Shiki, and Issa had not been translated into English until the pioneering work of R.H. Blyth in the late 1940s.) While Ezra Pound had modeled his poem In a Station of the Metro (1913) after Japanese haiku, Kerouac, departing from the 17-syllable, 3-line strictures, redefined the form and created an American haiku tradition. In the posthumously published collection Scattered Poems (1971), he proposed that the “Western haiku” simply say a lot in three short lines:
Above all, a Haiku must be very simple and free of all poetic trickery and make a little picture and yet be as airy and graceful as a Vivaldi Pastorella.
In his pocket notebooks, Kerouac wrote and rewrote haiku, revising and perfecting them. He also incorporated his haiku into his prose. His mastery of the form is demonstrated in his novel The Dharma Bums (1958).
Kerouac turned to Buddhist study and practice from 1953 to 1956, after his “road” period and in the lull between composing On the Road in 1951 and its publication in 1957. In the fall of 1953 he finished The Subterraneans (it would be published in 1958). Fed up with the world after the failed love affair upon which the book was based, he read Henry David Thoreau and fantasized a life outside civilization. He immersed himself in the study of Zen, beginning his genre-defying Some of the Dharma in 1953 as reader's notes on Dwight Goddard's A Buddhist Bible (1932); the work grew into a massive compilation of spiritual material, meditations, prayers, haiku, and musings on the teaching of Buddha. In an attempt to replicate the experience of Han Shan, a reclusive Chinese poet of the Tang dynasty (618–907), Kerouac spent 63 days atop Desolation Peak in Washington state. Kerouac recounted this experience in Desolation Angels (1965) using haiku as bridges (connectives in jazz) between sections of spontaneous prose. In 1956 he wrote a sutra, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity. He also began to think of his entire oeuvre as a “Divine Comedy of the Buddha,” thereby combining Eastern and Western traditions.
Later work
By the 1960s Kerouac had finished most of the writing for which he is best known. In 1961 he wrote Big Sur in 10 days while living in the cabin of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a fellow Beat poet, in California's Big Sur region. Two years later Kerouac's account of his brother's death was published as the spiritual Visions of Gerard. Another important autobiographical book, Vanity of Duluoz (1968), recounts stories of his childhood, his schooling, and the dramatic scandals that defined early Beat legend.
In 1969 Kerouac was broke, and many of his books were out of print. An alcoholic, he was living with his third wife and his mother in St. Petersburg, Fla., where he spent his time in local bars. A week after he had been beaten by fellow drinkers whom he had antagonized, he died of internal hemorrhaging in front of his television while watching The Galloping Gourmet—the ultimate ending for a writer who came to be known as the “martyred king of the Beats.”
Assessment
Kerouac's insistence upon “First thought, best thought” and his refusal to revise was controversial. He felt that revision was a form of literary lying, imposing a form farther away from the truth of the moment, counter to his intentions for his “true-life” novels. For the composition of haiku, however, Kerouac was more exacting. Yet he accomplished the task of revision by rewriting. Hence, there exist several variations of On the Road, the final one being the 1957 version that was a culmination of Kerouac's own revisions as well as the editing of his publisher. Significantly, Kerouac never saw the final manuscript before publication. Still, many critics found the long sweeping sentences of On the Road ragged and grammatically derelict.
Kerouac explained his quest for pure, unadulterated language—the truth of the heart unobstructed by the lying of revision—in two essays published in the Evergreen Review: Essentials of Spontaneous Prose (1958) and Belief and Technique for Modern Prose (1959). On the grammatically irreverent sentences, Kerouac extolled a “method” eschewing conventional punctuation in favour of dashes. In Essentials of Spontaneous Prose he recommended the “vigorous space dash separating rhetorical breathing (as jazz musician drawing breath between outblown phrases)”; the dash allowed Kerouac to deal with time differently, making it less prosaic and linear and more poetic. He also described his manner of developing an image, which began with the “jewel center,” from which he wrote in a “semi-trance,” “without consciousness,” his language governed by sound, by the poetic effect of alliteration and assonance, until he reached a plateau. A new “jewel center” would be initiated, stronger than the first, and would spiral out as he riffed (in an analogy with a jazz musician). He saw himself as a horn player blowing one long note, as he told interviewers for The Paris Review. His technique explains the unusual organization of his writing, which is not haphazard or sloppy but systematic in the most individualized sense. In fact, Kerouac revised On the Road numerous times by recasting his story in book after book of The Legend of Duluoz. His “spontaneity” allowed him to develop his distinct voice.
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