2nd Hand Jack Kerouac


Jay Pendergast, a doctoral candidate in Irish literature at Trinity College in Dublin: "What was the influence of Joyce on your work?"

Jack Kerouac: "Go fuck yourself!"

Desolate Angel is full of moments like this. Some aren't quite so triumphant. Here's another one from Kerouac, in his forties, talking to Allen Ginsberg:

"I'm old, ugly, red faced. . . I'm beer-bellied and a drunk and nobody loves me anymore. I can't get girls, come on and give me a blow job."



About a year ago I picked up Jack Kerouac's Vanity Of Duluoz . I didn't know it, then, but this was just about the last book he had in him. He had just married an old high school sweetheart, and he hadn't really written anything in quite awhile. What followed Vanity of Duluoz was Satori In Paris and Pic. And then he was dead.

I've still got a few more of his novels to read, but I'm taking my time. Before Vanity, it had been a few years since I'd read any Kerouac. Probably the semi-annual re-read of The Dharma Bums.



I picked up Dennis McNally's biography Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, The Beat Generation and America back in August. I took my time going through it. At the time, I thought that this was new biography on Kerouac. . . but it's now. It was first published in 1979. This new edition, with a new afterword, was pretty much rereleased in anticipation of Douglas Brinkley's Windblown World. . . which is a collection of personal writings from Kerouac's writing logs.

Brinkley (I'd started his book awhile ago) and McNally both foresee another wave of Kerouac criticism coming on. McNally's book does an outstanding job of outlining the critical reception of Kerouac's work while he was still alive. It was pretty bad, all around. While this forthcoming "second wave" might be a little more appreciative, I can't say I hold out much hope for it being any better, really.

I mean, do you really want to read "The Poetics and Ideology of Jack Kerouac?"

McNally keeps this biography tight. He managed to interview quite a few people Kerouac actually spoke to and lived with. Back in the seventies, that is. Just about everyone that mattered is now dead. His central claim is that Kerouac is an important lens through which we might examine the Post-WWII years of the United States. His attention to Kerouac's self-imposed isolation and the growing, beurocratic organization throughout the United States after the war is but one striking contrast he offers up as a fruit from that line of thought.

McNally--above all else--stresses the fundamentally religious aspects of Kerouac's thought and work, as well as those of his compatriots. Early in the book, he asserts that present scholarship would be better off with a more spiritual touch and. . . for all intents and purposes, that's what really got me interested in reading it.

It's a very humane look at a very humane author.

I once read someone say of Kerouac that the man didn't have a bad thing to say about anyone. I've always admired that.