The generation before him, artistically, was the Lost Generation. His generation was the defeated generation, the beat generation.
I was reading an account of the moment he realized “On the Road” was going to be a hit, and that his life was going to change. His then girlfriend or wife wrote this:
“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.”
Then the next day his publisher comes by with a case of champagne, he gets drunk, and he’s excited, the way he ought to have been the night before.
Would it be so hard to infer from that that he was destined to die of alcoholism?
Myself, I would ponder where or not what was going through his head was something like “how in the world did we get to a world where the underdog is the hero, not for surmounting the odds, but for BEING the underdog. I live in this world, but I don’t understand it.”
I take that quote from the “Portable Beat Reader”. Another set of quotes concerns his daughter he did not want to claim, and around whom he behaved very sketchy, as they say.
I am going to quote this at length, because this is the story of many abandoned children. I don’t think people who come and leave women and their babies realize the extent of the psychic damage they wreak, the hopes and fears and private terrors they engender.
Toward late fall my mother was going to court all the time to try and get child support from our fathers. She must have gotten fed up with waitressing. The day was nearing when I was to meet my father for the first time. I remember a certain gullible part of my young mind thinking that nine and a half must be the age when one is grown up enough to meet one’s father for the first time. It meant I was maturing–a big girl now. Feeling more independent than usual, I went to the pizza parlor all the way up on Fourteenth Street. I had had my hair curled for the occasion, and as I watched the guy twirl the dough, I kept looking in the mirror at my new hair, not at all sure I liked it and worrying what my father would think of me.
In Brooklyn the next day, after a long subway ride, my mother and I met Jack and his lawyer at the appointed place and went strolling down the street together. I couldn’t take my eyes off my father, he looked so much like me. I loved the way he shuffled along with his lower lip stuck out.
The lawyer nervously suggested we go somewhere for lunch and was about to walk into a restaurant when Jack saw a place he liked better, and steered us to a bar across the street, in spite of the lawyer’s feeble protests. I thought it was a great idea, wanting, as I did, to be in accord with this naughty bummish fellow. We sat down in a booth, my mother and I facing the two of them, and a hamburger was ordered for me. It was the day the first astronaut went up in space, and the TV up in the corner by the ceiling was showing him up in his capsule all bundled up in glaring black and white.
My mother and father seemed to be getting along just fine, and were talking about old times.
“Yeah,” he was saying into his beer, “you always used to burn the bacon,” jokingly accusing her. I could see why she had been attracted to him. He was so handsome with his deep blue eyes and dark hair hanging in a few fine wisps on his forehead. I like hearing them talk about the things they used to do. It made me feel whole, confirmed the suspicions I’d had all along that I was an official bona fide human being with TWO parents. [emphasis mine]
After that, we had to go get the blood tests. Jack and I, to determine if he really was my father. I felt like we were special somehow, as if our blood was some precious substance the laboratory needed, and we were the only two people in the world that had it.. Then we went back to my neighborhood, bringing Jack with us.
As soon as we got to the apartment, he wanted to know where the nearest liquor store was, so I took him by the hand to the one on Tenth Street., proudly walking him past kids I knew as if to say, “See–I have one too” [emphasis mine]
In the liquor store, he bought a bottle of Harvey’s Bristol Cream Sherry. That name is indelibly etched in my memory. As we walked back, he talked to me but seemed shy, like a boy on his first date. I was nervous too, afraid I’d say something stupid.
Upstairs, he sat down at the kitchen table and peeled off the black plastic around the top of the bottle, as my sisters gathered around him curiously. He pointed at each little black peel and furrowing his brow, said, “Shee im? Shs’ Russian–shhhs’ no good”! He kept doing this, to their delight, and telling my mother, “This one has laughing eyes and this one has melting eyes”.
I was a little jealous that he was paying them so much attention, but I figured he didn’t want to be serious, and me being older, maybe he was afraid we’d have to talk about something he didn’t want to think about. So I watched the antics and smiled whenever he looked at me.
To my sisters, he was just another funny guy that came over to visit and entertain them, like Ray Gordon or Pete Rivera. But to me he was something special, he was my very OWN funny man out of all the others–like their father, Don Olly, was to them.
Kerouc drinks his booze, then heads out the door. He says he will be back in January, and the next and only time she sees him again is 6 years later.
There, he is “upending a fifth of whiskey”–which she later calls a “baby bottle”–and watching the Beverly Hillbillies. He has moved in with his mother, and married a third time. Jan percipiently remarks: “Now that his mother could no longer take care of him [she had had a stroke], Jack had married another mother to take care of them both.”
Thus was the last scene she had of him. He died two years later, shortly after Neal Cassady reached the end of what he had always known was a one way ride, that would end far too soon.
This is how the great Jack Kerouac lived and died, from the perspective of someone whose heart he broke.
Three guesses how Jan fared later in life, although one should suffice. Her book details long term drug abuse, loveless liasons with heartless men, pregnancy at 15, and overall a whole lot of fuckup and hurt.
Can you not see this coming from these pathetic, sad lines? She was dead at 44. Her dad at 47.
Core lesson: as a society, we cannot side with the fuckups. We can feel them, we can help them, we can include them, but we CANNOT make them the heroes. They are not the heroes. Aim up, not down. Aim for better, not worse. You can be a visionary without being an amoral, drug addled thrill junkie and opportunist.
Even now, to take an apparently pedestrian example, who are Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer siding with in this Wall non-debate? The “Not-Us’s”. The Outside as against the Inside. The people who do not belong here, the people whose lives are not working where they are from. The people plagued by poverty, ignorance, crime and no small measure of laziness, who want to bring all these traits into our country by ignoring our process for legal immigration, and who in so doing want to jump in from of line relative to all the people we DO want, who are willing to do the work to do the thing correctly.