Forty years ago today, Jack Kerouac died. Not for him the glorious blaze that's the proverbial price of a life lived too fast. At the age of 47, he may have died relatively young, but he didn't leave a good-looking corpse. Kerouac had retreated into the philosophical if not actual loneliness of the writer's life, and died in hospital after vomiting much of his vitality out into the toilet of the home he shared with his wife and mother in Florida, America's sunshine retirement capital.
Bloated, reactionary and guileless, his was a painful and undignified death, brought on my too much drink and dissolute living, played out in the presence of the mother whose apron strings he couldn't seem to cut, and the wife who didn't understand him. Venerated by his fans and dismissed by many critics (Truman Capote was probably the most memorably sniffy about his spontaneous prose-poetry and the work of the Beat writers at large: 'None of these people have anything interesting to say,' he said, 'and none of them can write, not even Mr Kerouac.' It 'isn't writing at all - it's typing.' But he did not want for detractors), Kerouac has divided opinion as to his literary merit since his ungainly demise. But has his time finally come round again?
The evidence against Kerouac is, on the face of it, overwhelming. As joyful as his lyrical, stream-of-consciousness prose could be, it wasn't, we are reminded, proper writing. For a counterculture legend, he could come across like a grumpy old man from a US sitcom; while his foil and pal Neal Cassady moved seamlessly from the 1950s Beat Generation to the hippy revolution of the 60s, Kerouac couldn't or wouldn't understand this brave new world. When Cassady, by now running with the new generation epitomised by Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, visited him in 1964, Jack doubtfully took LSD and ended up silently beating himself up over the perceived failings which saw him kicked out of the Merchant Navy.
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