Rogue 1 - Jack Kerouac

“An awful realization that I have been fooling myself all my life thinking there was a next thing to do to keep the show going and actually I'm just a sick clown and so is everybody else..." -Jack Kerouac, Big Sur

In the hardy cast of twenty-year-old Kerouac in this naval enlistment mugshot, one already sees the rugged, straight shooting vitality of On the Road. But also manifest in his gaze is the descent into anguish that followed, the existential hangover of success and the suicidal alcoholic poisoning that haunts his twilight opus Big Sur.

The loneliness was there all along. Look under the hood of On the Road’s breathless prose and you find sadness everywhere. The Navy medical examiner apparently sensed something too: Kerouac was declared mentally unfit for service after only ten days and honorably discharged.

An actual mugshot seems a fitting way to open this collection, even if it didn’t come from Central Booking. I include Jack Kerouac first in this gallery because for me he was a catalyst and a catapult. When I first read On the Road as a 19-year-old, a yellow roman candle exploded across my consciousness.

I felt an intimacy with him in his raw and vulnerable ruminations, in his lust for experiences beyond the horizon, and even in biographic parallels: at that time, I was going to the same university he had gone to, I too entered as a college athlete like him (he football, me swimming), and though I never dropped out of college like him, I almost did right before graduation out of scorn for the professional and mercantile aspirations displayed by some of my classmates (the impetus felt noble then even if it reeks of foolhardy self-entitlement in hindsight).

Kerouac, of course, qualifies unequivocally as a rogue. He inspired countless youth, me included, to take to the road with backpack and notepad. He taped sheets together, downed uppers, and went at it like a fiend and a medium, turning the act of writing into an incantatory feat of jazzy athleticism.

He was pooh-poohed by his contemporaries, as outlaws often are. (“That’s not writing,” said Truman Capote, “That’s typing.”) Sure, the origin story of On the Road springing spontaneously and fully formed from his brain in three weeks like some bebop Athena is mostly myth (it was more like seven years) but… well, that’s also to my point.

He was a rogue to his idolators, who enthroned him as King of the Beats cultural superstar when he just wanted removed literary acclaim. And he was a rogue in his waywardness to his own idealization of small-town Catholic beatitude, a tension that likely supercharged his growing self-hate into self-destruction. But what do I know to start psychoanalyzing—what does anyone really know, as he might say.  

He lived hard and died young (well, 47, which, at 47, I’d like to now think is young). He was sick in body and mind, and above all in soul. Literary sentries of formalism and aesthetic restraint may raise a haughty eyebrow and trash talk his spontaneous prose, but they can sneer away. I tried him on again after all these decades, dipping back into some pages, listening to recordings of him crooning to Steve Allen’s piano playing, and, ah, yes, the words still sing.

I obviously can’t speak to his character, and probably for the best, because the most mythologized are often, partly by virtue of being lionized, the most flawed. But I can speak to his works. And what pervades them, even with woe closing in over his final years, is a childlike sweetness and wonder at life. There’s also a generosity in the writing, an absence of mean spirit—and where it does occasionally crop up, you get the sense it’s really just aimed at himself.

He may indeed have been a loutish drunk and an absent father, but he was a tender bard. The man played his music to the very end, even as his Titanic sank. He went for it. And he spurred me to.

Let’s close on a classic—surely his most quoted line—from the novel that kicked it all off:

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.” – Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Jack Kerouac. 1922-1969. Troubled Troubadour. Beat Catholic. Desolate Angel. Prime Mover.