we miss you jack kerouac

someone asked me yesterday why i like kerouac. they said he was only a mediocre writer telling other people's stories. the second part is certainly true, though kerouac was always in his stories, the glories are almost always someone else's, or washed over. for instance, you read about his time on mount desolation living alone in the mountains meditating and contemplating in both the dharma bums and the desolation angels. the difference being almost a decade of hard life in between the writing of virtually the same tale, despite a different beggining point and ending point (he started the story earlier in the dharma bums telling how he got there, and carried on long after the mountain in the desolation angels.). despite all that, you have two totally different accounts. the young and free-freeling kerouac wrote fondly of his time on mount desolation, while the old and wasting away kerouac wrote of it as a miserable, lonely time. it seems strange to say that ten years passed between the writings and that one is him young and free and the other is him old and wasting away, but you have to understand these are kerouac years, which are in a class of activity and stress levels very few people can actually relate to. i suppose any sane person would take ten kerouac years to twenty of any other kind. historically, i suppose we can count on the truth of mount desolation being somewhere in the middle of the two accounts. and i do love that about him. either way, you can rightfully say that he does whitewash other people's stories and that for the most part the heroes of his stories are other people (the venerable neal cassidy, william burroughs, others), but in my mind, that has always been one of my favorite things about kerouac. he watched people. he fell in love with personality types or "the mad ones" as he was so prone to calling them.

but as for whether or not he was good writer, it's silly to think otherwise. if all you've read are "the town and the city" and "on the road", maybe you can walk away with the impression that his technique leaves something to be desired, but there isn't a rational human on earth that would tell you that "tristessa" is not a brilliant work stylisticly. much the same can be said of "the subterraneans".

and that's pretty much what i told him. kerouac's "mad prose" is brilliant in so many ways, it makes any honest writer stutter. but more importantly than that is the ability for us to know and experience that people like that have existed, do exist. you see, there are four kinds of books in this world: good books, bad books, books that change literature, and books that change lives. kerouac is the last kind. he changed so many lives as to effectively change the world forever. and that is my favorite kind of writer.



2004-07-01 | 10:30 a.m.
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