The fifties are times when what rose like the foam of a badly served beer was the void: the wake of the resignation of living in the future. The United States was a jar full of discouragement, as if society had retreated into its own privacy, as if there was nothing more than this: taking the collective from home to work, then from work to home — if you had a job, if you had a home — watching TV, closing your eyes and, hopefully, dreaming. But there are those who don't. Always, in all times, restless, dissatisfied, with their heads on fire, there are those who do not. And Jack Kerouac was one of them.
In the summer of 1956 he was a forestry firefighter on top of the world. It had been two months since he had settled in Washington State, on the border with Canada, on a mountain called Desolation Peak or, in Spanish, Peak of Desolation. He lived in a cabin and, when he wasn't working, he wrote. He had published a book in 1950, El pueblo y la ciudad, and he had written ten more, all unpublished: some were kept under the bed or some corner without too much moisture; the rest gathered dust in the offices of different publishers, waiting to be read by their publishers, waiting for an opportunity.
Kerouac didn't have much hope because, basically, he was still writing, and when you keep writing you do it because he thinks the best thing he hasn't written it yet. It's a simple equation: there's no time to look back, just dedicate yourself to typing the voice that screams in your own thoughts. There was more than just a feeling. An editor who read the draft of On the Road —” a very intelligent man”, according to Kerouac himself, said to him: “Jack, this looks like Dostoevsky, but what can I do with something like this at this time?” He knew it himself: “It was not the time.”
Until one day history changes — along the way it's already in print — and what you hear coming down from the Peak of Desolation is not a whispering voice but the noise that from now on will represent a new generation, a new way of doing literature. “Jack Kerouac becomes famous overnight,” writes Jean-François Duval in the book Kerouac and the Beat Generation. “We are instantly witnessing the consecration of a man who, as it becomes clear, everyone takes for another. The narrator is confused with the writer. Worse still, it is assumed that this author-narrator and the character he stages are one and the same thing.”
Two two ago, in 1955, in a bar in San Francisco, a boy with glasses named Allen Ginsberg, in front of a short auditorium who smokes and drinks in silence, looks at a notebook, raises his voice and recites: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, hungry hysterics naked, crawling...” Lawrence Ferlinghetti is present, listens to him, marvels, proposes him to publish that long and beautiful poem in his new publishing house, City Lights. It comes out in 56 and 57 On the way it makes that push that was being built, that breath of freshness, those incipient sparks become a real explosion.
“This is not so much a literary event,” Duval writes, “as it is a sociological phenomenon. On the way it appears at the right moment to make the aspirations of a whole youth born during World War II (or just before) crystallize, a youth driven by the irresistible impulse of the newly inaugurated Thirty Glorious Ones and the changes they bring about: the exponential growth of consumption, technological advances (transistors, television) and cultural (paperbacks, discs of 45 revolutions), the progressive liberation of customs, the collapse of social and racial barriers”.
He was 28 years old when he wrote this novel. It was just a few days, three weeks, between April 2 and 22, 1951. He was married to Jane Haverty — she wasn't his first wife, nor was she the last — he lived in Manhattan. I was on my way back from a big trip through the United States and Mexico. The narrator is Sal Paradise and the protagonist is Dean Moriarty, pseudonym of Neal Cassady, one of his friends. The other great character, Carlo Marx, is actually Allen Ginsberg. They are travel stories that paint the canvas of a freedom. The number of books he sold is incalculable. As of today, 100 thousand copies are reissued around the world every year.
It begins like this: “I met Dean shortly after my wife and I separated. I had just been through a serious illness that I won't bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the almost unbearable separation and with my feeling that everything had died. With the appearance of Dean Moriarty, the part of my life that could be called my life on the road began.” There is a route, beer, marijuana, whiskey, cocaine, heroin, vertigo, a lot of vertigo, and the need to “lie on our backs looking at the ceiling and wondering what God would have proposed to make such a sad world”. “The rest could go to hell.”
He was born right in the middle, the third of five children, on March 12, 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts, United States. Son of French-Canadians who came from Quebec, Canada. Until he was six years old, French was spoken at home — along the way it began to be written in this language — then he learned English and became his official language. Two years earlier, at four, his eldest brother, aged nine, named Gérard, died, rheumatic fever, and the family went into implosion. His mother took refusal in faith, his father in alcohol and gambling. The figure of God was constant; as an adult he led it towards Buddhism.
