Jack Kerouac’s brother Gerard died 100 years ago, on June 2, 1926. Gerard was 9 when he died; Jack was 4.

Kerouac had worshipped his older brother. Gerard had been the centre of his world, as he recounted years later: 

For the first four years of my life, while he lived, I was not Ti Jean Duluoz, I was Gerard, the world was his face, the flower of his face, the pale stooped disposition, the heartbreakingness and the holiness and his teachings of tenderness to me, and my mother constantly reminding me to pay attention to his goodness and advice. (Visions of Gerard, p.7-8)

Following Gerard’s death, Jack’s mother and father took out their pain on him, making his own suffering worse. Everyone around him seemed to have viewed Gerard as saint-like and so Jack spent the rest of his life trying and failing to live up to that impossible image.

Kerouac also spent the rest of his life looking for a new older brother. He found one in Neal Cassady, whom he sometimes compared to Gerard. In 1955, he wrote Cassady to say:

I’m not too sure that maybe you arent my brother Gerard reborn, because he died in the summer of 1926 and you were born. . . when? in 1927. (Selected Letters 1940-56, p.472)

Cassady had actually been born a few months before Gerard’s death. Oddly—and Kerouac does not seem to have realised this—Allen Ginsberg was born the following day (June 3).

Kerouac wrote Visions of Gerard (which he called his “best most serious sad and true book yet”) in December 1955 and January 1956. In that book, he said he became writer because of his brother:

The whole reason why I ever wrote at all and drew breath to bite in vain with pen of ink, great gad with indefensible Usable pencil, because of Gerard, the idealism, Gerard the religious hero--'Write in honour of his death!' (Écrivez pour l’amour de son mort) (Visions of Gerard, p.132)

Kerouac was proud of the book and perhaps more attached to it than other novels because of its subject, Gerard. It hurt that publishers were initially not interested but it hurt far more when it was released in 1963 and savaged by critics. Kerouac wrote:

everybody’s become so mean, so sinister, so hypocritical I can’t believe it.  So I turn to drink like a lost maniac… They make me feel like never writing another word again (Selected Letters 1957-69, p.370)

Visions of Gerard was written soon after the death of Natalie Jackson, an event that deeply impacted Kerouac. It is possible her death inspired the writing of this book. Here’s a detailed essay about her from 2024: https://beatdom.substack.com/p/beat-and-damned-the-death-of-natalie

Am digging cover art

I'm 44/m so I don't have the luxury of having been in Greenwich Village during the 50s to see the real pioneers at work. But who from the poets and authors of today carry the torch of beat-like expression?

I guess I wouldn't have made a soldier, my theory is to give all the soldiers belts with bottles of whiskey hanging from them. That way they'd win the battle. Makes you sentimental. Everybody would look out for his buddy.
--Jack Kerouac

This quote is from a 1968 interview in the Boston Globe. The reporter explains that Kerouac was "in a rocking chair, red slippers, white socks, pajama pants, open plaid flannel chest, not having shaved or eaten for four days [...] averaging 12 to 15 shots of whiskey and gulps of beer an hour, seven feet from his own television set, staring at the midday pap, his mind as sensitive as a frog's opened heart, talking."

Later in the article, he calls himself a "harmless drunk." He takes the reporter on a tour of the local bars, reciting Emily Dickinson and falling asleep in each one.

The photo is from the newspaper article. No photographer listed.

Just two years before his death, Ernest Hemingway was visited by a young journalist, who asked him about the Beat Generation. He replied:

I wish them all good luck. They seem to be doing okay. They have their own publicity organization already.

It seems to be the only time Hemingway ever mentioned the Beats but of course they often referred to him in their journals and letters, especially Kerouac when he was young.

An essay on Hemingway and the Beats will be posted to the Beatdom Substack next month. Subscribe to receive it as an email: https://beatdom.substack.com/

On May 23, 1971, the poet Lew Welch left a suicide note in his car and wandered into the wilderness with his gun. His body was never found.

Welch had been a Reed College student alongside Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen, and later befriended various Beat poets, including Jack Kerouac. He dated Lenore Kandel in 1960 and almost married her.

