Jack Kerouac: Beat Drunk
I’m on a Jack Kerouac binge — novels, letters, notebooks, biographies, memoirs — and remembering what it’s like to be an alcoholic. Kerouac had his first drunk experience, egged on by his lush father, at the age of 16 on Thanksgiving Day, 1938. Nineteen years later — when the publication of On the Road made him the King of the Beat Generation, when he “opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levi’s to both sexes” (as William Burroughs quipped) — he was a hardened case. Like many alcoholics he repeatedly expressed a desire to quit forever, or moderate his drinking, or just sip a pre-dinner cocktail. But he’d be deep into his cups a week, a day, an hour later.
The mythology surrounding Kerouac claims that for much of his 47-year life he was what fellow Beat traveler Allen Ginsberg called an “ecstatic” alcoholic. Yet the writer who invented a “spontaneous prose” style, modeled after flights of jazz improvisation, had all the spontaneity of a booze-hound stuck like gum on a bar stool.
The legend is a thriving cottage industry: Every season there seems to be a new biography or memoir — including last year’s compelling Joyce Johnson-Kerouac love-affair-in-letters, Door Wide Open. Two volumes of selected letters, from 1940 to 1969, were assembled be esteemed Kerouac biographer Ann Charters. The Kerouac estate in Lowell, Massachusetts, has released rafts of notebooks and letters to historian and editor Douglas Brinkley for future publication and yet another biography. On the Road has sold over three million copies in the U.S.. And, as The Gap informed us, Jack Kerouac wore khakis (and Johnny Depp paid $10,000 for his leather coat).
Kerouac’s life and art, which by his own reckoning were inseparable, fit the predictable pathologies all alcoholics share. Indeed, I think the meaning and resonance of his art resides not in free-form prose or spirituality or nonconformity but in alcoholism. As a cautionary tale it’s not exactly the transcendent legacy he and his fans claim, but it’s valuable enough as a lesson in living and dying.
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No one knew better than Kerouac was an alcoholic than the author himself. His “so beautiful” alter-ego in The Subterraneans was “a drunk really, always staying late, freeloading, shouting, foolish.” [p200] Drinking heavily, he wrote, “you abandon people, and they abandon you — and you abandon yourself — It’s a form of partial self murder.” One reason to quit drink, he wrote, is “to attain permanently to the shivering bliss of pure blood. To keep the mind from confusion.” Shortly thereafter he admitted he’d “been drinking like a fiend … I drink to destroy myself.” Yet life without booze was “too dreary.” He’d been sober for eight days, he proudly wrote in 1954. The next day: “Got drunk, replunged … in insensitive ignorance of the past 14 years.”
His embrace of the Buddhist concept of spirit reincarnation, after meeting his Zen mentor, poet Gary Snyder, in 1949, can be seen as a glorified refusal to come to grips with alcoholism. In his dense collection of musings, Some of the Dharma, he reflects: “The reason I’m suffering now is not because I’m JK but because I’m a bearer of self … ‘I’ won’t be reborn, self will be.” The sad truth is that the “notself” he loathed was so often in charge during his life that it effectively became his “real self.”
Kerouac professed poetic and spiritual breakthroughs would offer “visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures.” Yet he admits: “A mistake has been discovered at the heart of the universe, and its name is existence,” and “all sentient life is tortured.” Nevertheless, he was able to rationalize the religiosity of booze, writing that he’d experienced his “highest vision of Buddhist Emptiness when drunk.” Delete “Buddhist” and we get closer to the truth. “Drink yr. Port & Shut Orp,” he writes at the end of Some of the Dharma.
Snyder asked him how he could connect with his spirit when his mind was “muddled” and his body was disintegrating. “I’m not sick, I’m fine,” replied Kerouac. He instead looked for “some expedient means” to give up alcohol. This usually meant an attempt at controlled drinking, but he had no control. Indeed, his writing is celebrated — and damned in the stifling conformity of the 1950s — for lack of formal controls. This begs the question: How close was his spur-of-the-moment revelation to alcoholic drool?
