Jack 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 During this period he wrote the unpublished The Sea Is My Brother.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.

Selected works:

• THE TOWN AND THE CITY, 1950
• ON THE ROAD, 1957 - Matkalla (suom. Markku Lahtela, 1964)
• THE DHARMA BUMS, 1958 - Dharmapummit (suom. Markus Jääskeläinen, 2001)
• THE SUBTERRANEANS, 1958 - Maanalaiset (suom. Kimmo Lilja, 2002)
• THE FLOATING WORLD, 1959
• MEXICO CITY BLUES, 1959
• MAGGIE CASSIDY, 1959
• DOCTOR SAX, 1959
• THE SCRIPTURE OF THE GOLDEN ETERNITY, 1960
• LONESOME TRAVELLER, 1960
• TRISTESSA, 1960 - Tristessa (suom. Elina Koskelin, Seppo Lahtinen ja Vesa-Matti Paija, 2006)
• PULL MY DAISY, 1961
• BOOK OF DREAMS, 1961
• BIG SUR, 1962 - Tuuliajolla Big Surissa (suom. Markus Jääskeläinen, 2002)
• VISIONS OF GERARD, 1963
• DESOLATION ANGELS, 1965 - Desolationin enkelit (suom. Jaakko Yli-Juonikas, 2004)
• SATORI IN PARIS, 1966
• SOME OF THE DHARMA, 1997
• VANITY OF DULOUTZ, 1968
• PIC, 1971
• SCATTERED POEMS, 1971
• VISIONS OF CODY, 1972
• HEAVEN, 1977
• ORPHEUS EMERGED, 2000 (published in digital format by LiveREADS)
• WINDBLOWN WORLD. THE JOURNALS OF JACK KEROUAC, 1947-1954, 2004 (ed. by Douglas Brinkley
• AND THE HIPPOS WERE BOILED IN THEIR TANKS, 2008 (with William S. Burroughs, written in 1945)

Taken from: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/kerouac.htm

Author: Petri Liukkonen

Some rights reserved Petri Liukkonen (author) & Ari Pesonen. Kuusankosken kaupunginkirjasto 2008

My Beatnik Uncle

I remember the day when I had my first contact with the beatnik subculture movement. I was not related with the term, and my only reference was maybe the Beatles, which I really like, but apart from that, it was a whole new world for me. It was in the late 90’s, when I was in the United States visiting my uncle, who was living in a place near Seattle since 1957, just before the rise of hippism. I had never seen him before, just in some blurred photographs, which portray him as young man with long black hair and dense moustache, dressed with big and worn blue jeans, a square–fabric T shirt, and some big round sunglasses over the head. Those photographs had always called my attention because he seems as a very particular man, and now I was on the road with my father, anxious because I was going to meet him.

I saw the house from the distance; it was an old wood house of an average size surrounded by a vast land covered by grass patches with different heights and colors. We parked the car in front of the old building, and as I stepped out of the car my uncle opened the door of his house and walked towards the car. He hugged us both effusively and let some amiable words of introduction came out of his mouth. His voice was soft and trembly, but somehow it sounded friendly and trustable, so I also introduced myself to him, although stammering because I found his presence was intimidating. He looked just exactly as the photographs: the face expression, the sunglasses and the clothes were just the same, or maybe not, but they look identical. The only changes were that he was now quite old and his hair was gray. He stared at me for a few seconds while I was thinking about this strange man, who, according to my dad, was a beatnik stuck in time. I didn’t know the meaning of my father’s words, but now they seem a little bit clearer because in fact, he was a person from another epoch. I also stared at him in the eyes –more exactly in the sunglasses- while the sun was heating the whole place. Then he smiled and invited us with a gesture to come into the house.

The first thing that shocked me when I entered into the house was the smell. It was quite pleasant since it was old-like, and dusty, but at the same time, it inspires a feeling of coziness. The second one was a great bookshelf that covered an entire wall of the living room. I don’t know how many books there were, but there were like hundreds and they all had brown or green or red hardcover. I read some names from the bookshelf: On the Road, by Jack Kerouac; Howl, by Allen Ginsberg; Naked Lunch, by William S. Burroughs; Counterpoint, by Aldous Huxley, among others. My uncle approached to the bookshelf and explained to me that those were writers from the Beat Generation who used to write about the beatnik, a subculture movement from which he was part of. I barely understood what he was saying; I was engrossed in the admiration of this mysterious place that embraces me with its old and interesting look.

My uncle laughed at me in a friendly way and invited me with a slow movement of his hand to sit down in a couch in the living room. I asked him shyly about the beatnik because I could not wait to know more about that confusing but involving world, since I was starting to relate it to him and his interesting environment. He seems somewhat uncomfortable. But then, after a gesture of approval from my dad, he started telling me. He told me that the beatniks were people who had very different ideas from the conservative society of the 50’s because they didn’t believe in war; they were only interested in protest lyrics that invited us all to join our intentions for peace and justice, and literature on liberation of all sorts. He obviously avoided the sexual and drugs references that implicated the beatnik, but nevertheless, I found all his stories amazing.  I don’t remember much about what he told me, but I know that it was one of the greatest moments of my life.

The light of the day started to extinguish and I start felling tired. My father touched my arm indicating me that it was time to go. I felt a deep sensation of sadness, like a pressure in my chest because I really wanted to stay there for an eternity, listening to all sorts of amazing stories about these particular people called the beatniks. However, I stood up knowing that maybe the next year I could return to see my uncle and talk with him, or I could write him anytime.  In the moment that I stepped out of the house, I felt the cold of the night and walked rapidly to get into the car.

By: Gabriel Restrepo

Origins of Beatnik

The beatnik was a sub-cultural movement developed in the United States during the decade of 1950's that later got more followers all around the world and become one of the biggest and most controversial suburban culture of its time. It also had very clear characteristics that goes from the free drug consume, the sexual liberation and anti-materialist ideologies. It is consider that the beatnik was the origin of the hippies since the word "hippy" comes from a phrase used by them. The raise of this subculture is related with American literature since the writer Jack Kerouac was the one who introduces the term "Beat generation" in 1948 when he was referring to the group of authors from which he was part of. It also refers to his social circle in general, formed in the underground of New York, characterized by young anti-conformist members who gather with intellectual purposes and to do certain activities that were not accepted by society. However the term was originally published by Clellon Holmes in his book Go (consider as the first beat novel) in which he describe this suburban group and call it the "beat generation", but the word "beat" was introduced into the group by other author: Herbert Huncke. The term was later expanded and popularized by Jack Kerouac.

The beatnik was very influential during the decades of 1950's and 1960's since it was liberation in many ways for the young Americans who were against the society standards and the conservative government. It was so strong that the history of the United Estates (and maybe the world history) cannot be studied without seeing this topic, because it does not only change the perspective of the people regarding global society, but it also create many movements, from feminist and homosexual activist, to a whole musical genre. It also influences the artistic and literary world.

By: Gabriel Restrepo