|  Tuesday Mar 06, 2007 You Don't Know Jack By Christopher Corbett
This year will mark the 50th anniversary of one of the most extraordinary events in American letters -- the publication of Jack Kerouac’s novel On The Road. Before 2007 is over you will have read a lot about Jack. But this coming Monday (March 12) is his birthday, so let us now praise the much misunderstood “king of the Beats,” who would be 85 if he had lived.
Jack’s candle burned at both ends. He died young. It is hard to think of him as being gone so long. But in some ways Jack Kerouac remains forever young (like the story in his famous novel), hitchhiking, on the road, looking for America. That may seem terribly romantic, but Jack was a terrible romantic. Born of French-Canadian immigrant parents in a grim New England mill town, Kerouac was a writer of extraordinary contrasts, somehow able to admire Eisenhower and Dr. Timothy Leary, the psychedelic travel agent, at the same time. Kerouac experimented with LSD and just about anything else he could get his hands on. Ike and acid. That’s Jack. Like most writers, he made himself up as he went along. The irony of Kerouac is that at the end of his life he was more like the people who disapproved of his books than the characters he celebrated in novels like On The Road, The Subterraneans and The Dharma Bums -- the outsiders, the people parents warned against. The novels, anti-establishment and anti-intellectual, enshrined the fringe, jazz, drugs and rootlessness. Kerouac’s life lent itself to easy ridicule. Born a Roman Catholic, he drifted off to Buddhism, but the former altar boy was back in the fold at the end of his life, saying once that he was the grandson of Pope Pius VI and on another occasion “a general in the Jesuit army.” His critics and admirers agree on one thing: Jack’s kingdom was not of this world. Jack agreed, too. His critics thought him the anti-Christ, which is interesting because Kerouac on occasion allowed that he was the Nazarene come again. Kerouac was never comfortable with the idea of being “the father of the Beat generation.” He was not paternity-suited, so to speak, and the thought that his accounts of restlessness, wandering and the open road eventually were linked to the coming of hippies and yippies troubled him. Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman terrified him. The novelist Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, LSD pioneers, were considered Jack’s spiritual heirs, but when the old beatnik met up with that strange crew he scolded them for desecrating the American flag and then to their amazement demonstrated the proper way to fold Old Glory. An account of this is one of the most moving parts of Tom Wolfe’s classic The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Jack was always full of surprises, a great American eccentric. In the age of Aquarius, in the 1960s, while much of the country was experiencing a social revolution that Kerouac’s fans and critics claimed he had spawned, Jack was home with his elderly French-Canadian mother, his cats and his memories, drinking boilermakers, already a retiree in his 40s. On The Road made him famous and infamous. It was the sort of book that put the fear of God in a sizable portion of the population, particularly academics and critics. Kerouac wrote the novel, which is largely autobiographical, in three weeks working nonstop with lashings of black coffee and Benzedrine. He typed it out on a roll of Tele-type paper. The manuscript was said to be 120 feet long, 175,000 words. There was no punctuation. Jack called this “spontaneous prose.” Truman Capote snidely sniped in a famous TV interview that Kerouac’s work was not writing but typing. But what did that matter? Capote’s legacy is modest, his fiction unread and his “nonfiction novel” (In Cold Blood), as he called it, now a vehicle for movies about the sad end of his life. But On The Road is now American literature. It has withstood the acid test of time. It remains a much beloved book and it remains a book that sells thousands and thousand of copies annually. Most of the old Beats -- the poet Allen Ginsberg (“Howl”), the novelist William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch) and fellow traveler Neal Cassady, whose career as an American icon included not merely inspiring Kerouac but later driving the bus for the Merry Pranksters -- are gone. But the beat goes on. Young people still read On The Road, and then try to reenact the cross-country escapades of Jack and his pal Cassady, a reform school graduate and car thief. Those who disapprove of this will be heartened to learn that Kerouac was never really much of a hitchhiker. He took the bus. In the end, wild kids came to the door and wanted him to come out and play On The Road. A case study in the dangers of celebrity, he wrote nearly two dozen books, but died drunk in a Florida bungalow, sitting in front of the TV, watching “The Galloping Gourmet.” He was 47. He was said to have $91 in his bank account. Today his literary estate is worth millions. A first edition of On The Road can cost $20,000. The original manuscript of the novel sold for $2.4 million. Francis Ford Coppola has long held the film rights to the book and the story is said to be coming to a theatre near you soon. You read it here first. On The Road will go on the best-seller list when that happens. Schoolmasters and over-zealous admirers, readers unable to separate Jack from the house he built, his fiction, continue to plague him. His most ferocious fans think him a visionary in the tradition of Walt Whitman. His most ferocious critics, also in the Whitman tradition, think him a five-star crank. Social critics down the years have blamed him for everything from drug abuse to hitchhiking. In death, as in life, there are still enough Jack Kerouacs to go around. Happy birthday, Jack.  |
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