His free-form writing style was inspired by meeting Neal Cassady, a wild-driving car thief and erstwhile writer, and Allen Ginsberg, the poet he encountered at Columbia University in 1944 with Burroughs to form the holy trinity of the Beats. He described their head-on energies in a famous passage from On the Road: “I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars …”
The challenge was getting that energy down on paper. “Until I find a way to unleash the inner life in an art-method, nothing about me will be clear.”
“Spontaneous prose” had its genesis when Kerouac heard Charlie Parker’s high flying bop epiphanies and felt that — yeah go man go! — this was the way he wanted to write. This is problematic from the get-go: Listening to sounds in the air and reading words on a page involve fundamentally different brain power. There’s also the built-in repetition factor of jazz. [ADD; Gioia] Still, the idea seemed good on paper. More importantly, it was liberating in the materialist conformity of the 1950s.
He engaged in the “heartbreaking discipline of the veritable fire ordeal when you can’t go back … all of innocent go-ahead confession … making the mind the slave of the tongue with no chance to lie or re-elaborate.” This credo sounds better in the convivial atmosphere of a bar, where there’s a captive audience. In the light of day, however, it’s more like an adolescent’s literary conceit of boasting of discoveries no one’s thought of before. “Innocent go-ahead” notwithstanding, this conceit is also the hallmark of a world-class drinker.
Kerouac diary editor Brinkley claims, perhaps self-servingly, that the author was actually “a fastidious, old-fashioned craftsman.” So fastidious that he would wait for his supply of benzedrine to arrive before he launched another sleepless word-slinging marathon. “Once I have the benzedrine it’ll be done in 10 days or less,” he wrote his agent in 1960 on writing Beat Traveler, an account of his ascent to fame. “I haven’t had any benzedrine for 2 years and I realized that’s why I haven’t written any new novels.” He said he wrote until he got bored, at which point he stopped and called it a book. Then start over again. “That’s deep form,” he said.
Asked for a sequel to On the Road, Kerouac loaded up on whiskey and benzedrine and knocked out The Dharma Bums in ten sessions in November 1957, 15,000 words at a time.
He carped to editor Robert Giroux in 1962 that critics “failed to realize that spontaneous writing of narrative prose is infinitely more difficult than careful slow painstaking writing with opportunities to revise—Because spontaneous writing is an ordeal requiring immediate discipline—They seem to think there’s no discipline involved—They don’t know how horrible it is to learn immediate and swift discipline and draw your breath in pain as you do so ….”
Yet the clearest view of Kerouac comes through his shambling letters. There was nothing “arty” about them, and were closer to the state of being, experience and writing that he aspired to. He used his letters to try out new ideas, wax enthusiastic, or complain, moan, whine. Reading the letters is a real-time reflection of Kerouac the man who considered his life not only grist for the mill but the mill itself.
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“I’m ready for any battle there he,” he told his diary in 1948. Nine years later, the publication of On The Road made him a star. “Everything exploded,” he wrote. He had the brooding looks. “He is more beautiful than M. Brando,” reported Salvador Dali (Brando was considered for the role of Cassady in the aborted Hollywood version). Kerouac made the feverish rounds of parties, scenes, interviews. “Drunk alatime,” he wrote Cassady. “Jesus said to see the Kingdom of Heaven you must lose yourself,” he told interviewer Mike Wallace, who retorted, “Then the Beat Generation loves death?” The media demanded cliches about the Beats and, in his alcoholic stupor, Kerouac unwittingly supplied them.
The prudishness of his critics made him seem heroic. On the Road was a “dizzy travelogue” full of “verbal goofballs” and a “series of Neanderthal grunts.” Kerouac was “a slob running a temperature.” Time magazine called him the “latrine laureate of Hobohemia … ambisextrous and hipsterical.” The high-brow Partisan Review accused him of wanting to “kill the intellectuals,” trying to “replace civilization by the street gang.” Truman Capote’s reaction was the most widely quoted: “That’s not writing, it’s just … typing!”
