By the time Jack Kerouac died at 47 (on this day) in 1969, he’d exiled himself from the 1960s youth culture he’d partly inspired with the likes of On the Road and The Dharma Bums. Bloated by booze and reactionary politics, he bore little resemblance to that matinee-idol handsome ‘King of the Beats’. In death, though, Kerouac’s star has risen with each succeeding generation. Catherine de Leon, a self-described ‘Kerouac acolyte’ examines the posthumous power and lasting legacy of Lowell, Massachusetts’ most famous (and infamous) native son.
Visions of March in icy white frigid New England – the browns of old kitchens where potatoes bubble upon cast-iron stoves, where red bricks bleed ominous shadows, where snow-peaked roofs and evergreens shudder, and the thunder of rushing rivers sing songs of doom, mark the 99th anniversary of the first day of a relatively short journey on the path of “we’re all going to die.”
March 12, 1922 was the day that Jean-Louis “Jack” Lebris de Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, and angels and phantoms bore witness; his soon to be dead brother too, and with every page that has been turned from the 1950s until today, we are all reborn with him, and together we walk, ride, and dance the road to the golden eternity one kick at a time.
The reverence we now have for Jack Kerouac was not remotely akin to the way he was viewed during the last years of his professional life. Like James Dean and JFK, both of whom had died before he did, his legacy has grown and he has become exceedingly idealised.
Had he lived to old age, would he have triumphed over his failures and become a venerated spokesman, a reincarnated man of letters rather than the so-called ‘barbarian with a typewriter’ that critics in the 50s reviled?