Kerouac
by Sean McGahey
Jack Kerouac, thought of by many as the father of the beat movement, is considered one of the most influential American writers of the 20th Century. The innovator of what he called “spontaneous bop prosody”, his frenzied fast pace writing seemed to embody the energy of the post WW2 youth. Kerouac wrote like a jazz musician plays: fast, paying no attention to the rules. His lack of punctuation and sentence structure once prompted Truman Capote to say of his work, “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”
Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts on March 12, 1922. He began working for his father in his printing shop at the age of 10, thus beginning his love of the printed word. He attended both Catholic and public schools, and was a star athlete. He eventually won a football scholarship to Columbia University in New York. While at Columbia, he fell in with a literary crowd, befriending Alan Ginsberg and William Burroughs. After a leg injury ended his shot at football stardom in his sophomore year, Jack dropped out of Columbia and joined the Merchant Marines. He also tried to join the Navy but was discharged shortly afterwards.
Kerouac then went back to New York and began writing the somewhat autobiographical tales that would define the Beat Generation.
“Beat” was coined by Kerouac during a conversation with Alan Ginsberg. He said their generation was a “Beat Generation”. But the term “beat” also fit well in describing that generations musical influence of the day: jazz.
Kerouac is best known for his novels, “On the Road”, and “Dharma Bums”. “Subterraneans” is a short novel that can be both rewarding and somewhat difficult to read at times due the unconventional punctuation. Sentences can run on for pages, interrupted by paragraphs of side thoughts and distractions contained within parenthesis and brackets. Dashes are used almost as places to pause and catch ones breath. But it’s Kerouac’s use of such breathless prose that so perfectly describes the jazz club experiences that he is writing about.
“On the Road”, published in 1955, is about a writer named Sal Paradise (actually Kerouac) who meets and becomes obsessed with the character of Dean Moriarity. Dean is the fictional equivalent of Neal Cassady, a Beat icon who never published a word during his lifetime, but appears either as himself or is characterized in the literary works of John Clellon Holmes, Alan Ginsberg, Tom Wolfe, and is even memorialized in the music of The Grateful Dead. Sal spends the novel hitchhiking across America, joy riding with Dean to Mexico, and basically experiencing the freedom of being on the road in post war America. Perhaps his best novel, “On the Road” may soon be gracing the silver screen. The movie rights to the novel were bought some years back by Francis Ford Coppola, and if the rumor mill is correct, pre-production may have already begun.
“Dharma Bums” is one of Kerouac’s better novels, my personal favorite. It fictionalizes Kerouac’s experiences hanging out in Northern California with Poet Gary Snyder. Called Japhy in the novel, Snyder tutors Kerouac’s character in the teachings of Zen Buddhism. Many of these teachings take place on hiking trips to the tops of the Sierra Cascades. Later in the novel, Kerouac’s character meditates on these teachings, learning what it’s like to commune with nature during a summer long exercise in isolation when he takes employment as a mountain top fire lookout in Washington state.
In his later life, Kerouac became an alcoholic recluse, living with his ailing mother in Northport, Long Island. Kerouac died an alcoholic’s death in 1969 at the age of 47. While commercially, Kerouac could be considered a prolific writer, much of his writing is unpublished. He began writing journals and diaries at a very young age and continued until his death. He was also a very prolific letter writer. These journals, notebooks, and letters had previously been kept private in the vaults of the Kerouac estate, but they have recently been turned over to historian Douglas Brinkley. Brinkley is currently working on a massive multi-volume edition of this previously unpublished work, and will also pen a biography of Kerouac based on the insights of his journals.