سید شهاب الدین ساداتی

Jack Kerouac is one of the most mythical figures in American literature, his name and the name of his novel On the Road (1957) having the power of invocation even for people who have never read a word he wrote; the names conjure freedom. By comparison, his poetry is obscure, but it is both powerful as poetry and significant as a direct influence on his fellow poets. Kerouac, with Allen GINSBERG, Gregory CORSO, and William S. Burroughs, was at the hub of the mid-20th-century shift in American literary consciousness known as the BEAT generation. When his first poems later published in MEXICO CITY BLUES (1959), arrived from Mexico in 1955, his friends who were involved in what became known as the SAN FRANCISCO RENAISSANCE, Gary SNYDER, Philip WHALEN, Philip Lamantia, and Michael MCCLURE, in particular, were moved and inspired. Kerouac, “authorcatalyst” of the writerly cataclysm that shook America, had a traceable impact on the writing of many others, such as Robert CREELEY, Amiri BARAKA, Lawrence FERLINGHETTI, Lew Welch, and Anne WALDMAN. Bob Dylan pointed to Kerouac’s verse as “the first poetry that spoke his [Dylan’s] own language”. Ginsberg proclaimed Kerouac “a major, perhaps seminal, poet and mayhap thru his imprint on Dylan and myself among others, a poetic influence over the entire planet”.

     Jean-Louis de Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, the youngest of three children in a French-Canadian family. His cultural origins are important, because of the role religion and language played in his life and his work; his first language was French, and his first and last religion was Roman Catholicism, interrupted by an earnest exploration of Buddhism. The collective force of mother tongue, mother church, and his own mother, Gabrielle, made him maternally fixated. He moved away from his language, his church, and his mother, physically and philosophically, but he always returned closer. Kerouac married three times, arguably had sex with as many men as he did women, and shamefully rejected his only child. Burdened all his life by the weight of his trinity of mother figures and by the early childhood loss of his brother Gerard, Kerouac died an ultraconservative, debilitated alcoholic, living once again with his mother.

     “Ti Jean,” or “Petit Jean,” as he was called within his family, knew early that he wanted to be a writer, but he was also an athlete of promise and went to Columbia in 1940 on a football scholarship; he dropped out after a dispute with his coach. It was not until early 1944 that he met Ginsberg and Burroughs; two years after that, he met Neal Cassady, who became Keroauc’s muse and the model for On the Road’s Dean Moriarty. Already shaped by writers such as Walt Whitman, Hart CRANE, and Thomas Wolfe, Kerouac was further affected as a writer by his New York friends, by their ideas, their actions, and their speech, as they were by his. Burroughs explained that “Kerouac was a writer. That is, he wrote”; rather than just talk about writing or call himself a writer, he did it, even at the risk of being gored by the life about which he wrote. The fact that he was in a frequent state of sorrow surfaces repeatedly in his poems. He would “suffer / even for bugs” (“Running Through — Chinese Poem Song”), lament “Oh sad Bodhidharma you were right / Everything we loved disappeared” (“Long Island Chinese Poem Rain”), admit “I’m just a human being with a lot of / shit on my heart” (“Goofball Blues”), and wonder why “The story of man … Should hurt me so” (“Bowery Blues”). He recorded what went on around him, wrote experimentally, incorporated jazz improvisation into his prose and poetry; Creeley warns that there can be no real understanding of Kerouac’s work “if there is not the recognition that this remarkable person is living here, is actual in all that is written”.

     Kerouac is in the work, in all his beauty and in all his despair. He appears in his poems as religious seeker, as sexual debauchee, as little boy, as happy friend, as musical composer, as penitent sinner, as unrepentant sinner. He wrote about everything and believed he had “better be a poet / Or lay down dead” (“San Francisco Blues — 42nd Chorus”). He created a concept of spontaneous composition, which, as Ginsberg explains it, was “the notion of writing and not looking back, not revising, but exhausting the mind by an outpouring of all the relevant associations”. Kerouac’s stated desire at the very start of his journey as a writer was to make “at least one deathless line”. He collaborated with Burroughs on a never-published novel, produced more than 20 other prose works, of which more than a dozen were published during his lifetime, and wrote five books of poetry, of which only one appeared in print before his death. Kerouac’s iconographic power in the American consciousness is unsurpassed and secure. His life, as a stream of-consciousness spontaneous composition alive in his art, is his “one deathless line.”

“Long Island Chinese Poem Rain” 

The years are hurrying

Autumn rains fall on my awning

My accomplishments mean nothing to me

My girl no longer visits me

Maybe because I got warts on my cock

Or she found a younger man with a smooth cock

I can look up anything in my wine bottle

Whitman was happy about something around here

Followed by millions sick

What, Whitman, say?

The headlines of ten days ago no longer interest me

Rugs woven lovingly end on garage crates

The white dove desecrated in desuetude

And who wants wisdom?

The world is an eraser for these words

Oh sad Bodhidharma you were right

Everything we loved disappeared

Nobody in the chair

Nobody in the books

Nobody in the rain

“Bowery Blues”

The story of man
Makes me sick
Inside, outside,
I don't know why
Something so conditional
And all talk
Should hurt me so.

I am hurt
I am scared
I want to live
I want to die
I don't know
Where to turn
In the Void
And when
To cut
Out

For no Church told me
No Guru holds me
No advice
Just stone
Of New York
And on the cafeteria
We hear
The saxophone
O dead Ruby
Died of Shot
In Thirty Two,
Sounding like old times
And de bombed
Empty decapitated
Murder by the clock.

And I see Shadows
Dancing into Doom
In love, holding
TIght the lovely asses
Of the little girls
In love with sex
Showing themselves
In white undergarments
At elevated windows
Hoping for the Worst.

I can't take it
Anymore
If I can't hold
My little behind
To me in my room

Then it's goodbye
Sangsara
For me
Besides
Girls aren't as good
As they look