“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.)
No comments:
Post a Comment