I’M NOT A BEATNIK, I’M A CATHOLIC — JACK KEROUAC
Like a lot of college kids who came of age in the Sixties, reading Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was a rite of passage for me, one that occurred a few days into my freshman year when my considerably more sophisticated dormitory roommate loaned me his dog-eared copy.
I caught the Kerouac bug so bad that I went on to read virtually everything he wrote after tracking down a last few obscure titles in the early 1970s, when I was traveling the Far East, at a wonderful bookstore on the Ginza in Tokyo that specialized in those orange-spined Penguin paperback editions. And like the movable feast of characters that populated Kerouac’s real and fictional lives, I spent much of the 1970s on the road, an odyssey that took me to 49 of the 50 American states. (Sorry, Montana, I’ll drop by someday.)
The good news from this literary experience is that I can confirm — as if I needed to tell the bibliophiles among you — that Kerouac is deserving of the mantle of trailblazing Beat Generation writer. He has exerted an enormous influence on many writers, myself included, as well as Ken Kesey and Richard Brautigan, and musicians like as Bob Dylan and Tom Waits.
The bad news is that I was to read only two more Kerouac books — The Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels — that gripped me as On the Road had, and most of the rest of what Kerouac wrote is second rate or worse. Maybe that’s just me because most critics are somewhat kinder.
Kerouac had many of the ingredients that make up the tortured artistic soul, including a difficult lifelong relationship with his mother, deep sensitivity and low self esteem, ambivalence about spirituality, ambiguous sexuality, unhappy in love and a profound addiction — in his case alcohol. That is obvious from the body of Kerouac’s work, some 25 or so novels and other books in all, but does not explain why his prolific but relatively short life produced a mere handful of books that arguably are worth reading today.
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