Lesson 4

The Legend of Duluoz (aka Jack Kerouac)

On the Road to his alcoholic demise.

Kerouac’s Formative Years

Jean Louis Libris de Kerouac was born March 12, 1922, in Lowell, Massachusetts, to French-Canadian parents, Leo Alcide, a printer, and Gabrielle Ange Levesque. He had two older siblings, Gerard and Caroline (nicknamed Nin). Until he entered school, Jack spoke French-Canadian dialect, and for most of his life he was known to his loved ones as Ti Jean, or Little Jack. The diminutive identity is very telling, for the home place was the absolute center of his life, and even though he traveled widely, he always returned home to live with his mother, Mémêre. In fact, he was living with her when he died in St. Petersburg, Florida, on October 21, 1969.

As a child, he had a rich fantasy life — and some would say the same was true of the adult Jack. Ti Jean also faced harsh realities; one of the pivotal events of his formative years was the death of his beloved Gerard, who died at age nine, when Jack was four. The loss of his beloved elder brother haunted Jack, and one of the most stirring of Kerouac’s books is Visions of Gerard.

When he was in high school, his father’s business foundered, and Jack dreamed of saving the family by gaining notoriety playing college football and eventually owning an insurance business. He got the football scholarship at Columbia, but reality intervened again, and he broke his leg, failed chemistry, and shipped out to Greenland after enlisting in the Marines and the Coast Guard on the same day.

When he returned to Lowell, his parents persuaded him to return to Columbia, as the coach wanted him back on the team. He quit the team for good after one game because the coach kept him on the bench. The Navy looked good, and he joined, but he refused to follow orders; he started his first novel there (The Sea Is My Brother) and was honorably discharged after six months as an “indifferent character.” After his discharge, his parents encouraged him to get a job, but he insisted that he was an artist. At odds with his parents over his future, he returned to New York, where he met Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, and William S. Burroughs. He also had a two-month marriage with Edie Parker, the roommate of Burrough’s future common-law wife Joan Vollmer, during this time. He made an intense, private study of literature and literary criticism, admiring and emulating the style of Thomas Wolfe. His first novel, The Town and the City (1950), explored the tensions of his life during these years — the clashing values of his working class Catholic upbringing and his benzedrine-driven city life.

Unpublished Manuscripts in his Knapsack

Kerouac was sure that The Town and the City would launch his literary career and he would garner the recognition he deserved, but that was not to be. For the next several years he wrote manuscript after manuscript. He had a contract for three books with Carl Solomon, but all three were rejected. He enlisted an agent, who also had no luck placing Kerouac’s manuscripts with publishers. He also crossed the country a number of times with Neal Cassady, spending money that his mother earned working at a shoe factory. And when he was drained and exhausted, he returned to her home to live.

Though the New York crowd had begun to move, some to far-flung places, they maintained constant contact through letters, taking care to keep one another apprised of their literary experiences and experiments. Kerouac outgrew the influence of Thomas Wolfe, believing that The Town and the City wasn’t as successful because it was so overtly derivative of the works of Wolfe. He began looking for a writing style that captured the revolutionary spirit he and Ginsberg had envisioned for the new literature. His frustration grew increasingly intense as each manuscript was rejected, but for five years he plodded on, driven to write novels that would establish his greatness as a writer. He made many road trips with Cassady. He married again, briefly, a woman named Joan Haverty. He went to Mexico and took a lot of drugs. He bounced back to Lowell, Denver, and San Francisco.

In all of his journeys he seemed to be looking for one thing: a writing style that would be revolutionary — and publishable. He remained convinced of his genius; he remained disappointed as each manuscript was rejected. He was jealous when John Clellon Holmes published Go. He followed Cassady and Ginsberg to the West Coast. He dreamed, he mulled, and he never quit typing.

Spontaneous Prose

He typed for three weeks straight, the original draft of On the Road, reeling it onto a single roll of paper. Six months later his writing revolution began when three threads of thought began to weave themselves together. From the jazzmen he had seen the beauty of improvisation, and he realized that he could produce “spontaneous prose” — just “blow” words onto the pages as the players blew notes; simultaneously heedless and purposeful, the words could just spill out. He also read Cassady’s letters, highly detailed stream of consciousness pieces that spun stories fast and precise. Cassady embodied the “Beat” impulse, and Kerouac also made him the “voice” of the Beats. Inspired by Cassady’s letters, Kerouac tried to create a voice like Neal’s to the page, rushing with detail, pulsing with rhythm and jangly grace.

Finally, on October 25, 1951, while Kerouac was having Chinese food with Ed White, a friend of Cassady’s from Denver, White suggested that he could approach the page as the painter would approach his canvas. Kerouac dubbed the new style of writing “sketching” and spent the next six months revising On the Road. A fourth influence came from Burroughs. Kerouac was much taken with his flat, reportorial tone, and Ti Jean wanted his prose to have the spontaneity of jazz and Cassady, but he also wanted it to be unadorned, almost journalistic in its accuracy.

