He was a touchstone of the Beat generation. But conservatives should not dismiss him so readily.
He was a touchstone of the Beat generation. But conservatives should not dismiss him so readily.
S hould conservatives take time to reflect on the life and work of Jack Kerouac on the centennial of his birth?
Kerouac, who was born in Lowell, Mass., on March 12, 1922, and whose troubled life ended on October 21, 1969, may be a canonical American writer with fans around the world. But he was a leading figure in the Beat literary movement, which exalted drugs, lewdness, hedonism, rootlessness, and rebellion against what it saw as the traditionalism and conformity of a hidebound mid-century America. Kerouac was a close friend of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who proudly proclaimed, in his poem “In the Baggage Room at Greyhound,” written barely three years after the death of Stalin, “I am a communist.” (And that is one of Ginsberg’s more printable utterances.)
Maybe some readers will need no further reason to write Jack Kerouac off forever. But the founder of the magazine that gave birth to the website you are now reading would surely have answered the question with which this piece begins in the affirmative. Kerouac matters. William F. Buckley Jr. took an interest in Jack Kerouac and invited him to appear along with two other guests, Lewis Yablonsky and Ed Sanders, in an episode of Firing Line recorded on September 3, 1968.
Kerouac, who at that point has just over a year to go before cirrhosis of the liver does him in, is not at his best. He looks haggard, bloated, older than his 46 years, and very, very tired. His speech is halting and slurred. He contributes relatively little to what is otherwise a spirited discussion, but those segments of the episode where he weighs in are by far the most interesting and illuminating. Buckley asks him what he sees as the specific relationship between the Beat generation and those fixtures of the 1960s scene known as “the hippies.” What do they have in common?
Kerouac’s answer may surprise you. Here is where Kerouac lays bare what he saw as the real meaning and purpose of his literary and cultural movement. He views Beatdom as devoted to the Dionysian principles of beatitude, finding pleasure in life, tenderness, revelry, aesthetic appreciation. Kerouac did not mean, any more than Dionysus did, for the movement to become corrupted and distorted, he explains. He and Ginsberg, both well into their 40s at the time of the interview, came to attract 18-year-old hippie flocks whom Kerouac considers to be, essentially, “good kids.”
These idealistic and fun-loving young people are not the problem, you see. They are not the ones who have perverted the Beat movement. No, the problem is the “hoodlums,” or, more precisely, the communists who, as Kerouac puts it, jumped on his back. The hard leftists of the 1960s corrupted and co-opted a literary, intellectual, and aesthetic movement that originally had no political, economic, social, or cultural goals in common with socialism or communism.
Kerouac’s views on this are clear. Buckley asks him whether a movement that Kerouac conceived as “pure” has become ideologized and misanthropic.
“Yes, it was pure in my heart,” Kerouac replies.
The beliefs, values, and objectives of the radicals who climbed onto the backs of the Beats really could not be further from the convictions of Kerouac. “Being a Catholic, I believe in order, tenderness, and piety,” he tells Buckley.
Later in the same interview, Kerouac states that he and his family vote Republican in every election.
Any student of Kerouac’s writing can see that he really did believe in order, as he understood it. What may seem like an exaltation of hedonism and rootlessness in his most famous work, the 1957 novel On the Road, occurs within a specific framework, as Kerouac and friends, in scene after scene, bond and then split up with plans to reunite in Denver or San Francisco or Los Angeles or New York or wherever it may be. They do not reject or flee from the past, from the wreckage of private lives, so much as they seek to extend their relationships across temporal and spatial borders and infuse them with a spiritual value and permanence transcending anything so superficial as a city or state line. The zest for experience, uncorrupted by ideology and stubbornly resistant to appropriation for anything so mundane as a political agenda, radiates from every page of this book. Reading On the Road, you may think of the concluding line of the novel Leaving the Atocha Station, by one of the leading contemporary writers, Ben Lerner: “Then I planned to live forever in a skylit room surrounded by my friends.”
The key to Kerouac’s significance in 2022, though, lies not in his most cited work but in a fascinating short novel published in 1966, Satori in Paris.
Today we see all around us the urge to cancel the past, or those people and passages of history that contravene the dogmas of today. Spray obscene graffiti on statues, tear them down, smash them to a million bits, the Left urges. Drop names from street signs and public buildings. Fire professors. Eradicate any and all signs of the less egalitarian past, consign them to the memory hole.
Kerouac offers one of the most eloquent refutations of the phenomenon we know as cancel culture that you may find in the literature of any age. His mission in Satori in Paris is to rescue things from the memory hole, to reestablish a connection with and affirm the relevance of ancestors who undoubtedly held beliefs, attitudes, and values that would get them in trouble in the politically correct present. He doesn’t care. Kerouac came from a family of modest means. Their ancestry reached back to Quebec and, from there, to Brittany on the northwestern tip of France. Satori in Paris relates his unquenchable curiosity about his ancestors in the days before Massachusetts, before Quebec, and about the preparations for and experience of a trip during which Kerouac hoped to unearth long-buried facts about those ancestors. This involves taking a trip to Paris and immersing himself in genealogical tomes in the Bibliothèque nationale, and then heading to Brest on the Atlantic coast to meet and carouse with the descendants of people whom Kerouac’s family knew centuries ago.
Written in a jaunty, Joycean stream-of-consciousness style, Satori in Paris conveys all the zest for living found in On the Road, even as it illuminates Kerouac’s fierce allegiance to the conservative, traditional, anti-Jacobin social order of the Vendée. The train he takes from Paris to Brest passes through Rennes, which may be the former capital of Brittany, but he does not consider it to be a city of the province, because, in 1793, it housed troops of the revolutionary republic whose mission was to quell the Vendée uprising and advance liberty, equality, fraternity.
The more time he spends wandering around Brest and talking to strangers in the street and in bars, the more he comes to love both the antediluvian character of the society to which he has returned and the impossibility of reconciling it with the modern, atheist, egalitarian order that demands conformity and slavish devotion to progressive ideals.
Not seldom have I heard progressives refer to Quebecois as the descendants of provincial rednecks. In Satori in Paris, Kerouac makes an explicit comparison between poor Southern transplants in New York, whom the snooty elites of Manhattan urge to go home to Alabama, and people of modest means whom the Parisian upper class may threaten to expel to Quimper on the Breton coast. Kerouac loves the people of Brittany, who with their openness and devotion to the simple pleasures of life strike him as the antithesis of the prim, progressive elites of Paris. Those elites have bullied and ostracized those with different values and have enforced their ideals, at various times in history, through the guillotine or through Twitter. There are passages in Satori in Paris where Kerouac describes himself as a spiritual participant, if not quite a literal soldier, in the right-wing uprising against the atheist mobs of the Revolution. “I’m a Catholic revisiting the ancestral land that fought for Catholicism against impossible odds yet won in the end,” Kerouac writes.
In the depot at Brest, and then during the train ride back to Paris, Kerouac appreciates the jokes made at his own expense when strangers refer to him as le roi, mocking his “me first” brashness and his way of putting his feet up on an opposite bench inside his cabin. He can take a joke. These are his people. Connecting with his ancestry is not a sin for which he deserves cancellation but an experience rising to the level of sublimity, revelation, spiritual uplift, satori.