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| Jack Kerouac's grave in Lowell, Mass. (Photo credit: rmarshall) |
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| English: His third of several homes growing up in the West Centralville section of Lowell, Jack Kerouac later referred to 34 Beaulieu Street as "sad Beaulieu". The Kerouac family was living there in 1926 when Jack's big brother Gerard died of rheumatic fever at the age of nine. Jack was four at the time, and would later say that Gerard followed him in life as a guardian angel. This is the Gerard of Kerouac's novel Visions of Gerard. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| Neal Cassady (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| English: Jack Kerouac by photographer Tom Palumbo, circa 1956 (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| Cassady at Smiths (Photo credit: eleanor lonardo) |
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| carolyn cassady (Photo credit: ☆eight☆) |
Years ago I had a library containing many of Jack
Kerouac’s books, but as I have moved around and gotten rid of books, these ones
bit the dust.
I had read the books, although I was never an enthusiast
for Kerouac. It is true he had a gift for word-spinning, for description , and
his books are a written stream of consciousness describing a life that seemed
virtually pointless to him, as it did to me, reading about it, except that his
method was given to creating myths around the people he used as characters, who
were usually based on his friends.
Having never been a fan of the Beat generation --- I was
once assigned to write a series of articles about the Beats in Montreal. I knew
nothing about them, didn’t feel for them, if they existed, and contented myself
with writing about various creative, artistic, iconoclastic artists who were
interesting people ---- it will not be a surprise to anyone reading this blog that
I am somewhat mystified as to the continuing high regard in which Kerouac, the
writer, seems to be held more than 60 years after first being published.
In spite of these reservations, I went along yesterday to
see the movie Big Sur, based on a
Kerouac novel published in 1962, when he was 40, suffering --- his life was a
life of suffering, it seems --- from the ails of being famous after publication
of his novel On the Road. He had already descended into deep depressions
and excessive drinking, and Big Sur describes
how, to gain some relief, he borrowed a cottage on the Californian coast owned
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of a bookshop in San Francisco. Kerouac,
according to the movie, immediately contacted his friend Neal Cassady, whom he
had portrayed under a pseudonym in his earlier works, a man who has moved into
history as a famous figure whose fame comes not from anything he achieved, but
simply from being famous --- a phenomenon that has become more usual in our own
day, as various rich young women have become famous for being famous.
The movie is directed by Michael Polish, and he has done a
fine job of it, portraying the particular coastline as almost a paradise, beautiful in the
extreme with its pure forests, its
raging ocean, and magnificent vistas. Unfortunately, the question I kept asking
myself as the action rolled on, was, “When are these guys going to grow up?”
To be honest, their behaviour seemed immature in the
extreme: Cassady had a job in a tire shop, and was living at home with his wife
and several children. He also had a nearby mistress, Billi, (played by the beautiful Kate Bosworth, who
seems to have become popular in recent years for winning awards as “the worst
actress of the year”) to whom he sent Kerouac in the expectation that they
would become lovers, which of course happened. But then Kerouac also had an
affair with Cassady’s wife, and blotted his escutcheon by
bringing the mistress into the Cassady home. Meantime, Kerouac had promised
Billi he would take her to Mexico and marry her, promises he had no intention
of keeping, and which, when he betrayed them, resulted in what seemed like
near-suicidal reactions from Billi.
All the characters in the movie seemed to be terminally
unhappy, or at least discontented, (which was odd considering that Kerouac’s
prose, presented as a persistent voice-over commentary on the action, was justifiably
lyrical about the countryside itself ), and there was really no convincing
explanation as to where this unhappiness originated. It could (at least this is
my take on it) have come from the very infantilism of Kerouac’s attitude to
life After all, he claimed not to have
ever been a beatnik, “I’m a Catholic,” he said, in refutation of how he was
customarily portrayed by the media. And it is known that during the Army
hearings which finally put paid to Senator Joe McCarthy’s onslaught on civil
liberties and pubic decency, Kerouac was sitting there urging McCarthy and his
minions on. Irrevocably right-wing, in
other words.
I have only to read the occasional quote from Kerouac to be
reminded of why I didn’t react with great enthusiasm to his prose. He described On the Road as “really
a story about two Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God. And we
found him. I found him in the sky, in Market Street San Francisco (those 2
visions), and Dean (Neal) had God sweating out of his forehead all the way.
THERE IS NO OTHER WAY OUT FOR THE HOLY MAN: HE MUST SWEAT FOR GOD. And once he
has found Him, the Godhood of God is forever established and really must not be
spoken about.”
Oh, yeah!
An interesting view of this group of friends was given in a
recent interview with Carolyn Cassady, who is now 87, and has lived in England
since 1985, in The Guardian. She said that the other members of the group
treated her husband “like a trained bear,” and added:
“ Neal said he took any drug, any pill, anyone handed him. He
didn't care. He was doing his damnedest to get killed." She feels guilty
about his self-destruction, commented the reporter. Carolyn added: "I didn't realise the
two pillars of his support were the railroad job and being head of a family. He
realised he would never become respectable, as he wanted, and he wanted to
die."
Ms. Cassady also had interesting things to say about Allen
Ginsberg, who doesn’t appear in this film, but who was probably the best writer
of this group.
She said: “Why this sudden interest in Ginsberg? I met him when he
was 20. He had never got over feeling he was worthless. He'd go out and try to
find a job, and he'd come back and he'd say, 'I'm never gonna amount to
anything. I just can't do anything. Even my finger's the wrong size.' He'd
tried some assembly line or something." Ironically, writes The Guardian reporter, Carolyn is
mystified by the fascination (of young people today with these writers.) "Kids
in school are still eating it up. I don't understand it. I don't see any value
in that at all, culturally….."
Perhaps it is the
helter-skelter nature of Kerouac’s prose that appeals to the enthusiastic young
of today. Mysterious though it may be to me, no one seems to hold against him
his right-wing politics, his amorality, his drunkenness. The proprietor of The
Word second-hand bookshop around the corner from me, told me this morning that when
books by Kerouac come into his shop, he usually sells them on the same day.
I can’t believe
this enthusiasm could be added to by anything shown in this film.
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