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Overview
Now that Kerouac's major novel, On the Road is accepted as an American classic, academic critics are slowly beginning to catch up with his experimental literary methods and examine the dozen books comprising what he called 'the legend of Duluoz.' Nearly all of his books have been in print internationally since his death in 1969, and his writing has been discovered and enjoyed by new readers throughout the world. Kerouac's view of the promise of America, the seductive and lovely vision of the beckoning open spaces of our continent, has never been expressed better by subsequent writers, perhaps because Kerouac was our last writer to believe in America's promise--and essential innocence--as the legacy he would explore in his autobiographical fiction.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466892811 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 03/24/2015 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 432 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Ann Charters received her B.A. at Berkeley and her Ph.D. at Columbia. She first met Kerouac at a poetry reading in Berkeley in 1956, and compiled a comprehensive bibliography of his work in 1967. A professor of English at the University of Connecticut, she is also the editor of Selected Letters of Jack Kerouac and the Portable Kerouac Reader, and the author of Beats and Company: Portrait of a Literary Generation.
Ann Charters received her B.A. at Berkeley and her Ph.D. at Columbia. She first met Kerouac at a poetry reading in Berkeley in 1956, and compiled a comprehensive bibliography of his work in 1967. A professor of English at the University of Connecticut, she is also the editor of Selected Letters of Jack Kerouac and the Portable Kerouac Reader, and the author of Beats and Company: Portrait of a Literary Generation.
Hometown:
ConnecticutDate of Birth:
November 10, 1936Place of Birth:
Bridgeport, ConnecticutEducation:
B.A., University of California, Berkeley, 1957; M.A., Columbia University, 1959; Ph.D., 1965Read an Excerpt
Kerouac
A Biography
By Ann Charters
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 1974 Ann ChartersAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-9281-1
CHAPTER 1
In 1954, when Jack Kerouac was thirty-two years old, he tried to define, for a friend, what it was he wanted out of life. The friend suggested that what he really wanted was a thatched hut like Thoreau's, not at Walden Pond, but in Lowell, the town where Jack was born, near Walden, in Massachusetts.
Kerouac agreed. He had left Lowell after high school, but, emotionally, he never left it at all, and whatever it was that held him there was always with him.
No one completely outgrows his childhood and everyone tends to sentimentalize the place where he grew up, but Lowell is not a town that's easy to feel sentimental about. It is an old Massachusetts mill-town, not Thoreau's Concord or Walden Pond. Yet Kerouac's attachment to Lowell, like so many other things in his life, was dominated by fantasy, as much as by anything real.
Through most of his life Kerouac played games with himself, giving himself new roles and identities, vanities as he called them in his last years. His belief in himself as a writer was his main identity, and in an essential way after he left Lowell it was the only identity that held him fast.
Neal Cassady once imagined a mutual friend saying of Jack: "Where is this guy, Kerouac, anyway?" Kerouac himself never knew. His essence lay in a romantic vision of himself. It lay in his fantasies: as a child, the fantasy of living with a saintly older brother Gerard; as an adolescent, of fighting evil alongside the mysterious Doctor Sax, of going with a football scholarship from a small high school to All-America fame at an Ivy League college; then, as an adult, the fantasy of being the greatest writer in the English language since Shakespeare and James Joyce, and when that success didn't come, in desperation, successive fantasies of being a drifter, a railroad brakeman, a Zen mountaineer, a holy mystic living on simple foods cooked along lonely streams; and through everything returning again and again to the only fantasy that always held him, the vision of being a child permanently cut adrift in a darkening universe.
This stream of fantasies, visions, myths, dreams, vanities — Kerouac used all these words for them — made up his life. They were the legend that he felt his life became. And they became more than this. In the intensity of the vision he had of his confused life he caught the dreams of a generation: the feeling that at some point something had been together, that there was a special vision they all shared, a romantic ideal that called on the road just ahead.
To this generation Jack Kerouac became a romantic hero, an archetypal rebel, the symbol of their own vanities, the symbol of their own romantic legend. He never understood this. He was a man whose life was dominated by a deeply felt sense of mortality, not the actual circumstances of what happened to him. His real life lay in his "vanities" and the legend he made out of them. Until, as he wrote it down, the legend became, finally, the only reality his life had.
Lowell is a small textile manufacturing center, a mill-town, on the Merrimack River in northeastern Massachusetts, about thirty miles north of downtown Boston. It's poor, dirty and rundown, both working-class and obstinately bourgeois, belligerently provincial.
If you go back to the Lowell main streets looking for traces of Kerouac there isn't much to find. New buildings, housing projects and modern store fronts have obliterated much of what he can have remembered from the twenties and thirties. But in the old French-Canadian neighborhoods on the other side of the river you can still turn a corner, or walk down a street and feel that nothing has changed. You can still get coffee and a hamburger in the Textile Lunch where Kerouac lived in the wooden building upstairs. On a winter afternoon in Lowell not long ago I heard a young French-Canadian high school boy at the narrow lunch counter tell the lady cooking in the back about the injury to his left knee that he'd gotten in a football game. Standing there, short, thin, with shining eyes, in a T-shirt and wash pants under his mackinaw, he could have been Kerouac after a game for Lowell High on an afternoon over thirty years before.
The houses Kerouac lived in are still there down Beaulieu Street, or Lupine Road, or Sarah Avenue, the same cracks he jumped in the sidewalks, the same scrubby brush alongside the Merrimack River where his imaginary friend Doctor Sax waited in the gloom of misty November evenings. Kerouac grew up mostly in the shabby French-Canadian neighborhood of Pawtucketville, and he never made much of an impression on downtown Lowell. If you ask today at a florist's shop in which of the city's two Catholic cemeteries he's buried, you'll probably be sent to the wrong one.
It is difficult to be sure if Jack loved Lowell itself, or if he was only attached to a romantic picture of the childhood he'd spent there. He was proud of having come from Lowell and went back even when his family had left. He couldn't stay there but he did always remain aware of the part of Lowell that was in him. His life centered there. He had memories of it all, from the textile mills along the river to the main business center where his father had a printing shop, to the rundown neighborhoods across the river where he grew up.
The raw outline of the legend which he made out of his life in Lowell is simple and uncomplicated. He was born at 9 Lupine Road, a simple, yellow-brown, wooden house on a back street almost out of Lowell in the hilly woods to the northeast, on 12 March, 1922, at 5 o'clock in the evening. He was the third child of Leo Alcide Kerouac, a job printer born in New Hampshire, who'd worked in the mills as a boy, and Gabrielle Ange Levesque Kerouac. Both were French Canadians whose families had emigrated to New England from Quebec.
Writing about his childhood in an "Author's Introduction" written in 1960 for his book, Lonesome Traveler, Kerouac described his family's origins in Breton, France. He said that around 1750 Baron Alexandre Louis Lebris de Kerouac of Cornwall, Brittany received a land grant in Canada where various descendants married Mohawk and Caughnawaga Indians and went into potato farming. His grandfather, Jean-Baptiste, was the first Kerouac to settle in the United States. He was a carpenter in Nashua, New Hampshire. His mother's ancestors, the L'Evesques, came from Normandy.
Jack was proud of this background. His father told him the family were aristocratic descendants of Cornish Celts who had come to Cornwall from Ireland "in the olden days long before Jesus." Their name itself was an ancient Gaelic name, "Kerouac'h," meaning, according to Jack's father, "Language of the House." After moving from Cornwall to Brittany, Jack was told, the family acquired an ancestral shield, "blue with gold stripes accompanied by three silver nails" and the motto "Aimer, Travailler et Souffrir"— Love, Work and Suffer.
Jack was baptized Jean Louis Lebris de Kerouac, supposedly after the French baron who had been his first North American ancestor. At home Jack was called "Ti Jean," Little Jack. He continued to use it in signing his letters to close friends until the last years of his life.
Jack had a brother, Gerard, who was five years older, and a sister, Caroline, nicknamed "Nin," who was three years older. His first memory was of sitting in his mother's arms. She was wearing the old brown bathrobe that members of the family always put on when they were sick. After that, brown was always associated with the color of life, the color of Jack's family, the comfort and security he felt there.
But Jack's strongest memories were of his brother Gerard's illness and death. Shortly after Jack's birth the family left their home on Lupine Road and moved to a house on Beaulieu Street in a quiet residential neighborhood called Centralville. Gerard died at the age of nine at home on Beaulieu Street, and Jack, then four years old, remembered that he was too nervous to sleep alone for years afterwards, so he slept in his mother's bed.
His sister Caroline was an early playmate. When she was eight years old and Jack was five, they went to the Saturday matinee movies together in downtown Lowell. They got in free because their father used to print the theater's programs. They used to arrive nearly an hour early and wait for Tim McCoy, Hoot Gibson or their favorite, Tom Mix, to appear on the screen, as they sat restlessly in their balcony seats close to the Moorish plaster cherubim in the ceiling, blowing bubble gum and ducking the usher.
The language spoken at home was French-Canadian. This was Kerouac's first language, and learning English in first grade from the nuns at St. Joseph's Brothers School was a struggle. On Sundays Jack walked to church with his mother and his sister. Later he was allowed to attend Sunday religious classes and go to confession by himself. Like most children, Kerouac made at least one attempt to run away from home. When he was eight, he left Lowell with a couple of small friends on a twenty-mile hike, heading for Pelham, New Hampshire, and adventures in the open country. The next day they were found cold and wet after a dismal night spent on the banks of the Merrimack River.
Centralville was the first neighborhood Kerouac remembered well. The family moved around a lot in Lowell, so Jack did not grow up with any one place which he cherished in particular. In 1932, when Jack was ten years old, after having changed houses a couple of times in Centralville, the family moved out to the French-Canadian neighborhood of Pawtucketville. This was the neighborhood where Jack felt most comfortable, the one he remembered as his childhood home more than any of the others.
Jack's mother Gabrielle — everyone called her mémêre — was fiercely devoted to her family and never made any close friends among their neighbors in Pawtucketville. She was a deeply religious Catholic. After Gerard's death she was very protective of her only son Jack, yet held the memory of Gerard up to him as a nearly saintly ideal of human perfection. She was always at home cleaning, washing, cooking. He never forgot her cooking — pancakes and maple syrup and sausages for breakfast, for lunch hamburgers and pork chops, or porkball stews, lots of fluffy mashed potatoes, buttered pieces of bread to dip in the gravy, desserts of cherry pie with whipped cream or vanilla pudding and for supper liver paté sandwiches followed by warm peach cake or Leo's favorite dessert, date pie with whipped cream.
Mémêre was intensely practical. She spent no money on herself, dressing in shabby housedresses and clean aprons, her face round and serene under her glasses. Leo Kerouac was much more sociable. He'd been, in turn, an insurance salesman, a job printer and then manager of a bowling alley. In Jack's words, he was "a popular fellow around Lowell." He took Ti Jean with him to the horse races in Boston one fall day when he was twelve, and shortly afterwards, absorbing his father's taste for the races (they both had the same memory for racing percentages and batting averages), Jack began his own involved horse racing games with marbles in his bedroom. He wiped the linoleum floor meticulously with a damp mop before every race and afterwards recorded the results for imaginary racing fans who followed the series in his own turf paper.
When his mother heard the mournful strains of the old 78 record "Dardenella" on Jack's wind-up phonograph coming from upstairs, she knew that the race was about to begin. Mémêre was less enthusiastic about horse racing than Leo and tried to stop Jack from hanging around his stuffy room, telling him instead to play outside in the fresh air. She hung the nursery picture "Jack be nimble, Jack be quick" on his bedroom wall.
After the family moved to Phebe Avenue, Jack went to Bartlett Junior High School and, between the ages of twelve and thirteen, began to spend hours playing in the Pawtucket neighborhood or exploring the banks of the nearby Merrimack River. Kerouac remembered that when he was little he got all his boyhood "in vanilla winter waves around the kitchen stove," but after he began junior high school his mother took a job in the mills downtown so Jack stayed out on the streets instead of coming straight home from school. His first and favorite game was a fantasy baseball game he played by himself with a steel ball bearing, hitting it into different parts of his backyard. One day, on a lucky hit, the "ball" sailed over into the next block, and was lost for good.
