franciscovazbrasil: JACK KEROUAC

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) - original name Jean-Luis Lebris de Kerouac

American novelist and poet, leading figure and spokesman of the Beat Generation. Kerouac's search for spiritual liberation produced his best known work, the autobiographical novel ON THE ROAD (1957). The first beat novel was based on Kerouac's travels across America with his friend Neal Cassidy. Its importance was compared to Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises, generally seen as the testament of the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s.

"I stuck my head out of the window and took deep breaths of the fragrant air. It was the most beautiful of all moments. The madman was a brakeman with the Southern Pacific and he lived in Fresno; his father was also a brakeman. He lost his toe in the Oakland yards, switching, I didn't quite understand how. He drove me into buzzing Fresno and let me off by the south side of town. I went for a quick Coke in a little grocery by the tracks, and here came a melancholy Armenian youth along the red boxcars, and just at that moment locomotive howled, and I said to myself, Yes, yes, Saroyan town." (from On the Road)

Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, the third child of working-class French-Canadian èmigrés. His father, Leo, owned a print shop - he died of stomach cancer in 1946. Kerouac learned English as a second language, and first the French-Canadian dialect joual. When he was four, his beloved older brother Gerard died. Kerouac believed that Gerard followed him as a guardian angel. Kerouac went to parochial school where he was educated by Jesuits. In high school he was a star athlete. In 1939 he entered Columbia University on a football scholarship, but soon dropped out. He joined the navy and was discharged during World War II on psychiatric grounds. Kerouac served as a merchant seaman and roamed United States and Mexico. During this period he wrote the unpublished The Sea Is My Brother. His first novel, THE TOWN AND THE CITY, appeared in 1950. The account of the decline of his own family received good critics but Kerouac judged the novel as a failure.

While hanging around Columbia campus in 1944, Kerouac began to mix with a group of New York based intellectuals including William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, whose Bohemian life style and search for new philosophy profoundly influenced him. He was married for a short time with Edie Parker and after excessive use of Benzedrine he was hospitalized. Kerouac was addicted to the drug for most of his life.

In the early 1950s, Kerouac took a job in Washington State with the U.S. Forest Service as a fire watcher in a one-room fire lookout. In 1957, nine months before becoming famous with the publication of On the Road, he had an affair with Joyce Johnson (Glassman), who wrote about their relationship in Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957-1958 (2000). She was twenty-one. On the night of their first blind date in January 1957, Kerouac couldn't even afford to buy her a cup of coffee. "He told me how he'd promised his father that someday he'd buy his mother a house—maybe he'd really be able to do that eventually. He also hoped critics would admire his breakthrough into spontaneous, unfettered prose." (from Door Wide Open) As a writer Johnson did not gain such fame as the young men of the beat generation, proving perhaps with her fate the masculine character of the movement. "It's funny the way you and Allen and Peter came to town this winter and shook us all up," she notes in a letter. Just before the publication of On the Road Burroughs went with Ginsberg to Tangiers, where Burroughs was writing his most famous novel, The Naked Lunch.

On the Road was inspired by the drug-fuelled cross-country car rides that Kerouac made with Neal Cassady (1926-1968). The narrator, Sal Paradise, accompanies his friends on four separate trips as they travel the country, spending time in Colorado, California, Virginia, New York and Mexico. Carlo Marx is Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady is Dean Moriarty, who tells Sal: "... I can go anywhere in America and get what I want because it is the same in every corner. I know the people, I know what they do. We give and take and go in the incredibly complicated sweetness zigzagging every side." William Burroughs, who wrote under the pseudonym of William Lee about his heroin addiction, was Old Bull Lee - "... he was a teacher, and it may be said that he had every right to teach because he spent all his time learning; and the things he learned were what he considered to be and called "the facts of life," which he learned not only out of necessity but because he wanted to." The headlong style of the narrator underlines the description of lifestyle based on beauty, alcohol, jazz, sex, drugs, and mysticism. Kerouac wrote the book, at his kitchen table on West 20th Street, over a period of just 20 days on a single roll of telegraph paper. In the process he reinvented "automatic writing," which marked the writings of Surrealistic circles in Paris in the 1920s. Kerouac presented a new, spontaneous, unpolished style, the 'sound of the mind', similar to almost theatrical performance. It appealed subculture folksingers, hipsters, mystics, and writers. Truman Capote condemned to work, "That's not writing, that's typewriting", but it made Kerouac celebrated television personality and Neal Cassidy a model for an alternative lifestyle.