“From a strong Catholic background, Jack prayed before his brother's photo when he wanted to get something,” says Juan Vives Rocabert in the book Jack Kerouac: the king of the beat generation. One day, while still very young, listen to the word of God in the crucifix: “My son, you are in a world of mystery and incomprehensible pain, it is for your own good, we will save you, because we consider your soul as important as the soul of the rest of the people in the world... but you have to suffer because of that, what is more, my son, you must die, you have to die, you have to suffer because of it to die in pain between cries, fears, despair”.
Juan Vives Rocabert delves into this “situation that, over time, Jack Kerouac would literally obey” and argues that “this message from God may not necessarily be a hallucinatory phenomenon and rather correspond to a novelization or mythification of a narcissistic part of his personality in which he attributes a kind of high mission, even if it is intensely tinged by strong masochism and a sacrificial fantasy”. This episode is key to thinking about Kerouac's work: experience and imagination, truth and fiction, all together spinning in a linguistic whirlpool.
It did not need to be in literary magazines, on television programs, in the libraries of scholars and self-taught people, in bookstores, in the dreams of thousands of readers —all that finally came—; writing was always there. He named his mechanism, his method, his technique, “spontaneous prose”, and defined it as “the free diversion of the mind into the infinite seas of thought, diving into the ocean of English with no discipline other than the rhythms of rhetorical exhalation and protested narration, like a fist that falls on a table with each sound complete! bang!”. Feel, improvise, shoot.
Thus he was reaping a long, prolific, fruitful and intense work. Some books: The Underground, The Dharma Wanderers, Big sur. He formed with Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs at the head of a movement that, on the one hand, never recognized itself, and on the other, opened up throughout the country. For Dennis McNally — he writes it in the book Jack Kerouac: America and the Beat Generation, a Biography — they created “a body of profoundly significant works that deserve to be studied not only for aesthetic reasons”, but also because “they are dramatic reflections of the historical changes in the United States.”
Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs as the trident, the three-peaked mountain, which achieved remarkable massiveness, but below are a large number of authors. In the book Poetry Beat, an anthology of the year 2017, there are texts by forty poets. John Clellon Holmes, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, Herbert Huncke, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Diane di Prima, Carl Solomon, Philip Lamantia and Peter Orlovsky, but also characters practically invisible to the story, outsiders, such as Elise Cowen. This breadth takes them out of the place of group, of brotherhood, and places them as a movement, as a generation.
In his work, deep down, although it can sometimes be perceived waving on the surface, there is a crucial sensitivity, a mixture of vulnerability and daring, of sadness and ardor, a war cry with tears in his eyes, a howl, a deeply poetic flame. Because, as Allen Ginsberg wrote, “deep down we were all poets”. Gabriel Batalla argues in Jack Kerouac's El camino that, although his work “was misunderstood and rejected by the publishing world for a long time and even by intellectuals and critics”, “today it would be canonical myopia to leave it out of the most influential writers of the last century”.
It was eleven o'clock in the morning of October 20 when he started vomiting blood. I was sitting there drinking whiskey and malt liquor, writing some notes. He felt a strong stitch in his stomach and an unstoppable desire to take out — no longer metaphorically — everything inside him. From the hospital, an ambulance took him to St. Anthony in St. Petersburg, Florida. He had several transfusions and surgery, but it was too late. He died the next morning, when the clock struck 5:15. It was October 21, 1969. He was anesthetized to receive the surgery and never woke up again. He was only 47 years old.
There is a fundamental book in his biography. It is called The Philosophy of the Beat Generation and other writings. There are anecdotes, memories, confessions, interpretations and a transgressive drive that seems to slip out of the pages. It is something that is in his books, which in his poetry is seen a lot. Is it the stories? Is it the style? The scenes, the characters? Sensitivity? It's what he says and that's how he says it. “Why am I going to attack what I love beyond life? That's beat. Live life? Naaa, love life,” he writes. And then: “I feel sorry for those who spit on the Beat Generation, the wind will dispel them and erase them from history.”
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