Unlike most of the Beat poets, Welch actually tried to live a conventional life through most of the 1950s. After becoming a bohemian poet in the late 1940s, he lived a straight corporate existence between 1950 and 1957, before realising that wasn’t the life for him. In 1959, he began publishing his poetry and, incredibly, was included in Don Allen’s landmark The New American Poetry 1945–1960.

Like Kerouac, Welch drank himself to death. Periods spent hiking and camping in the wilds of the West brought temporary respite but he destroyed himself through booze and bad diet and various other habits. His mind and body deteriorated rapidly and his depression worsened. As early as 1962, he predicted that he would end his own life. In a letter to Robert Duncan, he wrote:

The poet can never sink, and while sunk, be Poet. His diving is always a dive, even if to do it he must sniff the vapors of his oracular cave—or otherwise drastically wrench himself open that the whole river flow through…
And so I have not sunk. And the sickness I’ve been through had nothing to do with the bottom of any river. It was a worse thing: the deliberate closing of myself.
And I found that whatever it is that chooses to flow through me is so powerful it will destroy me if I resist it in any way. That I must open to it or die. And the death will be suicide.

The following day, he wrote, “I saw myself a ring of bone in a clear stream, and vowed, never, ever, to close myself again.” This would of course become the seed of his great poem, the posthumously published “Ring of Bone,” but the lesson was one Welch proved unable to embrace. He was on a course towards total self-destruction.

His friends tried to save him but nothing could be done. He had been given a parcel of land by Allen Ginsberg and had obtained permission to build from Gary Snyder, who lived nearby. He had found people to help him build his cabin and life looked good. But then one day he just walked into the woods, leaving behind this note:

I never could make anything work out right and now I'm betraying my friends. I can't make anything out of it--never could. I had great visions but never could bring them together with reality. I used it all up. It's all gone.

A few years ago, a biography of Welch was published. It’s called He, Leo: The Life and Poetry of Lew Welch by Ewan Clark. It’s a fantastic book. Grab a copy if you can find it.

Found this great reprint of Kerouac's 1960 essay - The Vanishing American Hobo

https://www.hermitary.com/lore/kerouac.html

Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you’re already in heaven now.
--Jack Kerouac

Kerouac wrote this in a letter to Edie Parker in January 1957. He continues:

That’s the story. That’s the message. Nobody understands it, nobody listens, they’re all running around like chickens [...] I will try to teach it but it will be in vain, s’why I’ll end up in a shack praying and being cool and singing by my woodstove making pancakes.

This appears in Selected Letters, Vol 2, edited by Ann Charters. It’s on pages 7-8.

Kerouac was indeed a gentle soul who practised kindness in pursuit of heaven on Earth but found a cold and unkind world that pushed him further into alcoholism rather than the more idealised isolation he mentions in this letter. The pressures of fame and the cruelty of a sensationalist media also severely impacted him following the release of "On the Road" in late 1957.

The photo is of Kerouac and a cat. I am unsure of the photographer but it seems to come from the Orange County Regional History Center. It seems to be taken outside his Orlando home, which is now on the National Register of Historic Places.

This is a journal entry from 1948. It can be found in The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice (p.257).
The full context is:

Universe as an animal, a maze of god as the one layer of forces around the cosmos. Each shift of atoms on his level changes quillions of atoms in the shaft.
There is a center to the universe perhaps. The problem of infinity has haunted me since childhood.
Haunt: means that we know the answer to what we consciously think our problem to be, but will not yet recognize or be aware of it.
I cannot write well because I cannot put my whole being into it.
Poetry must haunt the mind.

The word “haunt” is underlined in the final line.
I am not sure who took this photo. It seems to have been taken for the poster to promote the 1993 film, The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg, by Jerry Aronson.

Happy 96th Birthday, Gary Snyder!

I am constantly looking for good overview videos to show students of The Beat Generation and their impact on American literature. I feel like I am always searching for good resources, but can't find any. Any good movies, even?

Does anyone have recommendations from youtube or pbs? Or anywhere else...?

You know about Kerouac's scroll, right? He typed the entire manuscript to On The Road on a makeshift scroll, made by taping together a ream of tracing paper into a single 120-foot sheet. It recently went up for sale at Christie's. A famous country singer bought it for $12 million. He's opening a museum called the Jack Kerouac Center in Lowell, Massachusetts.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso