The American writer Jack Kerouac, whose centenary fell this year, was adamant about the Catholic inspiration of his work, which he repeatedly referred to, in part to disarm his critics. In 1961, Kerouac claimed to one correspondent that his most celebrated novel, On the Road (1957), was “really a story about two Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God”.
After he coined the term “Beat Generation” – initially referring to those lacking basic necessities for life – he belatedly discovered a further meaning in the French word béat, or blessed. Thenceforth Kerouac called his generation beatific, rather than disadvantaged. He rejected associated terminology, scolding a television reporter in 1968 with “I’m no Beatnik. I’m a Catholic.”
This mindset gave On the Road, a picaresque pilgrimage across America by raffish characters (some of whom commit theft and other criminal acts), an Augustinian sense of personal mission. Illegality and sacredness could coexist, said Kerouac, quoted by his biographer Gerald Nicosia: “If Jesus ever started walking across the United States, he’d be arrested outside of Altoona, Pennsylvania!”
Kerouac noted in a journal from 1948 that he crossed the USA in an attempt to “see the world, which was the City of God”. Yet his works, including Doctor Sax, The Subterraneans, Visions of Cody and Mexico City Blues, were usually written in marathon bursts of energy from less-exalted sources: amphetamines alternating with morphine, marijuana, hashish, LSD, opium and alcohol.
He described Dean Moriarty, a character in On the Road, as “a holy con man.” The oxymoron was possible, he insisted to a Paris Review interviewer in 1968, because “All I write about is Jesus. I am… General of the Jesuit Army.” Earlier, in 1951, he wrote to a friend: “The Church is the last sanctuary in this world, the first and the last. It is the worldly edifice of the Lord; I’m done sneering at any part of it.”
This viewpoint was formulated during his upbringing in a French-Canadian family, who had been transplanted to a working-class city in Massachusetts; at home, the Kerouac family spoke joual, a regional dialect. Listening to Kerouac (who was born Jean Louis Kirouac) speak French on surviving Canadian TV broadcasts reminds us that he only became fully fluent in English at around college age, while his mastery of his native language was dynamic and salty.
Among highlights of his joual-speaking childhood were walks to outdoor Stations of the Cross with his older brother Gerard, who died young of rheumatic fever; the family home was filled with images of St Thérèse of Lisieux, and mysticism was part of his life from an early stage.
In the novel Doctor Sax (1959), he describes visiting Sainte-Jeanne-d’Arc Church in his hometown at dusk and seeing a statue of the Virgin Mary turn its head.
Small wonder he became a devotee of religious articles. He explained in a 1959 article on the origins of the Beat Generation: “I am not ashamed to wear the crucifix of my Lord. It is because I am Beat, that is, I believe in beatitude and that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son to it.” Nearly every page of his diaries bore a prayer, or an appeal to Christ for mercy, or a sketched crucifix. Kerouac was bemused when his publisher and several magazines airbrushed the cross from around his neck in a publicity portrait.
In 1959, Kerouac created his own icon, painting an imaginary portrait of Cardinal Giovanni Montini, the Archbishop of Milan, in papal garb, fully four years before he became Pope Paul VI. Montini had been raised to the cardinalate in December 1958, at which point he was seen as a likely successor to Pope John XXIII. Whether or not Kerouac followed Vatican news closely, his appreciation of Catholicism allowed room for apocryphal anecdotes. One such tale, about St Teresa of Ávila, supposedly describes the saint as falling into mud, whereupon Jesus informs her, “This is how I treat my friends.” Her reply: “No wonder you have so few!”
Other lifelong favourite intercessors included St Joseph, whom he wrote about in a 1957 reminiscence for a New York newspaper about his childhood Christmases: “My favourite object in the church was the statue of the saint holding little Jesus in his arms. This was the statue of St Anthony [of Padua] but I always thought it was St Joseph.”
Dissociating himself from student protestors on a current affairs programme in 1968, he declared, “Being a Catholic, I believe in order, tenderness and piety.” Taking him at his word, Fr Armand Morissette, who knew Kerouac as a boy and conducted his funeral Mass, called him a mystic and “modern saint”. The clergyman added: “He’s just like Christ to me.”
Another friend, the sociologist Francis X Feminella, declared that meeting Kerouac “was like meeting the pope”. He introduced Fr Joseph Scheuer, a sociologist and Passionist priest from Fordham University, to Kerouac. Scheuer concurred with Kerouac’s lamentations that the Catholic Church could be more interested in organisational matters than in spirituality. Leaving Kerouac’s home, he told Feminella: “We visited a very holy man tonight”.
Less admirably, Kerouac approved of the drunken, self-defensive harangues of Senator Joseph McCarthy out of sympathy with McCarthy’s strident anti-communist rhetoric; he overlooked the Wisconsin senator’s destructive and unsubstantiated public attacks on the character and patriotism of political opponents. Kerouac was also unapologetically anti-Semitic, blaming communism and other woes on Jews. These baseless allegations, which estranged him for a while from his longtime friend Allen Ginsberg, an American Jewish poet, were forgiven by Ginsberg, although less easily by other contemporaries.
These downsides give pause to otherwise ardent centennial commemorations. Happier evidence exists of Kerouac’s hopes for fraternal coexistence in a short film, Pull My Daisy (1959), which he wrote and narrated.
Based on a real-life incident, the movie recounts how a railway brakeman and his wife invited a bishop for dinner, but their bohemian friends arrived to disrupt the party. The good-humoured film shows Beat poets as friendly, innocuous and above all youthful.
Today that community is gone, but Kerouac’s readers remain to replace his sometimes preternaturally tolerant friends, accepting even of his flaws. Over the past 15 years, these fans have been regaled with previously unavailable texts, including a transcription of the original unexpurgated draft of On the Road (Viking), a novel, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (Grove Press), written in collaboration with William Burroughs, and a generous selection of rediscovered French language writings (Les Éditions du Boréal).
All offer further evidence that perhaps the most Catholic aspect of Kerouac’s artistry was his refusal to cede to the sin of despair. At a 1982 conference, his trajectory was summed up by another friend, American Catholic poet Gregory Corso: “If you’re really a Catholic, you stick to it… and when you’re old, you’re going to slip through your death like butter and go to heaven – you got it made!”
On his centenary, it is worth reflecting on whether Jack Kerouac’s spiritual inspiration – notwithstanding his many flaws – may perhaps have ensured that he, too, had it made.
Benjamin Ivry has written biographies of Francis Poulenc, Arthur Rimbaud and Maurice Ravel
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