Remembering Jack

JOHN CLELLON HOLMES, a friend and fellow novelist, called him "the great rememberer." But when we remember Jack Kerouac only 11 years after his alcoholic death, we too often remember the man and his fabulous stories, rather than his genius. Jack Kerouac was that kind of writer. His writing was so full of speed, his characters so powerful, his ideas so outrageous for the times that his fame is mostly owed to the characters and events he portrayed, not to the way he portrayed them.

Jack Kerouac did not write reportage, he wrote fiction. He had a memory for detail and the abstract which earned him Holmes's affectionate epitaph. Above all, Kerouac applied a new, rhapsodic prose form to the old story of a young man's crazy adventures.

Jack's Book succeeds where other Kerouac biographies have failed --this book does not obscure the writer's prosaic genius behind the eccentric and flamboyant characters and events he portrayed. Moreover, Jack's Book reveals Kerouac the man by retracing his steps through the men and women who knew and shaped the "King of the Beat Generation."

Written by two vagabond writers, Jack's Book is a collection of relevant interviews with the people who knew Kerouac from his Lowell childhood all the way to his disillusionment at Columbia University and subsequent travels on the road.

Through Kerouac's friends, we are shown a troubled man full of ironies and disillusion. But the "Father of the Beats," despite new and radical ideas of how prose should be written, was an exceedingly kind man, and one who firmly believed in things like religion and America. This comes as a surprise to many because of the Bohemians Kerouac portrayed and loved.

When he was a boy, Kerouac lived in the three-decker tenements of Lowell, Mass., then a booming textile and industrial city. He was very close to his parents -- especially to his mother -- who were French-Canadian immigrants. When Jack received an athletic scholarship to Columbia, his mother sighed with relief because her son would be "living with the people he should have grown up with."

BUT JACK kept in touch with his Lowell friends, most of whom remained in Lowell to work at mills and support families. And the friends Kerouac made at Columbia were not the type his mother had hoped for.

Boyhood friend "G.J." Apostolos describes a very sensitive, and sometimes diffident, young Kerouac:

"Everything hurt the guy. Just a drizzly November day would zing him. Jack had everything. His mother tried to get him to associate with 'better' people.

"I can't never be what she wants. I can't live with her. I'm disappointing her," he'd say. Jack always tried to please his mother. It seemed to eat away at him. He went off with the Beat Generation, but he always worried about his mother.

The book's interviews unveil Kerouac's immense sensitivity to and faith in human beings. Carolyn Cassidy claimed that "Jack fell in love with every woman he saw," intimating that he was always worried about hurting his friends and the women he knew. Thus, we are shown a very shy man. Some of Kerouac's childhood friends say that he did not have many girlfriends during high school because his "shyness was always taken as conceit."

The biography is illuminating because it pieces together the puzzling parts of a personality and a mind which has become cliched by fame. He was a great storyteller, they said. He was wonderful and crazy, they said. He wrote great autobiographies and fathered the hippie generation, they said. Clearly, Kerouac started something in 1957 when On the Road was published. But the changes in American mores and literature that Kerouac inspired are due to his literary and human genius, not to wild and crazy stories. Holmes said it best: "Most books that come out are contained. That is, people say, 'I want to read that book.' But what happened when On the Road came out was, 'I want to know that man,' women saying, 'I want to sleep with him.' They just wanted the experience, and all this was profoundly confusing to a guy like Kerouac, who was a terribly simple and conventional genius.

"This so discombobulated him that for the rest of his life he never, never got the needle back on true north.

"Never."