In July 1995, when I was 25 and working as a reporter for a local newspaper in the north of England, I made my first trip to America, temptingly sneaking into a business journey in Boston. On the last day of the trip, I abandoned the itinerary and set out before dawn for the small town of Lowell, 30 miles away.
Lowell is the city in Massachusetts where writer Jack Kerouac is buried and where he was born a hundred years ago this weekend. I discovered Kerouac about four years ago when I was reading On the Road on a long bus ride to the Saint Fermin Bull-Running Festival in Pamplona, Spain, and then devoured a dozen or more of his novels and romance books with the key. poetry and dreams, everything I could get my hands on. I was a fan.
I felt some kind of kinship with Kerouac that I couldn’t explain. Maybe the roots of the working class, autodidactic forty-shaped collection of knowledge. He had aspirations to become a journalist, writing articles for his university newspaper in Columbia. He dropped out of college after a year due to a football injury; I never went to university. He died in 1969, 82 days before my birth. I took drugs on a mountaintop in the Lake District, reprising Kerouac’s summer as a firefighter at Despair’s Peak, and wondered if I could be his reincarnation.
Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel On the Road is an American classic.Kerouac is both revered and despised for his jazz-inspired spontaneous prose mostly plotless novels and for his often controversial lifestyle. In 1993, when I was 21, when I discovered On The Road, and when I went to Kerouac’s homeland, the Gap used it in an ad campaign to sell their khaki pants. That same year, a BBC television adaptation of Hanif Kureishi’s 1990 novel The Buddha of the Suburbs was shown, in which the social climber Eve chides the protagonist Karim for reading Kerouac, quoting Truman Capote’s disparaging “it’s not writing, it’s typing” , and opining, “The most brutal thing you can do about Kerouac is re-read it at 38.”
Kerouac’s work often makes red flag book lists that if you see the person you’re dating on the shelf should run a mile. Everyone seems to agree that Kerouac is a thing for immature youth to be nurtured, re-evaluated in maturity, and found missing.
And yet here I am, now there is more distance between this place and visiting Kerouac’s grave than between standing in the scorching July heat looking at the flat headstone with his childhood nickname Tee Jean in Edson Cemetery and Kerouac’s death in Florida. . Here I am arguing that Kerouac is as relevant as ever as we celebrate the 100th anniversary of his birth.
Kerouac’s complicated life, his conflicting views, his duality in so many ways make him more famous than ever. Raised a Catholic, he embraced a carefully curated hybrid of Buddhist spirituality, pierced by grief at the death of his elder brother Gerard, who was only nine years old, whom Kerouac venerated as a saint.
He advocated freedom, renunciation of responsibility, retreat into the mystical night of magical America, where the earth went on the horizon to infinity, but he never cut the apron and eventually died living with his mother. Although he has always been an obedient son, he has been an absent father to his daughter Yang, even denying his paternity.
In his 20s, Kerouac devoured Das Kapital and read the Daily Worker, and poet Allen Ginsberg said he was “an open communist.” Towards the end of his life, he supported the Vietnam War, and when his former road buddy Neal Cassidy, now riding with Ken Kesey’s acid-resistant Merry Pranksters, visited him, Kerouac grimly took the American flag that one of the hippies wore as a cape and folded it reverently. .
Kerouac has been married three times, and his depictions of women in his work are ludicrous at best, reduced to cardboard cutouts to facilitate sex or express motherhood. However, it is widely believed that he had same-sex relationships and repressed his feelings for men all his life.
In other words, Jack Kerouac is a real mess. And really, aren’t we all? Does anyone know who or what they should be in today’s world? Gender is becoming more fluid, identity is a changing concept, labels are meaningless.
Not to mention selling khakis, it’s time, a century after he was born, we made Kerouac the poster boy for the magnificently intricate, indefinable, quicksand landscape of 2022.