Category: Kerouac and Friends

Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1979), pp. 336-337, in a letter to Dr. T. R. Spivey dated 21 June 1959:

I haven't read the article in PR [Paris Review?] or the beat writers themselves.  That seems about the most appalling thing you could set yourself to do — read them.  But reading about them and reading what they have to say about themselves makes me think that there is a lot of ill-directed good in them.  Certainly some revolt against our exaggerated materialism is long overdue.  They seem to know a good many of the right things to run away from, but to lack any necessary discipline.  They call themselves holy but holiness costs and so far as I can see they pay nothing.  It's true that grace is the free gift of God  but to put yourself in the way of being receptive to it you have to practice self-denial.  I observe that Baron von Hügel's most used words are derivatives of the word cost.  As long as the beat people abandon themselves to all sensual satisfactions, on principle, you can't take them for anything  but false mystics.  A good look at St. John of the Cross makes them all look sick.

You can't trust them as poets either because they are too busy acting like poets.  The true poet is anonymous, as to his habits, but these boys have to look, act, and apparently smell like poets.

This is the only reference to the Beats that I found in The Habit of Being apart from the sentence, "That boy is on the road more than Kerouac, though in a more elegant manner." (p. 373)

Although O'Connor did not read the Beat authors  she correctly sensed their appalling side (William Burroughs, for one example) and zeroed in accurately on their lack of discipline and adolescent posturing as 'holy' when they refused to satisfy the elementary requirements of becoming such.  But in fairness to Kerouac one should point out that he really did at one time make a very serious effort at reforming his life.  See Resolutions Made and Broken, No More Booze, Publishing, or Seminal Emission, Divine Light, Sex, Alcohol, and Kerouac. 

And I wonder what Miss O'Connor would say had she lived long enough  to read that book by the Holy Goof, Neal Cassady, entitled Grace Beats Karma: Letters from Prison 1958-1960? (Blast Books, 1993)  Grace Beats Karma: what a wonderful  title, apt, witty, and pithy!  I shall have to pull some quotations before October's end.

Arguably, the central figure of the Beat movement was not Kerouac (OTR's Sal Paradise) but Neal Cassady (OTR's Dean Moriarty).

Jack Kerouac's On the Road was published 54 years ago in September, 1957. Joyce Johnson remembers. Excerpts:

     Who could have predicted that an essentially plotless novel about
     the relationship between two rootless young men who seemed
     constitutionally unable to settle down was about to kick off a
     culture war that is still being fought to this day? [. . .]

     In Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman sacrificed his life to a
     fruitless pursuit of the American dream; Kerouac's two protagonists
     acted as if that dream was of no importance. On the Road followed
     Sal and Dean through three years of frenetic transcontinental
     movement in the late 1940s. Their main goal in life was to "know
     time," which they could achieve by packing as much intensity as
     possible into each moment. [. . .]

     The two ideas, beat and beatnik — one substantive and
     life-expanding, the other superficial and hedonistic – helped shape
     the counterculture of the '60s and to this day are confused with
     each other, not only by Kerouac's detractors but even by some of
     his most ardent fans. [. . .]

     Beatniks were passe from the start, but On the Road has never gone
     without readers, though it took decades to lose its outlaw status.
     Only recently was it admitted — cautiously — to the literary canon.
     (The Modern Library has named it one of the 100 best
     English-language novels of the 20th century.) Fifty years after On
     the Road was first published, Kerouac's voice still calls out: Look
     around you, stay open, question the roles society has thrust upon
     you, don't give up the search for connection and meaning. In this
     bleak new doom-haunted century, those imperatives again sound
     urgent and subversive — and necessary.

Anthony Daniel's (Theodore Dalrymple's) assessment in Another Side of Paradise is rather less
positive:

     He led a tormented life, and I cannot help but feel sadness for a
     would-be rebel who spent most of his life, as did Kerouac, living
     at home with his mother. He also drank himself to a horrible death.
     But while it is true that most great writers were tormented souls,
     it does not follow that most tormented souls were great writers. To
     call Kerouac's writing mediocre is to do it too much honor: its
     significance is sociological rather than literary. The fact that
     his work is now being subjected to near-biblical levels of
     reverential scholarship is a sign of very debased literary and
     academic standards.

     I have seen some of the most mediocre minds of my generation
     destroyed by too great an interest in the Beats.

The last line of this quotation parodies the first line of Allen Ginsberg's Howl:

     I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
     starving hysterical naked . . . .

And as for Kerouac's "living at home with his mother," which Dalrymple intends as a slight, the truth is rather that Kerouac's mother lived with him, and with him and Stella Sampas after the two were married on 18 November 1966. (See Gerald Nicosia, Memory Babe, p. 670 ff.)  Kerouac was ever the dutiful son, a conservative trait that Dalrymple  misses.

The despairing section X of Book Thirteen of Vanity of Duluoz which I quoted yesterday is followed immediately by this:

Yet I saw the cross just then when I closed my eyes after writing all this.  I cant escape its mysterious penetration into all this brutality.  I just simply SEE it all the time, even the Greek cross sometimes.  I hope it will all turn out true.

It is fitting to conclude Kerouac month with the last section of Jack's last book, a section in which, while alluding to the Catholic mass, he raises his glass to his own piecemeal suicide:

Forget it wifey. Go to sleep. Tomorrow's another day. Hic calix! Look that up in Latin, it means "Here's the chalice," and be sure there's wine in it.