Kerouac´s THE DHARMA BUMS appeared in 1958. It paved way for Zen Buddhism as the philosophy for the bohemian artists´ communities of San Francisco´s North Beach, southern California´s Venice West and New York City´s Greenwich Village. The novel contained a portrait of the poet Gary Snyder, on whom the character Jaffe Ryder was based. The protagonist is Ray Smith, whose friend Ryder sees a vision of "thousands, or even millions of young Americans wandering around refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming all that crap they didn't really want anyway, such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least fancy new cars, certain hair oils and deodorants, etc." Smith starts to meditate, he rejects the society, and then returns to the world with the "vision of the freedom of eternity".

Disappointed by the way his works were misunderstood Kerouac retired to childhood town of Lowell, where he was looked after by his mother, Gabrielle, known as "Mémêre." When she had a paralysing stroke, Kerouac nursed her. Kerouac felt his role as a spokesman for the beat generation something of a burden, but occasionally participated to the cross-country adventures. More regularly he visited his home town's bars and clubs. He also married a local girl Stella Sampas. During these years he wrote a series of autobiographical novels. VISIONS OF GERARD (1963) was based on his childhood and depicted the last months in the life of the narrator's 9-year-old brother Gerard. "It is as though Kerouac believes that if only one were to write really bad prose, the result, with any kind of luck at all, would be literature, and disturbingly beautiful," wrote Saul Maloff in the New York Times (September 8, 1963). SATORI IN PARIS (1966) was an account of his quest for his Breton ancestors. "Somewhere during my ten days in Paris (and Brittany) I received an illumination of some kind that seems to've changed me again, towards what I suppose'll be my pattern for another seven years or more: in effect, a satori: the Japanese word for 'sudden illumination,' 'sudden awakening' or simply 'kick in the eye.'" THE SUBTERRANEANS (1958), was written in three days with the help of Benzedrine. It depicted Kerouac's - Leo Percepied in the book - affair with Mardou Fox, a mulatto woman. Critics were hot happy with its disintegration of syntax. In BIG SUR (1962) Kerouac's alter ego was Jack Duluoz. The book was part of the author's massive series The Duluoz Legend, in which he told the story of his life from 1922 to the summer of 1965.

Kerouac suffered abdominal hemorrhage whilst vomiting in his lavatory and died at home on October 21, 1969, in St. Petersburg, Florida. A few month earlier Neal Cassady's nude corpse had been discovered in Mexico. Kerouac's novel VISIONS OF CODY was published posthumously in 1972, but it was composed already in 1951-52. When his friends did not like On the Road, Kerouac started to write inserts to patch up the work. These grew into a new book. Although Ginsberg considered it a "holy mess", he did not change its rambling style and discontinuous structure which had the improvisational quality of jazz. New Directions published short selections from it in 1959, but rest of the work was rejected as pornographic. In 2000 appeared in digital format ORPHEUS EMERGED, the first full-length work of fiction after Vision of Cody. The novella was originally completed in 1945; in the new format the work includes also an introduction by the poet and scholar Robert Creeley, photographs, biography of the author, excerpts from Kerouac's journals, bibliographies, etc.

Jack Kerouac (pronounced [dʒak ˈkɛrʊæk]) (March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969) was an American novelist, writer, poet, artist, and part of the Beat Generation. While enjoying popular but little critical success during his own lifetime, Kerouac is now considered one of America's most important authors. The spontaneous, confessional prose style inspired other writers, including Tom Robbins, Richard Brautigan, Hunter S. Thompson, Ken Kesey, Tom Waits and Bob Dylan. Kerouac's best known works are On the Road and The Dharma Bums.

He divided most of his adult life between roaming the vast American landscape and living with his mother. Faced with a changing country, Kerouac sought to find his place, eventually bringing him to reject the values of the fifties. His writing often reflects a desire to break free from society's mold and to find meaning in life. This search may have led him to experiment with drugs (he used alcohol, psilocybin, marijuana, and benzedrine, among others to study spiritual teachings such as Buddhism) and to embark on trips around the world. His books are often credited as the catalyst for the 1960s counterculture.

Kerouac died in St. Petersburg, Florida at the age of forty-seven from an internal hemorrhage thought to have been caused by alcoholism.