He also began another book, Visions of Cody, about Cassady, who was at times like a brother to Kerouac. He made his way to the Bay Area, where Ginsberg and Cassady had gone, rejected manuscripts piling up in his knapsack.

In 1954 he returned home to live with his mother, sister, and brother-in-law. He took a nostalgic trip back to Lowell, and a ray of hope emerged when he realized that “beat” also connoted “beatific” and “beatitude.” To his family’s dismay, he also began to study Buddhism. Rejections continued, and soon he was saving money so he could hitchhike to San Francisco, accumulate money working for the railroad, and move to Mexico with Ginsberg.

Acceptance, At Last

July 1955 brought acceptance, finally, when Malcolm Cowley and Keith Jennison of Viking Press bought the manuscript Kerouac called “Beat Generation” — better known as On the Road. Kerouac, who had once refused to make any revisions, willingly omitted passages to make the manuscript clearer. He went to Mexico, where he wrote wildly spontaneous poems (see Mexico City Blues), portraying himself and Buddha as bop musicians, visionaries playing in the “New Reality Jam Session.”

In September he went to Berkeley to see Cassady, Ginsberg, and the poets of the Bay Area. Kerouac was an enthusiastic participant in the Six Gallery reading that launched Ginsberg. Kerouac became good friends with Gary Snyder, who would soon leave for Japan to live in a Zen Monastery. Kerouac’s account of their hiking trip is recounted in The Dharma Bums. He stayed for a few weeks, then hitchhiked home for Christmas. In the following months, he wrote Visions of Gerard about his elder brother. Tensions in the family drove him west again. He had a summer job as a fire-watcher, and he planned to write great things in the solitude of Desolation Peak, which is in Mt. Baker National Forest in Washington State.

Once again, Kerouac’s fantasy and reality didn’t converge. He had kept meticulous journals, but he didn’t produce the manuscripts he had planned to write during his solitary sojourn. When he left Desolation Peak, he went back to California to party with Ginsberg and company for a while, and then shipped off to Tangiers to visit Burroughs. Five years later he transcribed his notes from that time. The manuscript that would become Desolation Angels describes the year before On the Road hit the street in September 1957.

The Golden Flood

Having been dragged through a slough of rejection, Kerouac was hardly prepared for the instant fame On the Road garnered. He was an overnight sensation, suddenly the King of the Beats. Ann Charters notes in Kerouac: A Biography (ISBN 0312113471), “When success comes in America it comes in a golden flood, and it seems that whatever you want is there to be taken and that all you have to do is reach out a hand and it’s yours. It’s only when the wave goes on swirling around you that you begin to feel its dangerous pull.”

He was thrilled to stay on the best-seller list for five weeks. He had written a “great American novel,” given voice, face, and name to a spirit of the times. Not all reviews were positive, but the young readers gobbled it up.

Success would not be stopped. Two more manuscripts were published in the next two years, The Subterraneans and The Dharma Bums. He did print and television interviews. Trouble is, everyone thought he was Dean Moriarty, but he was Sal Paradise. His Beat friends lived beatnik lifestyles, but he didn’t. As Ginsberg became increasingly politically active, Kerouac refrained from waving banners. He retired his knapsack to storage in his mother’s house. He wanted nothing more than to write more books, to ascertain his literary stature. Interviewers wanted him to be Moriarty; sometimes he gave them what they wanted. In the press, his drunkenness was highlighted; mostly he drank so that he could play the role. And he always returned home to his mother when he needed stability.

In 1959 and 1960, more of his formerly rejected manuscripts were published: Doctor Sax, Maggie Cassidy, Mexico City Blues, Visions of Cody, Tristessa, and Lonesome Traveler. None received the attention On the Road had, and no one was calling him a serious writer. This is a great disappointment for the man who thought James Joyce and Marcel Proust should move over and make room for him in the Pantheon of Great Writers.

One of his favorite manuscripts, Doctor Sax, was slammed by The New York Times. The poetry of Mexico City Blues did not put him on the map as a poet. Parodies of Beat work denigrated him, and he was drinking very heavily as he played the role of the King of the Beats. By 1960 he had eight books in print, $20,000 in the bank, and he couldn’t have been less happy or more drunk.

Persuaded by friends, he made one last trip west to stay at a cabin in Big Sur, to straighten himself out and try to write again. The trip was a disaster. He ended up leaving the solitude of the canyon and going to the city, where he went on another drinking binge.

