Paul Maher Jr.

"Jack Kerouac: Still On the Road After Half a Century" by Lachlan Jobbins - Good Reading Magazine, September 2005
 
In 2001, a record was set for the sale of a literary manuscript. James Irsay, owner of the Indianapolis Colts, paid US$2.43 million for the original manuscript of Jack Kerouac’s seminal novel On the Road. The manuscript, one long single-spaced scroll which Kerouac famously claimed to have written in a three week burst of inspiration in 1951, has been the stuff of legend for almost half a century. On the Road was published in 1957, and immediately hailed by Gilbert Millstein of the New York Times as ‘an historic occasion ... the most beautifully executed, the clearest and most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac named years ago as "beat."’
 
It is the story of two friends, Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, who travel the length of America from New York to San Francisco and everywhere in between, in search of something they never quite find. Based on Kerouac’s real-life journeys with Neal Cassady in the late 1940's, it was a long time coming.
 
By 1957, Kerouac had been writing for 15 years in virtual anonymity and, despite having been published in 1950 (The Town and the City), had begun to despair of ever making a living from his craft. Supported largely by his mother Gabrielle, Kerouac had travelled, written, thought and mythologised since his late teens.
 
According to Paul Maher, author of Kerouac: The Definitive Biography, ‘Kerouac’s work evolved only after years of hard work, rejection and being subject to abject poverty.’
 
With On the Road, his efforts reached a kind of fruition. At the time of its publication, he was staying with his girlfriend, Joyce Glassman. As she recalled in her memoir Minor Characters, she and Kerouac stepped out at midnight to read the review in the Times, and ‘Jack kept shaking his head. He didn’t look happy, exactly, but strangely puzzled, as if he couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t happier than he was.’ That night, ‘Jack lay down obscure for the last time in his life. The ringing phone woke him the next morning and he was famous.’
 
The critical adulation was not to last. The reviews that followed called it rebellious, criminal and uncontrolled. Truman Capote, hearing of Kerouac’s boast that he wrote it in three weeks, quipped ‘that’s not writing, it’s typing.’
 
Kerouac, who had worked diligently at his craft since he was a teenager, was devastated. Already a heavy drinker, with a shyness that he had drowned in beer all his life, he plunged into alcohol as a refuge from the barrage of criticism.
 
Yet despite the critical reaction, for a while he was the darling of the New York publishing world. On the Road found an adoring audience in the young people of the day. It spent some weeks on the Times bestseller list, though it never reached number one.
 
The Beat Generation flowered into national consciousness at the time. Coined in the late 40's by Kerouac to describe his circle of friends who had come of age during the war, and in its wake sought something more than the factory-made comforts and conformities of the burgeoning middle class, the term now became a media bandwagon, a catch-all for any type of youth rebellion. And soon enough it was parodied, reduced to the easily stereotypical goatee, beret and bongo drums. In the middle was Kerouac, trying to prove he was a serious writer.
 
He had formulated a theory of writing he called ‘Spontaneous Prose’ in the early 50's. Its basic tenets were a belief in ‘first thought, best thought’ inspiration, the rush of words on the page rather than slow, revised phrases. He often likened his technique to that of the jazz soloist, blowing chorus after chorus, each one building on the ideas of the previous one. Unfortunately, most of On the Road was not written in this style, or at least, at Malcolm Cowley’s insistence, it had been was edited into the more traditional work that was finally published.
 
In the following years, a flood of Kerouac manuscripts were published, as editors clamoured for his rising stock. But he never achieved the artistic recognition he desired. Apart from the respect of fellow Beats, Kerouac’s work was seen by most commentators as subversive at best, ‘slobber’ at worst. From the start, the life of the handsome author aroused more interest than the content of his books.
 
As ‘King of the Beats’, he was pursued by women, lured into prodigious drunks, ripped off, beaten up and stolen from. By the early 60's, he was a broken man. Returning to his hometown with his mother, he lived out his remaining years in a succession of houses from Massachusetts to Florida. When he died in 1969, most of his books were out of print, and he had been largely forgotten in America. The Beat Generation was history, it was the time of the hippies. It wasn’t until the late 80's and early 90's that his work and life began to be seriously reconsidered.
 
After his death, his estate was left to his mother, who in turn left it to his last wife, Stella. In the 90's, after her death, literary executor John Sampas (Stella’s brother), began looking through Kerouac’s meticulously kept archive for publishable material. He found a gold mine. According to Sampas, the archive includes journals and diaries, letters and manuscripts dating back to his childhood. And slowly, as interest in the Beat Generation revived, much previously unpublished material has been made available to readers.
 
There have been books of letters, poetry, religious writings, juvenilia, paintings, CDs, even a CD-Rom. Recently, historian Douglas Brinkley edited the first volume of Kerouac’s journals, covering the period during which he wrote The Town and the City and On the Road. The Kerouac revealed therein is a man riven with uncertainties about his ability and his destiny, but determined to create a lasting literature. In October, Thunder’s Mouth Press will publish his collected interviews, and a playscript he wrote (apparently for Marlon Brando), called The Beat Generation. In the future, there are plans to publish the Book of Sketches, more volumes of correspondence, a biography of the Buddha, and other works.
 
So why the continuing interest in Kerouac and the Beats? In the words of his most recent biographer, Paul Maher, ‘he leads a life that is largely gone from the American landscape. The romantic notion of hitchhiking through 1940s America can only be lived vicariously through Kerouac. He continues to amaze readers.’ According to Maher, ‘he truly believed what he wrote was the proper way to conduct his life. When people read Kerouac, they sense that genuine spirit.’
 
His life was a string of dualisms; between town and city, other women and his mother, home and the road. In the end he kept coming back to his mother, and the home she kept for him. It was there that he was free to think and to write, to recover from his adventures and record it all, and store up fuel for the next one. Without home, we wouldn’t have On the Road, and one of the most popular modern American novelists would never have been.
 
In 2007, On the Road will be 50 years old. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s difficult to see what critics were reacting against. It is a portrait of a friendship, probably the most important of Kerouac’s life. Rather than a list of reasons to go on the road, I prefer to see it as a cautionary tale. But it still catches the imagination, and will doubtless continue to be a rucksack favourite for years to come.
 


"Jack Kerouac: Still On the Road After Half a Century" by Lachlan Jobbins - Good Reading Magazine, September 2005
 
In 2001, a record was set for the sale of a literary manuscript. James Irsay, owner of the Indianapolis Colts, paid US$2.43 million for the original manuscript of Jack Kerouac’s seminal novel On the Road. The manuscript, one long single-spaced scroll which Kerouac famously claimed to have written in a three week burst of inspiration in 1951, has been the stuff of legend for almost half a century. On the Road was published in 1957, and immediately hailed by Gilbert Millstein of the New York Times as ‘an historic occasion ... the most beautifully executed, the clearest and most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac named years ago as "beat."’
 
It is the story of two friends, Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, who travel the length of America from New York to San Francisco and everywhere in between, in search of something they never quite find. Based on Kerouac’s real-life journeys with Neal Cassady in the late 1940's, it was a long time coming.
 
By 1957, Kerouac had been writing for 15 years in virtual anonymity and, despite having been published in 1950 (The Town and the City), had begun to despair of ever making a living from his craft. Supported largely by his mother Gabrielle, Kerouac had travelled, written, thought and mythologised since his late teens.
 
According to Paul Maher, author of Kerouac: The Definitive Biography, ‘Kerouac’s work evolved only after years of hard work, rejection and being subject to abject poverty.’
 
With On the Road, his efforts reached a kind of fruition. At the time of its publication, he was staying with his girlfriend, Joyce Glassman. As she recalled in her memoir Minor Characters, she and Kerouac stepped out at midnight to read the review in the Times, and ‘Jack kept shaking his head. He didn’t look happy, exactly, but strangely puzzled, as if he couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t happier than he was.’ That night, ‘Jack lay down obscure for the last time in his life. The ringing phone woke him the next morning and he was famous.’
 
The critical adulation was not to last. The reviews that followed called it rebellious, criminal and uncontrolled. Truman Capote, hearing of Kerouac’s boast that he wrote it in three weeks, quipped ‘that’s not writing, it’s typing.’
 
Kerouac, who had worked diligently at his craft since he was a teenager, was devastated. Already a heavy drinker, with a shyness that he had drowned in beer all his life, he plunged into alcohol as a refuge from the barrage of criticism.
 
Yet despite the critical reaction, for a while he was the darling of the New York publishing world. On the Road found an adoring audience in the young people of the day. It spent some weeks on the Times bestseller list, though it never reached number one.
 
The Beat Generation flowered into national consciousness at the time. Coined in the late 40's by Kerouac to describe his circle of friends who had come of age during the war, and in its wake sought something more than the factory-made comforts and conformities of the burgeoning middle class, the term now became a media bandwagon, a catch-all for any type of youth rebellion. And soon enough it was parodied, reduced to the easily stereotypical goatee, beret and bongo drums. In the middle was Kerouac, trying to prove he was a serious writer.
 
He had formulated a theory of writing he called ‘Spontaneous Prose’ in the early 50's. Its basic tenets were a belief in ‘first thought, best thought’ inspiration, the rush of words on the page rather than slow, revised phrases. He often likened his technique to that of the jazz soloist, blowing chorus after chorus, each one building on the ideas of the previous one. Unfortunately, most of On the Road was not written in this style, or at least, at Malcolm Cowley’s insistence, it had been was edited into the more traditional work that was finally published.
 
In the following years, a flood of Kerouac manuscripts were published, as editors clamoured for his rising stock. But he never achieved the artistic recognition he desired. Apart from the respect of fellow Beats, Kerouac’s work was seen by most commentators as subversive at best, ‘slobber’ at worst. From the start, the life of the handsome author aroused more interest than the content of his books.
 
As ‘King of the Beats’, he was pursued by women, lured into prodigious drunks, ripped off, beaten up and stolen from. By the early 60's, he was a broken man. Returning to his hometown with his mother, he lived out his remaining years in a succession of houses from Massachusetts to Florida. When he died in 1969, most of his books were out of print, and he had been largely forgotten in America. The Beat Generation was history, it was the time of the hippies. It wasn’t until the late 80's and early 90's that his work and life began to be seriously reconsidered.
 
After his death, his estate was left to his mother, who in turn left it to his last wife, Stella. In the 90's, after her death, literary executor John Sampas (Stella’s brother), began looking through Kerouac’s meticulously kept archive for publishable material. He found a gold mine. According to Sampas, the archive includes journals and diaries, letters and manuscripts dating back to his childhood. And slowly, as interest in the Beat Generation revived, much previously unpublished material has been made available to readers.
 
There have been books of letters, poetry, religious writings, juvenilia, paintings, CDs, even a CD-Rom. Recently, historian Douglas Brinkley edited the first volume of Kerouac’s journals, covering the period during which he wrote The Town and the City and On the Road. The Kerouac revealed therein is a man riven with uncertainties about his ability and his destiny, but determined to create a lasting literature. In October, Thunder’s Mouth Press will publish his collected interviews, and a playscript he wrote (apparently for Marlon Brando), called The Beat Generation. In the future, there are plans to publish the Book of Sketches, more volumes of correspondence, a biography of the Buddha, and other works.
 
So why the continuing interest in Kerouac and the Beats? In the words of his most recent biographer, Paul Maher, ‘he leads a life that is largely gone from the American landscape. The romantic notion of hitchhiking through 1940s America can only be lived vicariously through Kerouac. He continues to amaze readers.’ According to Maher, ‘he truly believed what he wrote was the proper way to conduct his life. When people read Kerouac, they sense that genuine spirit.’
 
His life was a string of dualisms; between town and city, other women and his mother, home and the road. In the end he kept coming back to his mother, and the home she kept for him. It was there that he was free to think and to write, to recover from his adventures and record it all, and store up fuel for the next one. Without home, we wouldn’t have On the Road, and one of the most popular modern American novelists would never have been.
 
In 2007, On the Road will be 50 years old. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s difficult to see what critics were reacting against. It is a portrait of a friendship, probably the most important of Kerouac’s life. Rather than a list of reasons to go on the road, I prefer to see it as a cautionary tale. But it still catches the imagination, and will doubtless continue to be a rucksack favourite for years to come.
 