Life

Kerouac was born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac, in Lowell, Massachusetts, to a family of French-Americans. His parents, Leo-Alcide Kerouac and Gabrielle-Ange Lévesque, were natives of the province of Quebec in Canada. Like many other Québécois of their generation, the Lévesques and Kerouacs were part of the Quebec emigration to New England to find employment. Jack didn't start to learn English until the age of six. At home, he and his family spoke Quebec French. At an early age, he was profoundly marked by the death of his elder brother Gérard, later prompting him to write the book Visions of Gerard.

Later, his athletic prowess led him to become a star on his local football team, and this achievement earned him scholarships to Boston College and Columbia University in New York. He entered Columbia University after spending the scholarship's required year at Horace Mann School. Kerouac broke his leg playing football during his freshman year, and he argued constantly with his coach who kept him benched; his football scholarship did not pan out. After this, he went to live with an old girlfriend, Edie Parker, in New York. It was in New York that Kerouac met the people with whom he was to journey around the world, and the subjects of many of his novels: the so-called Beat Generation, which included people such as Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady and William S. Burroughs. He joined the Merchant Marine in 1942. In 1943, he joined the United States Navy, but was discharged during World War II on psychiatric grounds---he was of "indifferent disposition."

During Kerouac's time at Columbia University, Burroughs and Kerouac got into trouble with the law for failing to report a murder; this incident formed the basis of a mystery novel the two collaborated on in 1945 entitled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (the novel was never published, although an excerpt from the manuscript would be included in the Burroughs compilation Word Virus). In between his sea voyages, Kerouac stayed in New York with friends from Fordham University in The Bronx. He started writing his first novel, called The Town and the City. It was published in 1950 under the name "John Kerouac" and earned him some respect as a writer. Unlike Kerouac's later work, which established his Beat style, The Town and the City is heavily influenced by Kerouac's reading of Thomas Wolfe.

Kerouac wrote constantly but did not publish his next novel for six years. Building upon previous drafts tentatively titled "The Beat Generation" and "Gone On The Road", Kerouac wrote what is now known as On the Road in April, 1951. ^[1] Fueled by Benzedrine and coffee, he completed the first version of the novel during a three week extended session of spontaneous confessional prose. This session produced the now famous scroll of On The Road. His technique was heavily influenced by Jazz, especially Bebop (and later Buddhism) as well as the famous Joan Anderson letter authored by Neal Cassady. Publishers rejected the book due to its experimental writing style and its sympathetic tone towards minorities and marginalized social groups of the United States in the 1950s. In 1957, Viking Press purchased the novel, demanding major revisions. ^[2]

The book was largely autobiographical, narrated from the point of view of the character Sal Paradise, describing Kerouac's roadtrip adventures across the United States and Mexico with Neal Cassady, the model for the character of Dean Moriarty. In a way, the story is a retelling of Mark Twain's classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, though in On the Road the narrator (Sal Paradise) is twice Huck's age and Kerouac's story is set in an America a hundred years after Twain's story. Kerouac's novel is often described as the defining work of the post-World War II Beat Generation and Kerouac came to be called "the king of the beat generation."

Kerouac's friendship with Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Gregory Corso, among others, defined a generation. Kerouac also wrote and narrated a "Beat" movie entitled Pull My Daisy in 1958. In 1954, Kerouac discovered Dwight Goddard's A Buddhist Bible at the San Jose Library, which marked the beginning of Kerouac's immersion into Buddhism. He chronicled parts of this, as well as some of his adventures with Gary Snyder and other San Francisco-area poets, in the book The Dharma Bums, set in California and published in 1958. The Dharma Bums, which some have called the sequel to On the Road, was written in Orlando, Florida during late 1957 through early 1958.

Kerouac developed something of a friendship with the scholar Alan Watts (cryptically named Arthur Wayne in Kerouac's novel Big Sur, and Alex Aums in Desolation Angels). He also met and had discussions with the famous Japanese Zen Buddhist authority D.T. Suzuki.

In July 1957, Kerouac moved to a small house on Clouser Ave. in the College Park section of Orlando, Florida to await the release of On the Road. A few weeks later, the review appears in the New York Times proclaiming Kerouac the voice of a new generation. Kerouac was hailed as a major American writer, and reluctantly as the voice of the Beat Generation. His fame would come as an unmanageable surge that would ultimately be his undoing.

John Antonelli's 1985 documentary Kerouac, the Movie begins and ends with footage of Kerouac reading from On the Road and 'Visions of Cody' from The Tonight Show with Steve Allen in 1957. Kerouac appears intelligent but shy. "Are you nervous?" asks Steve Allen. "Naw," says Kerouac.