He returned for a short time to Mexico City, where he finished Desolation Angels, which he had started writing there in 1956. Then he went to live in relative seclusion with his mother in Florida. Shortly thereafter, in one of his epic 10-night writing sessions, he wrote the account of his last trip to California, Big Sur. Despite having finished two more books, Kerouac remained despondent. Nothing could lift his spirits. Ann Charters reports that on New Year’s Eve of 1961 he told his nephew that “he had reached the other shore, there was nothing to yearn after, not even happiness.” Kerouac later told David Markson, a friend in New York, that it was a sad day when a group of admirers with “Dharma Bums” written on their jackets came to see the famous Jack Kerouac. They were shocked to see him in such bad shape, and he was so shocked to see them that he couldn’t find any words to say.

Kerouac marked the publication of Big Sur in September 1962 with a 30-day drinking binge second only in intensity to his great spree when On the Road rocketed him to fame. Big Sur revived interest in the missing Beat, but only temporarily.

Spurred by momentary glimmer, he bought a house in Northport, Long Island. He granted a taped interview with the painter Stanley Twardowicz in April 1964, and he confessed that he thought he was written out. When the painter suggested that Kerouac’s best work had been written between 1951 and 1956, Kerouac affirmed, saying, “When nobody knew me, nobody cared.” The somewhat bittersweet statement underscores the irony that he did his best work when his manuscripts were being rejected, between the publication of his first novel in 1950 and On the Road in 1957. He made one more trip, this time to Paris, intending to write a book about his stay there. The 10 days were hazy at best, and the result was Satori in Paris, an allusion to the enlightenment that came at one point during the trip.

Desolation and Decline

As Kerouac languished, his old friends became increasingly famous. Ginsberg was everywhere, reading poetry and organizing political rallies with great energy. Naked Lunch, the manuscript that Kerouac had typed up and titled, put Burroughs on the map. For the first time in two decades, Kerouac lost touch with his Beat compadres. The lone exception was Carolyn Cassady; he often called her in the wee hours of the morning in California and said things like, “Pull up a chair and sit down and talk with Uncle Jack.” He had split outright with Neal, and as in all such partings, there were two sides of the story. One was that Kerouac had become disgusted when Neal hit the road on the acid bus with Ken Kesey and that LSD had ruined him; Neal’s side was that Kerouac’s drinking had ruined him.

Kerouac was further alienated from his old friends because he did not share their political views, which they made public at every possible moment. Privately, he railed against them for not being more patriotic. Kerouac’s bid to be viewed as a serious novelist got lost in the media portrayal of him as King of the Beats — a role he may have sometimes tried too hard to play.

In 1966 the literary establishment began to validate the Beats, collecting their papers for university archives and including chapters about them in scholarly books.

On the home front, his sister died, and his mother was paralyzed by a stroke. He married a third time; the bride was Stella Sampas, the sister of one of his close friends from Lowell. In a way, the marriage brought him full circle. He once again went home to Lowell for solace, and her family, who could have served as the prototypes for the happy family portrayed in The Town and the City. (Of course, when he was writing his first novel, he never imagined he would marry Stella.) But Kerouac was finished with the city.

In his final years, he refused most interviews and drank heavily. When he died on October 21, 1969, Stella shipped his body to Lowell for burial. His mother was too infirm to make the trip, so Stella remained home with her, but Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and John Clellon Holmes were there among the mourners.

The End of the Duluoz Legend

The Duluoz Legend, Kerouac’s name for his life story, comprises a blend of fantasy and reality, which he captured in his many manuscripts. Taken together, his novels can be read as autobiography, the best account of his life and times. Ann Charters maps the legend near the end of her biography, Kerouac:

The Legend of Duluoz begins with Visions of Gerard, his earliest years, continues into boyhood with Doctor Sax and adolescence with Maggie Cassidy, then goes on, with Vanity of Duluoz, into his college years and earliest encounters with Burroughs and Ginsberg. On the Road picks up when he met Cassady, mid-way i[n]to the writing of The Town and the City. Visions of Cody describes the cross-country trips and conversations with Cassady after Jack had discovered spontaneous prose. Lonesome Traveler and The Subterraneans describe his years of working, traveling, and living in New York, filled with the frustration of being unable to sell any manuscripts after his first book. Tristessa describes the month in Mexico City before The Dharma Bums, while Desolation Angels continues after Berkeley to his summer as a firewatcher and the publication over a year later of On the Road. Big Sur describes his alcoholic breakdown after the assault of fame and Satori in Paris concludes with the loneliness of his final trip to Brittany.

The trajectory of his life may not be so much legend as tragedy.

Jack Kerouac’s literary legacy continues to grow, and his books remain in print. Undoubtedly, he captured the spirit of his times in a unique way, even if he didn’t embody it himself. His “spontaneous prose” style fueled Ginsberg’s success and has continued to influence contemporary writers. By reading On the Road, you can form your own opinion about Ti Jean’s literary legacy.

Assignment: On the Road and Elsewhere: Kerouac

Read through section three of Part Three of On the Road.