{"id":4775,"date":"2018-02-14T07:29:18","date_gmt":"2018-02-14T07:29:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2018\/02\/14\/kerouac-religious-writer\/"},"modified":"2018-02-14T07:29:18","modified_gmt":"2018-02-14T07:29:18","slug":"kerouac-religious-writer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2018\/02\/14\/kerouac-religious-writer\/","title":{"rendered":"Kerouac: Religious Writer?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Kerouac and Friends industry churns on, its latest product being Hard to be a Saint in the City: The Spiritual Vision of the Beats <\/em><\/a>by Robert Inchausti, Shambhala (January 30, 2018), 208 pages.<\/span><\/p>\n

From Scott Beauchamp's review<\/a>:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

The real tragedy of Kerouac\u2019s reception was that the people who should have known better took the en vogue hedonist reading at face value, writing him off as a word-vomiting miscreant. But that\u2019s a caricature of Kerouac that over-emphasizes the most obvious personal flaws of an intensely spiritual writer. It\u2019s an oversimplification by way of calling someone a simpleton. The truth is more complex and so much more interesting: Kerouac was one of the most humble and devoted American religious writers of the 20th century. Robert Inchausti\u2019s recently published Hard to be a Saint in the City: The Spiritual Vision of the Beats <\/em>makes an attempt at recognizing the heterodox spiritual focus of the entire Beat oeuvre, but it only points the reader in the right direction. Its simple and hodgepodge construction suggests the vast amount of analysis, particularly of Kerouac\u2019s work, which remains to be done in order to change his reputation in the popular imagination.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I'm a Kerouac aficionado from way back. I love the guy and the rush and gush of his hyper-romantic and heart-felt wordage.* He brings tears to my eyes every October. His tapes and CDs accompany me on every road trip. He was a writer who was religious, but a "religious writer"? It's an exaggeration, like calling Thomas Merton, who was a religious writer,  a spiritual master. I love him too, especially the Merton of the journals, but he was no more a spiritual master than I am.  And then there is Bob Dylan, the greatest American writer of popular songs, who added so much to our lives, but deserving of the Nobel Prize in Literature?  I submit that Flannery O'Connor is closer to the truth about Kerouac & Co.<\/span><\/p>\n

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

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I haven't read the article in PR [Paris Review<\/em>?] 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 H\u00fcgel<\/a>'s most used words are derivatives of the word cost<\/em>.  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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"O'Connor<\/a>This is the only reference to the Beats that I found in The Habit of Being<\/em> apart from the sentence, "That boy is on the road more than Kerouac, though in a more elegant manner." (p. 373)<\/span><\/p>\n

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.  <\/span><\/p>\n

See Resolutions Made and Broken<\/a>, No More Booze, Publishing, or Seminal Emission<\/a>, Divine Light, Sex, Alcohol, and Kerouac<\/a>. <\/span><\/p>\n

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<\/em>? (Blast Books, 1993)  Grace Beats Karma<\/em>: what a wonderful  title, apt, witty, and pithy!  <\/span><\/p>\n

Arguably, the central figure of the Beat movement was not Kerouac (OTR's Sal Paradise) but Neal Cassady (OTR's Dean Moriarty).<\/span><\/p>\n

Lucky me, to have been both in and of the '60s. And to have survived.<\/span><\/p>\n

_____________________<\/span><\/p>\n

*'Wordage' to my ear embodies a sense between the pejorative 'verbiage'  and the commendatory 'writing.' I am reminded of Truman Capote's anti-Kerouac jab, "That's not writing; it's typewriting!"<\/span> <\/p>\n

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<\/a>Merton the Conflicted<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/fieldset>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Kerouac and Friends industry churns on, its latest product being Hard to be a Saint in the City: The Spiritual Vision of the Beats by Robert Inchausti, Shambhala (January 30, 2018), 208 pages. From Scott Beauchamp's review: The real tragedy of Kerouac\u2019s reception was that the people who should have known better took the en vogue hedonist reading at … Continue reading “Kerouac: Religious Writer?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[202],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kerouac-and-friends"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4775"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4775\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}