Ann Douglas, professor of American studies at Columbia University, echoes the party line that he was “dazed and embittered by what he saw as abuse” by critics, and “retreated further and further into alcoholism and despair.” As he wrote to poet Philip Whalen in 1960: “I’m completely sick of mad beat city scenes at last. I quit that for sure, right now, I am going to exert my will from now on. Most of my lushness arises from having to be with bores … I drink from nervousness and ennui …” Yet alcoholics are delusional: how could not see that his style of writing and life was anathema to the button-down ’50s? They’re also notoriously thin-skinned (and Kerouac got bugged by anything). His drinking prevented him from wearing the barbs as badges of honor, or making alliances with those who did love his work. Alcoholics see goblins everywhere; he was unable to discriminate.
He bemoaned the “horror of being a writer in America with a limited amount of sauvee faire [that] can lead to premature worse-than-death exhaustion of every decent sincere little instinct you were born with …” Yet he was too trapped by alcoholic inertia to realize that instincts necessarily change with time, for better and worse. Clearly alcohol was the principal culprit for his “exhaustion” and limited savoir faire, but he was on to something with the “worse-than-death” part.
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Like many alcoholics with a bee in their bonnet, he degenerated towards dogma. Spontaneous prose involved taking shortcuts at the expense of character development, leading to the picture-postcard-thin stereotypes that dominated his work. Consider these prototypical entries in his diary of 1949, a year before the publication of his first novel The Town and the City. Driving west, he stuck his head out the window “with Billie Holiday eyes and offered my soul to the whole world — big sad eyes, like the whores in the Richmond mud-shack saloon. Saw how much genius I had, too …”
A month later his bus hit a snowdrift and teams of “eager young men with shovels” arrived to clear the road. “Is this the ‘isolationist’ Middle West? Where in the effete-thinking East would men work for others, for nothing, at midnight in howling, freezing gales?” Yet when push comes to shove, most human beings — even snobs — band together for the common good. Back east in Poughkeepsie, he laments, “Dismal streets, dismal lives. Thousands of drunkards in bars.” (Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!)
But he meets a Negro and sees the “future of America” in lies in his “simplicity and raw strength.” Kerouac’s condescending primitivism — he described Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk “jumping like mad moneys” — rears its head during a stroll in Denver’s darktown, noticing “the dusky leg of some mysterious, sensuous girl,” wishing he “could exchange worlds with the happy, true-minded, ecstatic Negroes of America.”
Noble savages could wait. In effete Manhattan after getting a bite from famous book editor Robert Giroux, he muses, “I like the idea that we’re going to ‘work in his office in the evenings’ … in shirtsleeves (good Arrow shirts); maybe a pint of whiskey; chats … and old Broadway glowing.” After all, his “aim is to write, make money, and buy a big wheat farm.” Preferably with a bar and good honest hired hands.
“There’s a palpable streak of infantilism in Kerouac’s work,” writes Douglas, “and it can degenerate into banal and self-indulgent formlessness, badly in need of just the kind of editing that Kerouac refused.” But she can’t leave it at that; like the “enabler” of an alcoholic, she rationalizes that “maturity, the mantra of cold war policy-makers and psychologists, held much the same dangers for him that integration posed for James Baldwin. ‘Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?’” I don’t think Kerouac got that far in his thinking. He liked Ike. The Beats “love everything, Billy Graham, the Big Ten, rock and roll, Zen, apple pie, Eisenhower — we dig it all.” A decade later, he added: “I wasn’t trying to create any kind of new consciousness. We were just a bunch of guys who were out trying to get laid.”
Knowing thyself — proverbially plumbing the depths of “soul” — was in itself a subsersive act in the gray-flannel-suit ’50s, but in Kerouac’s case it met a dead-end in front a bottle. The Beat Generation’s dissatisfied introspection went hand-in-hand with the nascent black civil rights and ban-the-bomb movements, and a decade later would spawn the anti-war and feminist movements. But Kerouac joined no battles, rarely lifting a finger even in defense of friends he had so frequently leaned on.
He was upset that Ken Kesey’s hippie Merry Pranksters ripped off the On the Road saga for the ’60s. His attitude towards youth rebellion became stodgily proprietary. In a letter to his agent trying to resurrect his reputation, he advised: “Don’t let incompetents tell you Road or anything connected with it is ‘dead.’ Beatles is spelled Beatles and not Beetles.” (Their name was word play on the insect, Buddy Holly’s backing group The Crickets, and the musical sense of “beat.”) It was Kerouac himself who declared the Beat Generation “dead” by 1949. He railed that the 1950’s “began a new sinisterness in America, and now the ‘Soaring Sixties’ is really just a soaring hysteria …” The so-called tenderheart presaged vice-president Spiro Agnew’s put-down of the “nattering nabobs of negativism.”