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Look for Kerouac's play The Beat Generation in Fall '05 and Book of Sketches in Spring '06.
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Jack Kerouac The synthesis and embodiment of The Beat Generation: Five significant books from Jack Kerouac's own library, signed and/or annotated by the great writer, his blue jeans and ornate wooden cross.
A quintessential Jack Kerouac archive featuring books that molded a poet, a pair of his blue jeans that may have accompanied him "On the Road" and a bohemian style wooden cross that may have hung in his house. The following is a recap of the notes and writings in the books of Jack Kerouac, and a brief description of the nature of the books themselves.New Editions 2, An Anthology of Literary Discoveries, a limited edition of copies of 1,000, with inside cover signed "Jack Kerouac", and "Neal + The 3 Stooges Jack Kerouac" written in blue ink on the spine. No publishing date. The back cover describes Kerouac's story, Neal and The Three Stooges, as "a romantic rhapsody of boyhood". The starting page of his story is dog-eared.The Philosophy of Schopenhauer is annotated by Jack Kerouac, with "The world as will (thing - in - itself) and as idea (object of the mind.)" written in his hand. In the fourth book contained in this volume, entitled "The World as Will Second Aspect The Assertion and Denial of the Will to Live, When Self-Consciousness Has Been Attained", Kerouac has underlined 42 lines of text, and has six pages highlighted in the left margin. Additionally, there are two "x"'s in the margins, emphasizing the text. Schopenhauer did not believe that people had individual wills but were rather simply part of a vast and single will that pervades the universe: that the feeling of separateness that each of has is but an illusion. This sounds much like the Naturalistic School of philosophy. The problem with Schopenhauer is that, in his view, "the cosmic will is wicked ... and the source of all endless suffering." Schopenhauer saw the worst in life, believing that he had no individual will, man was therefore at the complete mercy of all that which is about him. The text that Kerouac has underlined deals with past, present, and future, and how Schopenhauer contended that the present is all there is, and that past and future are an illusion. There is much of this philosophical ideology in many of the writings of Kerouac.Pensees, The Provincial Letters by Blaise Pascal, owned and annotated by Jack Kerouac. On the title page, Kerouac has written "Pascal is not Neitzsche's 'broken Christian'---he is the Immortal Mathematician. JK". Pascal was a mathematician who became a religious philosopher. His "Pascal's Wager" claims to prove that belief in God is rational, stating "If God does not exist, one will lose nothing by believing in him, while if he does exist, one will lose everything by not believing." On one page, the sentence "What shall we conclude from all our darkness, but our unworthiness?" is circled, and asterisked. At the bottom of the page is written "Check on your past, all of it" in Kerouac's hand. On another page, there are three lines of text underlined, with an asterisk, and the notation "Thus the vicious Judas-worship of Kazgatzakis". Another circled segment of text reads: "If the Jews had all been converted by Jesus Christ, we should have none but questionable witnesses. And if they had been entirely destroyed, we should have no witnesses at all." There is a page in which "What makes us not believe in the true miracles, is want of love" is underlined and arrowed, with this notation "Dostoevsky's 'Hell is the inability to love' (or to believe in miracles)". The following is a heavily annotated paragraph, with Kerouac's comments bracketed: "Jesus Christ came to blind those who saw clearly [legal thieves] and to give sight to the blind; to heal the sick, and leave the healthy [those of self-interest] to die; to call to repentance, and to justify sinners, and to leave the righteous [hypocrites] in their sins; to fill the needy, and leave the rich [the ostentatious wastrels] empty." On the back cover leaf is written: "What would you have done if there had been no Christ?" in Kerouac's hand. There are many other notations, at least eight of them, with over 100 lines of text underlined, five assorted pages bracketed in the margin, and over 25 places where the text has been "x"d. An amazing glimpse into the profound religious nature of the "Beat" author and parochial school graduate. The House of Atreus containing the plays of Aeschylus, "The Agamemnon, Libation-Bearers Furies. This is a very early signature "John Kerouac" so it could have possibly been a schoolbook. It is signed in pencil on the cover page. There are several annotations in the book mostly made with pencil. Kerouac had a special interest in the writer's style, marking a section that reads, "Of such odes, this Trilogy, and especially the Agamemnon, presents to us the noblest surviving specimens. They may be regarded as the poet's profoundest musings on the moral and religions and historical problems suggested by mythical tale which forms the groundwork for his drama." Then another section that reads, "For we have in both, the same central idea; the succession, that is of guilt, atonement, absolution. In Agamemnon, some themes are Human action in its most violent and problematic aspects - lust for power and the violence that accompanies it; clash between male and female dominance; crime and punishment; emotion v. reason; tribalism v. democracy; pollution and purification. All are intensified because they occur within the family. Similar to Kerouac's "the Town and the City" that was a depiction of his family and growing up in a milltown. Perhaps the first inkling of inspiration. Kerouac has made notes on 12 pages, not including pencil highlights elsewhere. The last three pages are full of Kerouac's study notes. The notes read, "Koros - Fullness of head - Comfort. Hybris - Wanton ??? - Pride. Ate - Doom. Cycle which greek expected after too great success, pri?? And insolence." Then the following page reads, "Greek play prologue (anything before first chorus) - watchman. Paradus C - Paradus page 5. Episode I - Clytimnestra page 13. Stasimon I C - Statsimon page 17. Episode II Ch?? Ode - Herald page 23. Statismon II strophe, anticipation, episode. Episode III - Statsimon page 31. Koonsnos c and out - Coming of Agamemnon page 36-37. Exodus. Epilogue - actors go out. Idea very near that of Christian attitude. Plays said(???) because they are just a little pre?? To Christian idea. A bibliography of works by Jack Kerouac compiled by Ann Charters. This green paper bound book printed in 1967 is inscribed, "For Tony from Brother jack. 9-25-67 Lowell." Two years before Kerouac's death. With 5 pages of corrections made perhaps by Kerouac.The dark bluejeans are the Powerhouse 101 style from Montgomery Ward. You can almost see Kerouac aimlessly wandering down a dusty road wearing these during his travels. The wooden cross carved by an artist named Youenn measures 12.5 x 7 and still bears the worn twine that Kerouac must have used to hang it on the wall. The back of the cross bears a long, faint inscription with a few words in Kerouac's unmistakeable hand.