Quote of the Day (Jack Kerouac, on Praying to St. Mary)

“I had some stunning thoughts last night, the result of studying Tolstoy, Spengler, New Testament and also the result of praying to St. Mary to intercede for me to make me stop being a maniacal drunkard. Ever since I instituted the little prayer, I've not been lushing. So far, every prayer addressed to the Holy Mother has been answered, and I only ‘discovered’ her last Halloween. I shouldn’t be telling you this. But I do want to point out, the reason I think she intercedes so well for us, is because she too is a human being, who was simply chosen to suckle and care for an incarnated Barnasha, after all. Of what use would Jesus be to us if he didn’t have to have a mother’s care?"—Jack Kerouac, from a Feb. 19, 1963 letter to editor Robert Giroux, in Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters: Volume 2: 1957-1969, edited by Ann Charters (1999)

Sal Paradise was the name of his alter ego in his best-known novel, but Jack Kerouac could see precious little of Heaven when he died in St. Petersburg, Fla., on this date in 1969 from abdominal hemorrhaging, a complication of his alcoholism. Still, his intense search for transcendence, even amid his worst troubles (and they had become very bad indeed even by now, a half-dozen years after the wild success of On the Road), remains profoundly moving.

One suspects, despite the disclaimer that he “shouldn’t be telling you this,” that Kerouac knew exactly what he was doing in confiding in Robert Giroux. If anyone could have understood Kerouac’s religious feelings, it was Giroux—like Kerouac, a Catholic who had attended Columbia, an editor who had worked with Trappist monk Thomas Merton.

Kerouac needed all the spiritual light he could find: he was spiraling ever faster into alcoholism, depression and aggression.  In an incisive bit of detective work in The New Yorker last year, Ian Schaffer followed the threads of the novelist’s adult life, presenting strong evidence of the kind of traumatic head injuries that middle-aged former football players have suffered more recently.

There was even less abatement of pain for this kind of medical issue back then than now: people did not even know that this condition existed. In his suffering and anguish over being a “maniacal drunkard,” Kerouac turned back to the faith of his childhood growing up in Lowell, Mass. He further identified with the bond between Jesus and the Blessed Virgin Mary because his life was dominated by the need to care for his own mother, who had suffered a stroke. 

Readers might be nonplussed at the thought of the apostle of personal freedom as practiced in On the Road returning to the deeply traditional faith of his upbringing (and maybe even more so by the 1968 appearance that Kerouac made on William F. Buckley's "Firing Line"--an incident I recounted in a prior post).  But the desire for transcendence is present right in the middle of perhaps the best remembered line of his roman a clef about his road trip with friend Neal Cassady:

"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."

(The photograph of Kerouac is by Tom Palumbo, from New York, circa 1956. By the time of the letter to Giroux, because of his alcoholism, the author's appearance had grown considerably puffier.)

This Day in Literary History (O’Connor Puts Editor in His Place)

February 18, 1949—Flannery O’Connor might have been only a few weeks short of 24, but she would not be condescended to be an editor twice her age as “a slightly dim-witted Camp Fire Girl.” One day after writing her agent that she wouldn’t respond to John Selby until hearing back from her first, she fired off a letter to the Rinehart editor in chief anyway, telling him that, while perfectly amenable to criticism, it would only be “within the sphere of what I am trying to do.” In fact, contrary to the “conventional novel” that he was trying to steer her toward, the finished book, though “less angular,” would still be “just as odd if not odder than the nine chapters you have now.”

Anyone who has read any of the work of the Georgia writer can guess that O’Connor and Selby did not work together—certainly to the relief of both parties, but not to the ultimate benefit of Selby and his reputation. A short-story writer and author of 10 novels himself, he might have been expected to have been sympathetic to the likes of O’Connor, and his firm had, only the year before, made a splash with a first novel by another twentysomething author, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead.

But O’Connor, while finishing up her stay at the Yaddo artists’ colony near Saratoga Springs, NY, was annoyed that it took Selby so long to get back to her about his opinion of her manuscript—and that the criticism he did send was “very vague and totally missed the point of what kind of novel I am writing.” This only increased the misgivings created by her friend, poet Robert Lowell, who believed that the very inadequacies seen by Selby were, in fact, part of the manuscript’s strength.

Three years and who knows how many revisions later, Wise Blood would go on to establish O’Connor as perhaps the leading voice of Southern gothic fiction.  Its humor was so dark, its descriptions so stark (“He had a nose like a shrike’s bill and a long vertical crease on either side of his mouth”) that initial reviews were mixed. 

In time, it would come to be recognized as a distinctly powerful vision of a spiritually blind male pilgrim (the first and last name of its protagonist, Hazel Motes, doubly reinforces the notion of diminished sight) in a barren, lost contemporary landscape seemingly aching for his “Church Without Christ.” It would be regarded as stark as a Hieronymus Bosch painting in the way it used the outlandish to underscore religious concerns, an allegory that would be adapted for film in 1979 by John Huston.

It is easy to regard Selby as benighted in his dealings with someone now regarded as a midcentury master of American fiction, and he didn’t help his case for posterity when, upon giving her release to take her manuscript elsewhere, he noted that O’Connor was “stiff-necked, uncooperative and unethical.” But his kind has not disappeared from the modern publishing landscape. An author I know was told by at least one editor that a major problem with his long novel was the multiple-character perspective he used on the plot. He disregarded the advice, took the novel to another house and was rewarded with an American Book Award.

Moreover, Selby was almost certainly in something of a state of shock, because the 108 pages he read were far, far different from what he had originally seen. O’Connor began her work while a graduate student at the University of Iowa. That material had helped her win the school’s Rinehart-Iowa Fiction Award, which gave the publisher the first shot at publishing the novel.

But midway through, O’Connor developed a far different narrative voice—one less sympathetic and more “strident and detached,” according to The Art and Vision of Flannery O'Connor, by Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr. If you want to see another example of how a mid-revision change can alter a book’s dynamic, the closest counterpart would be Moby-Dick, transformed, after Herman Melville met Nathaniel Hawthorne and delved deeply into William Shakespeare, from a conventional sea account of a voyage into a symbol-laden examination of an obsessive quest to destroy evil.

The editor who became the lucky beneficiary of Selby’s befuddlement was Robert Giroux, then at Harcourt, Brace and Company. The two had a common faith—Roman Catholicism—which helped him understand her unique worldview. Moreover, he felt her “tremendous strength, creative and moral,” and came to admire not only the very self-confidence that had put Selby off but also another quality: that “She not only knew exactly what she wanted to write but was prepared to sacrifice everything to achieve it,” according to an interview he gave George Plimpton a half-century later for The Paris Review.