Quote of the Day (Jack Kerouac, on Fame and ‘The Enthusiasms of Younger Men’)

“Ah the tears of things, incidentally…I've all these two days spent filing old letters, taking them out of old envelopes, clipping the pages together, putting them away… hundreds of old letters from Allen [Ginsberg], [William] Burroughs, [Neal] Cassady, enuf to make you cry the enthusiasms of younger men… how bleak we become. And fame kills all. Someday 'The Letters of Allen Ginsberg to Jack Kerouac' will make America cry.

“Old letters starting ‘Cher, Cher Jean…’ etc. And O all the youngish preoccupations!

“Cassady’s letters are wildly beautiful and full of Irish Celtic verbal zing. Burrough’s old letters contain the same dry humor, like ‘H.C. is sailing away in a boat with a sail to match his blond hair. Enough to make a man spew.’”—American novelist Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), letter to poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, May 25, 1961, in Jack Kerouac Selected Letters: Volume 2, 1957-1969, edited by Ann Charters (1999)

It was only four years since his On the Road had become the fictional touchstone of the Beats, but in his letter to Ferlinghetti 60 years ago today, Jack Kerouac was already sounding less “beato” (the Italian for “beatific,” his sense of the West Coast literary movement) than beaten.  

The exhilaration of his recent move to Orlando, Fla., had dissipated, and he was now worrying about his mother’s declining health and grousing about left-wing utopianism that he regarded as insufficiently critical of Soviet totalitarianism and inimical to his beliefs as a self-described “Catholic conservative.” (On “Peace Marchers” recently in the news, he grumbled, “I think they should now endeavor to get permission from the Soviet government to march in Russia in the name of the same peace plea.”)

His death from an abdominal hemorrhage caused by a lifetime of heavy drinking was still eight years off, but Kerouac was even now contemplating posterity. He was lamenting the lost “enthusiasms” of him and his companions, the complications of immense success (“fame kills all”), and what time had undone.

But he was also thinking of restoration—of how preserving his correspondence would enable a deeper, kinder appreciation of his circle in all their humor and humanity.

To a large extent, Kerouac’s faith in these letters was justified. They could not arrest his inexorable physical and creative decline, but they have played their part in the more generous consideration of his early work that has occurred in the last few decades. Moveover, they allow readers to see, without the filter of a biographer, the novelist in all the complications and salvific compassion that governed his life.

Or, as he wrote in his 1958 novel The Dharma Bums, “One man practicing kindness in the wilderness is worth all the temples this world pulls.”

Quote of the Day (Jack Kerouac, on How ‘Heaven is Nigh’)

“All is well, practice kindness, heaven is nigh.” —American “Beat” novelist—and Catholic--Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), Visions of Gerard (1963)

Quote of the Day (Jack Kerouac, on Kindness and Heaven)

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"Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you’re already in heaven now.” —“Beat” novelist Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), in Selected Letters, 1957-1969: Vol. 2, edited by Ann Charters (1999)

(The photograph of Kerouac is by Tom Palumbo, from New York, circa 1956.)

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.)

Quote of the Day (Jack Kerouac, on Those ‘Mad to Live’)

“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, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”—Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957)

(Photograph by Tom Palumbo, from New York, circa 1956)

Quote of the Day (Jack Kerouac, on Genius and Talent)

“Genius gives birth, talent delivers.”—Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), quoted in Writer’s Digest, January 1962

(Photograph by Tom Palumbo, from New York, circa 1956)