In a letter following a five day binge with college students, he grouses on this “generation of despisers,” who laugh at his arrest for sleeping in a car, at borrowing another $10 from the bartender, at his pot belly, “although I can drink them all under the table, which I did, taking turns from one to the other.” He was “tired of talk, of sociological questions about poetry and literature, of ignorance in campus clothes …” He was tired, period: hungover, “beat.”
His long goodbye was agonizing. “I’ve already written up everything that ever happened to me,” he told his last editor Ellis Amburn in 1964. He described himself in a 1965 letter as a “brooding stagnant angry relic of the past,” not a “big Jewish genius” like Bellow, Roth, Mailer, Malamud, Salinger but a “tin-eared Canuck” with “no standing in American literature … just a phenomena … not ‘American’ like above but some kind of ‘nik.’” He hit the local bars, announcing, “I’m Jack Kerouac. I’m a famous writer from Lowell.” Yet folks in the Massachusetts birthplace he returned to regarded him as nothing more than an irascible town drunk. “Does anything in modern life make you sick?” a Radio-Canada interviewer asked in 1967. He replied: “I’m sick of myself.” In 1968, he was reduced to selling his “fabulous and vast” correspondence to Ginsberg and laying claim to the original scroll manuscript of On the Road “to tide me over middle age in a very surprisingly unlucky literary career …”
The women he used so duplicitously — for money, crash pads, sex, sympathy — weren’t there anymore. One object of his desire said: “My heart sort of went out to him, but I realized he counted on that. He ended up living with his mother.”
“Memere” was the mother from hell. She banned his bohemian pals and girlfriends from coming around, she opened his mail. Oh, occasionally she reminded him to tone down the drinking, but she too was an alcoholic; they were drinking partners, passed out in front of the flickering TV set. She was his greatest “enabler.” In return he catered to her every whim — including an alarming propensity to move whenever she didn’t like the weather or the neighbors. The last dozen years of his life saw them move from the northeast to Florida like yo-yos.
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“Poets of genius are just decorations on the wall, if without the poetry of kindness and caritas,” he wrote. “This means Christ was right,” and people like Freud and “his cold depreciation of helpless personalities” were wrong. The “life of calm and peaceful tiredness, and of honesty, of the hermit or homebody, is minding his own business, which is, Love of Heaven, and Heaven is above us, & witness.”
Calm and peaceful tiredness? Alas, if only. Such is the alcoholic’s glorified denial of a lifelong hangover. (He could have used a little Freud.)
OK, I’ve been rough on Jack. I’ve been sober for a little while now. One day at a time, as they say. Health problems related to alcohol have prohibited drinking as an option; it’d be like playing Russian Roulette. The closest I get to a bender is reading about it; I’m a sucker for the scientific and confessional literature on alcoholism. I’m suspicious of psychobabble and alcobabble. But behind the platitudes, there’s truth. (I wouldn’t say that I wear the realization of being an alcoholic as a badge of honor. But I accept it, because there is no other choice. So I’m skeptical of sanctimony.) Maybe I’m being holier-than-thou in seeking meaning in Kerouac only through the prism of his alcoholism. Maybe I’m slumming.
On October 20, 1969, hours after writing a letter to his nephew with eerie premonitions of his death, Kerouac began to vomit blood, the result of hemorrhaging esophageal varices. He died 18 hours later, after 26 blood transfusions.
And yet. Readings by Jack Kerouac on the Beat Generation (on Verve Records) is stunningly beautiful, confident and enthusiastic, sensitive and vulnerable, told in calm storytelling cadences. The Subterraneans is not an easy read but is a great adventurous book by any standards, a spellbinding evocation of the heady San Francisco beat underground circa 1950. On the Road — which contrary to legend was crafted instead of spurted — seems, well, charming after all these years. “His heart was in the right place,” a friend told me recently. And yet …