In 1955 Kerouac wrote a biography of Siddhartha Gautama, entitled Wake Up, which was unpublished during his lifetime but eventually serialised in Tricycle magazine, 1993-95. Shortly before his death Kerouac told interviewer Joseph Lelyveld of the New York Times, "I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic." After pointing to a painting of Pope Paul VI, Kerouac noted, "You know who painted that? Me."[1]

He died on October 21, 1969 at St. Anthony's Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida, one day after being rushed, in severe abdominal pain, from his St. Petersburg home by ambulance. His death, at the age of 47, resulted from an internal hemorrhage caused by cirrhosis of the liver, the unfortunate result of a life of heavy drinking. He was living at the time with his third wife Stella, and his mother Gabrielle. He is buried in his home town of Lowell.

Style

Kerouac is considered by some as the "King of the Beatniks" as well as the "Father of the Hippies". Kerouac's method was heavily influenced by the prolific explosion of Jazz, especially the Bebop genre established by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and others. Later, Kerouac would include ideas he developed in his Buddhist studies, beginning with Gary Snyder. He called this style Spontaneous Prose, a literary technique akin to stream of consciousness. Kerouac's motto was "first-thought=best thought", and many of his books exemplified this approach including On the Road, Visions of Cody, Visions of Gerard, Big Sur, and The Subterraneans. The central features of this writing method was the idea of breath (borrowed from Jazz and from Buddhist meditation breathing), improvising words over the inherent structures of mind and language, and not editing a single word (much of his work was edited by Donald Merriam Allen, a major figure in Beat Generation poetry who also edited some of Ginsberg's work as well). Connected with his idea of breath was the elimination of the period, preferring to use a long, connecting dash instead. As such, the phrases occurring between dashes might resemble improvisational jazz licks. When spoken, the words might take on a certain kind of rhythm, though none of it pre-meditated.

Gary Snyder was greatly admired by Kerouac, and many of his ideas influenced Kerouac. The Dharma Bums contains accounts of a mountain climbing trip Kerouac took with Snyder. Kerouac took a job as a fire lookout one summer on Snyder's recommendation, which by many accounts was a difficult but ultimatley rewarding experience. Kerouac described the experience in his novel "Desolation Angels".

He would go on for hours to friends and strangers about his method, often drunk, which at first wasn't well received by Ginsberg, who had an acute awareness of the need to sell literature (to publishers) as much as write it, though he'd later be one of its great proponents, indeed Ginsberg was apparently influenced by Kerouac's free flowing prose method of writing in the composition of his masterpiece "Howl". It was at about the time that Kerouac wrote The Subterraneans that he was approached by Ginsberg and others to formally explicate exactly how he wrote it, how he did Spontaneous Prose. Among the writings he set down specifically about his Spontaneous Prose method, the most concise would be Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, a list of thirty "essentials."

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.."
—From Kerouac's famous novel "On The Road" which demonstrates his beautiful use of imagery in a beat style.

NOTE: Originally the term "beat" meant "weary", but it was later connected to jazz music like the "hip" vocabulary and cool manners of the Counter Culture artists´. "Beat" also appeared in Norman Mailer's essay The White Negro (1957): 'The words are man, go, put down, make, beat, cool, swing, with it, crazy, dig, creep, hip, square.' Several magazines published articles on the Beats and lexicons of their jargon. Teenage followers were called 'beatniks" - it was the time when the Soviet Union put the satellite Sputnik in space. (See The Atlas of World Literature, 1996). Jack Kerouac was among the first - perhaps the first - who coined the phrase 'the beat generation', source of the word 'beatnik'. The 'beats' rebelled against the conformity of 1950s society and valued artistic and personal freedom of expression. - For further reading: Kerouac: A Biography by A Charters (1973); Jack Kerouac by R.A. Hipkiss (1976); Jack's Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac by B. Gifford and L. Lee (1978); "On the Road": Text and Criticism, ed. by S. Donaldson (1979); Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac by Gerald Nicosia (1994); Jack Kerouac's Duluoz Legend: The Mythic Form of an Autobiographical Fiction by James T. Jones (1999); Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957-1958 by Joyce Johnson (2000); Nobody's Wife by Joan Haverty Kerouac (2000); Kerouac's Spontaneous Poetics by Regina Weinreich (2002) - Note: Kerouac's birthday in Lexikon der Weltliteratur (1988) is 13.3.1922! - In this calendar: March 12, 1922.