An excerpt from On the Road on a marker in the center of Jack Kerouac Alley, a one-way alleyway in Chinatown, San Francisco, California, that connects Grant Avenue and Columbus Avenue. (Above photo in public domain)
An Essay by Jonathon Kendall
Photography by Jessica Beaulieu
I first met Jack Kerouac in my early-twenties as most young men do, ever full of passion and hope and hunger for the future, before the academic-advisor/career-machine says, “Hello there. Hi. I appreciate your enthusiasm. Love your energy. You’re going to be great. But… can we get a little serious for a second? A little realistic? What are you going to, may I ask, really do with your life?”
Because that is who Kerouac is in your twenties: a rage against the machine of capitalism (The Dharma Bums), a veneration of the “holy” self and hedonism (On The Road), a humanized/allegorical argument on behalf of the civil rights and free-love movements (The Subterraneans), a glorification of alcoholism and hitchhiking and confusion (Big Sur).
To an unsubtle mind (like mine at the time), after reading the Kerouacian canon one resurfaces evangelical for the efficacy of spontaneous travel, sex, Zen, art, loyalty, and equally and vocally against any system or any person who tells you any version of – “Don’t do that.”
Your favorite of his quotes: “Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don’t be sorry.”
Kerouac, in this reading, is a motivational speaker.
Who, pray, he asks, should stand in our way?
And isn’t he right? Isn’t there something magnificent about howling into the early mornings, chain-smoking with a beautiful girl or guy on your arm, skipping down the jazz-streets of your wherever-city quoting Hemingway below the stars? Isn’t there something almost, let’s call it “divine” about such joyful nowness? This is why young hearts love Kerouac.
Which is already enough to cause hero worship – though then after even a tertiary study of Kerouac’s historical place – our minds spout off saying that he was also a stylistic revolutionary. He reinvented prose, challenged the form of the novel, and therefore almost single-handedly defined an entire movement (or dare I say even generation) of literature.
“Go to The Beat Museum on Broadway in North Beach in San Francisco!”
“Smoke in the alley between The City Lights Bookstore and Vesuvio Café (Jack Kerouac Street) and talk shop with the wrinkled locals and contemporary backpackers who know him best!”
“Read his best lines carved into the stones of the Lowell of his youth.”
“Get a tattoo! ‘The only ones for me are the mad ones.’ It’ll look great. I promise.”
“Take a road trip and ONLY eat apple pie like Kerouac. Feel what it’s like to be truly American and wild and free.”
His deification… now complete.
And listen, I still get it. I get it because there’s a part of me that still believes this legend. A proper night of revelry or a slightly dangerous week of travel is important is it not? Why are we here, after all? To experience? To peer out the window of consciousness and feel?
We can’t all be pious monks all the time… nor should we be. Right?
Sure.
Though Kerouac, after a fifth or sixth or especially tenth reading, or after a decade of experience in the “real world,” often comes to eventually sound and feel a bit self-indulgent. In this reading, he is at best an observant poet and at worst a masturbatory misogynist.
Your new-self begins to sound like your parents berating your old-self for not having realized sooner – reminding you that no the universe does not revolve around you and no the world does not owe you anything and also yes you should obviously treat women with respect and also yes you should stop drinking so much and ultimately do something for society.
Your new-self now reads another famous Kerouac quote – “I had nothing to offer anyone except my own confusion” – and begins to agree with him.
And listen, no matter your opinion, it’s objective that he checks off all the requisite boxes for “great artist.” Even if you believe he’s a self-obsessed chauvinist who stole his so-called “style” from Thomas Wolfe and James Joyce, he did define an entire medium for a generation (was artistically relevant), was a brilliant wordsmith (was artistically skilled), and had a thesis for life (was culturally relevant).
So I’m not arguing that we will forget him. We won’t.
Though a better question, and one that is relevant to all art and artists at large: should we?
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As artists, art critics, and experiencers of (especially great) art – it’s natural to revisit a work over and over, each time coming back with a new understanding. The art itself is but an artifact from which we glean meaning. Even if the piece does not change – we do. Time passes. Culture evolves. Context matters. And so, naturally, with every new viewing or next reading, the layers unpack themselves into a more coherent thesis. Art, in this way, is a conversation.
At first, we ask Kerouac what he wants, and he answers travel and love and freedom. This was me taking a road trip across the country after college. This was me visiting his gravestone in Lowell. This was me reading Tristessa in Mexico City.
“Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion,” he says.
But then we ask him again a few years later and this time he doesn’t care about anyone but himself especially not the girls he casually sleeps with nor the people he stole cars from, and that we, therefore, shouldn’t pay any attention to his madness because he doesn’t know anything about anything, not really. This was me not reading him for years, disappointed in him like a once-hero-father who you find out was an adulterer all along.
“Don’t touch me, I’m full of snakes,” he says.
Though it wasn’t until I moved to San Francisco, just a few blocks from The Beat Museum and The City Lights Bookstore, that I truly unpacked and then forgave and now I think therefore understand the enigma that is Kerouac. I’ve finally married the two sides of the coin. There’s a meta-lesson here. Namely, that location matters. That if you desire to feel and then understand an artist, any artist, then it’s best to use all your senses in the process. You must see and experience the muse which helped to manifest their creation. In this case: a neighborhood in San Francisco.
Which is what I do almost every day now. If my fiancé and I walk to the bookstore, have dinner, or go to the park – we walk past the iconic Columbus/Broadway intersection where The Beats made their home. And you know what’s there? What is mostly there?
Sure, there are the famous bars (Naked Lunch) and fancy restaurants (Quince) and world-class murals (above New Sun) – but also and predominately there are strip clubs and cigar bars and jazz clubs and hobo hangouts and homeless junkies shooting up, smelling of urine sleeping on the sidewalks, wrists ever-outstretched asking for change.
And for any “cultured” literary historian or typical art critic who is “well read” and “well educated,” the type who travels and visits museums and reads, dare I say, magazines like Arts & Food, the juxtaposition will be stark. Difficult even. Because it is.
You arrive to have a coffee at Caffe Trieste and leave wondering what’s happening to the world. San Francisco, at the time of this publication, is undoubtedly going through a crisis of mental health and homelessness, and no more is this emergency apparent than where Kerouac famously made San Francisco his home. His neighborhood. Now mine.
And so, as a “cultured/educated/well-read” professional writer and philosopher, in that I was faced to come down from the high tower of theory, every single day… in passing these hobos and prostitutes and strip clubs on my way to $100 dinners… while attempting to unpack this larger question – “How do we solve homelessness and drug addiction with compassion and efficacy?” – I finally came to understand the brilliance that is Kerouac.
What was Kerouac’s artistic thesis? What was he trying to impart?
The answer is that Kerouac was a spiritual writer. And that above all, he attempted to make beautiful and even show the holiness of the “worst” of us.
In this reading, he says, “It always makes me proud to love the world somehow – hate’s so easy compared.”
Because you must understand that his books are all FULL of prostitutes, heroin-addicted musicians, manic floundering and mental illness, alcoholic hobos, the homeless and the forgotten. Which our hearts (when we’re young and ideal) tell us to forgive and help these downtrodden of our society. That we should march and provide for. That it’s not their fault. Etc. Though then eventually our conservative brains tell us to stay safe and that it is their fault isn’t it? We all make our own choices, don’t we? Etc.
Enter stage left: smiling Jack Kerouac, a mystical figure, arguing against both our hearts and brains in saying things like, “The fact that everybody in the world dreams every night ties all mankind together.”
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And so, I finally come full circle to answer the question: should we still care about Kerouac?
Yes.
But not because he invented spontaneous prose because the truth is (shhh) he really didn’t. Nor because he most perfectly exemplified the American Dream, neither its faults nor its boldness. But rather, because way down the rabbit hole (like any great artist), Jack Kerouac was willing to do what most of us are unwilling to do: truly experience and then metaphorically articulate the holy practice of empathy.
In this reading, he says things like, “I want to work in revelations, not just spin silly tales for money. I want to fish as deep down as possible into my own subconscious in the belief that once that far down, everyone will understand because they are the same that far down.”
This, then, is Kerouac’s thesis in half a sentence: “…because (we) are all the same that far down.”
And it’s a moral one, this thesis. An important one. One that we should never soon forget.
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Photographs:
All photographs in this article were taken by Jessica Beaulieu for ARTS & FOOD Magazine and are covered under our copyright. The first photo, at the beginning of this article, is in the public domain.
(Source: Our special guest contributors for this issue are writer Jonathon Kendall and photographer Jessica Beaulieu, both are based in San Francisco, CA. Jonathon has authored several books and is currently the COO of the online content company, Mentor Box. “Conversations with Kerouac” is an original essay written for ARTS & FOOD Magazine.)