Jack also clowned away the long afternoons before suppertime with friends from junior high school. Textile Avenue, Riverside Street, Sarah Avenue and Gershom were the streets of the neighborhood where they played. Moody Street was the main street running from downtown Lowell, lined with nondescript insurance offices, cigar stores, lunch stands and five and dime stores. It crossed the river into Pawtucketville and ended in what was then high open country at the last stop of the trolley line. The district was called Dracut. It contained woods and farms owned primarily by Greek immigrants. Kerouac played baseball there as the pitcher of his team, the Dracut Tigers.
Jack liked team games but essentially he was a loner. Once during a Dracut football game he was tackled hard and someone shouted to him, "Little Christ." The name stung so that he never forgot it. The summer of 1935, when Jack was thirteen, he invented a timing clock out of an old phonograph turntable and used it for his friends' track meets at the Lowell Textile Institute, a redbrick college on Textile Avenue in Pawtucketville. A cinder track circled the playing field, and Jack began to work out on it regularly, discovering he was the fastest runner among his friends. He wasn't particularly tall, but he was strong and sturdy, with short muscular legs. Later, in his novel Doctor Sax, he wrote about the summer evenings on the track at the Textile Institute, remembering the arduous hours of running against his own timing clock, keeping records of his improvement, running until it was dark and time to go home to supper.
As a young boy Jack was also deep into the radio serials, the Saturday movies and the pulp magazines of the 1930s. When he was very young he drew his own comic strips, and by the time he was eleven he was filling nickel notebooks with "novels" as well as writing his horse racing newspaper, which he printed by hand.
His favorite reading was the pulp weeklies, especially the Shadow Magazine published every other Friday afternoon by Smith and Street. The magazine, with its stories of Evil lurking behind lamp posts vanquished speedily by the urbane Shadow, probably highlighted all of Jack's feelings about what lurked in the shadows of his own neighborhood. He bought the magazine in a newspaper and candy store he called Destouches' in Doctor Sax, and he fantasized that he could see the ghost of a playmate who had died accidently in Pawtucketville, called Zap Plouffe in Doctor Sax, whenever he tucked the Shadow Magazine under his arm and walked quickly toward home.
In his imagination Jack was always sliding into fantasies like this from the pulp magazines and movies. A walk in a snowstorm a few days before Christmas, starting from his house at Phebe Avenue and circling three miles up and around through the woods to the top of Textile Avenue, was dramatized as an heroic exploit. When he and his friends made errors in their sandlot baseball games, they said "Drat it," in imitation of B-movie English noblemen.
But Kerouac's childhood was still often a dark and gloomy time. In Pawtucketville the houses and tenements would be lit and noisy for holidays like Christmas and on most Saturday nights, but the rest of the time they were dark and stuffy, their bare windows suggesting the hard times within during the Depression years.
For the first ten years of his life, Kerouac associated the gloom and darkness with the confusion and unhappiness he felt after Gerard's death. He thought he had licked the fear when unexpectedly it nudged him again on a warm summer evening in 1934, while he was crossing the Moody Street bridge with his mother. A man carrying a watermelon suddenly dropped dead right in front of them. Mémêre saw at a glance what had happened, but Jack, twelve years old, was terrified. He followed the staring eyes of the dead man into the water of the Merrimack below the bridge, and it seemed to him that the August moon shining on the river and rocks was death itself, beside them on the bridge. Jack was completely devastated.
That night he refused to sleep alone, and crawled in between his mother and sister (Leo Kerouac slept in a bed by himself) until his sister got fed up with the crowd and moved to Jack's bed. It was only huddled against the warm back of his mother that he felt the shadows of the night pressed against the dark screened window of the bedroom couldn't hurt him. He felt ashamed at first about returning to his mother's bed. He thought he was over the nervousness which followed Gerard's death, but as time went on this physical and emotional intimacy seemed a blessing.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Kerouac by Ann Charters. Copyright © 1974 Ann Charters. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Foreword by Allen Ginsberg,
Preface,
Introduction,
Part One, 1922-1951,
Part Two, 1951-1957,
Part Three, 1957-1969,
Appendices:,
One: Chronology,
Two: Notes & Sources,
Three: Bibliographical Chronology,
Four: Identity Key,
Five: Index,
Also by Ann Charters,
Copyright,