He Honored Life

"Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes. Woodstock rises from his pages."

                                                         William S. Burroughs

Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac was born 100 years ago tomorrow in Lowell, Massachusetts. He came to be known as Jack Kerouac, and for those of us who came of age at a certain time, his influence was towering. He was a novelist and poet who was often regarded as the leader of the beatniks and the beat movement in general in the 1950s, although Kerouac himself often said things such as "I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic."

He was conflicted that way over a lot of things - religion (he dabbled in Eastern religions, Indian art and culture, but always returned to his Catholic roots), athletics (he was good enough to make the football team at Columbia University but argued so much with Coach Lou Little that he became a benchwarmer before leaving school for the military), the military (he washed out of both the Merchant Marine and the Navy, which discharged him for having an "indifferent character) and his writing, which he sometimes called "a crock as literature."

I don't see a lot of young people today talking about him, so maybe his works are not being taught in high school and college any longer, and that's a shame, because he created an entire style of writing. 

Jim Sampas is Kerouac's nephew, and serves as the literary executor of Kerouac's  estate. He is working on establishing a Kerouac museum at the St. Jean Baptiste Church, the site of Jack's christening and funeral (and where he served as an altar boy). Sampas points out that people such as including Bob Dylan, the Beatles and Barack Obama cite Kerouac as an influence. 

Kerouac is best known for the 1957 novel  “On the Road,” which was the first and most important description of the restlessness that settled over America after World War II.  It was so different from the usual American novel that it took six years before he could find a publisher for a book that would change the way books were written. Literally. 

In the days before word processing, one processed words by typing them on a typewriter, but Kerouac fueled his energy with a diet of pea soup, coffee and cigarettes. Not wishing to have to insert a new piece of paper every time he filled a page with his story, he taped together enough sheets of paper to form a 120' scroll, and he wrote "On The Road" in a three-week solid burst.

That scroll, by the way, has fallen into the hands of Jim Irsay, a Kerouac devotee who happens to own the Indianapolis Colts of the NFL, having inherited the team from his father Robert, about whom, the less said, the better.

What Sampas called "Kerouac’s true-to-life, spontaneous prose” has influenced literature ever since it was published. I like to compare it to a natural conversation, when people are talking, as opposed to the pinched style of a heavily edited and rewritten book. I've read both the standard version of "On The Road" and the verbatim transcript of the scroll, with typos, extra words, and other mistakes, and they are both like a warm conversation with a friend relating the story of a cross-country excursion.

It was hard to follow up the success of "On The Road" for Jack, and he fell into a life of dissolution, passing away in October, 1969, a sad lonely man in Florida. But his early flame still glows, if you care to be warmed by it!